Was there no visible damage to the car that was smoking? If he really gets done for hoax calls then that's a very sad situation.
HF
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She doesn't say, but I get the impression it was their car that was smoking. She said it looked like they were setting some bushes on fire, but it could have just been they were smoking the tyres.
Apparently she mentioned the police response to the woman in McD's and they reckon the police never do anything about these kids despite them being a regular fixture...
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As is the case in some of the other forums out there I was wondering If you guys in the controll room can actually monitor who is logged and which thread they are reading at any given time. Must admit I would find it wierd knowing someone can be watching your every move, if this is the case.
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Mal,
We have no Big Brother here - rest assured.
OR DO WE?????? Should I feel sudden pangs of desperate paranoia, purely because I have chatted to people here?!
Even allowed my name to become known, and my email address too, in mad moments of actually believing that people are what they say they are ;)
All TIC Mal, as you will realise now ;)
HF
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Not really, no.
Who logs in and when is logged by the computers obviously. What forums they read is also logged.
However;
There is no indication of which thread(s) are read
I have no way of knowing the log-in information until reports are compiled at the end of the week or month.
There is no way of me knowing at the time, if you see what I mean.
It would be fun to see who is logged in at a particular moment and which thread they are reading, but sadly we can't.
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Oh come on Mark, tell the truth. We both roared with laughter when we saw Mal picking his nose whilst reading this thread earlier ;o)
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Well am I pleased about that, and another thing Dynamic********Dave I do not pick my nose I discreetly relieve it of obstructions!!!!!!!.
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Steve this sounds weird - have you asked your sis about this?
HF
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Steve this sounds weird - have you asked your sis about this?
Sorry, asked about what?
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I have a question relating to council tax:
I recently discovered that I had given the wrong date to the council when I recently told them my moving in date. They said they would send a bill for the 'missing' council tax due. Today I got home to find a very threatening and menacing letter from Slough Council asking for £50. It was entitled "Council tax final reminder", dated 13 March 2003, and stating that if I did not pay within 7 days they would go to court to get bailiffs to visit, and charge me the court costs.
To say that I found this letter menacing and threatening is to put it mildly. I have never been anywhere near a court in my ~40 years of existence.
How can this be a final reminder when it was the first letter asking for payment? And how can they issue a deadline that I probably cannot meet? After all tomorrow is already 5 days into the deadline and a cheque takes 3 days to clear.
I presume that if I do not succeed in getting payment to them in time, then the court case will damage my credit rating? And when the court case takes place, I will be charged court and bailiffs fees.
It strikes me that an elderly and infirm person receiving such a letter would be really shocked by it.
Anyone know how I can complain about this letter? Is their some 'independent' body that handles complaints.
I really am quite shocked by such heavy handed menacing tactics being used against someone who WANTS to pay and who has tried to go by the book to do so.
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Leif - I am no legal expert but generally, these letters are computer generated. I have had something similar and the reply from my council was 'oh, we can't stop the computer from sending out letters'. My reply was something like 'you could if you used a ruddy great axe' but I think they'd had a sense of humour by-pass.
If I were you, I'd ring them again, and explain in words of one syllable or less what you've already told them. Also, I'd send them the full amount that they're demanding because if it does eventually come to court, they will look more favourably upon you if you can demonstrate that you've complied with their deadlines, however unreasonable they may be.
Hope this has helped
Cheers
PS I agree with what you say about if an elderly person had recieved the letter though. Inexcusable, if you ask me. Which you didn't. But you know what I mean.
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Thanks Rob. I did ring them (intended to anyway) and it took a while but I finally got them to agree that they had made a mistake. (Words of one syllable and a big gap between each.)
Obviously I will pay the sum due ASAP but blimey what a way to deal with the public.
It does indeed seem to be a computer generated letter. And to think that if it had been lost in the post, or I had been on holiday for a week, they would have taken me to court and fined me for the privilege.
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Oh how my wife will laugh at this. Her job is actually write the code that generates these letters. Whilst she is of course technically very competent she does tell some stories about her less computer literate colleagues.
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Leif,
Wrote a reply to you last night shortly before the site went down, so it never got posted.
Have had similar problems myself re council tax threats, and spent similar amounts of time on the phone trying to sort things out.
Thankfully, for me too, the message seems to have finally got through.
I think for all the minutes and even hours we spend pressing options 1,2,3,4 or to speak to an advisor press 5', and then, on our own phone bills, having to listen to endless canned music interrupted only by the 'sorry, your call is important to us' messages, it is a *very* rare occasion that we actually get through to someone that understands what you're saying, and even more rare that they actually do something about it.
Moan over.
HF
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Hi HF, thanks for the posting. Sorry to hear you had council trouble too. A colleague next to me was wrongly taken to court by Ealing Council and he had to successfully defend himself.
It is worrying to think that a council behaves in this manner.
Leif.
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There is only one sure way to deal with such problems with Council ( or Civil-Service) staff. Find out the name of the head of the Deparment and write to them, marked "for the personal attention of .....", and copy to your local-councillor (or MP in case of Civil Service). Nowadays, these details are usually given on the Council web-site.
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I've lost the address bar from Internet Explorer. The address bar is ticked on the view menue, anybody help?
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If nearly everything top of explorer frame has gone, press F11, which toggles "full frame".
If one of the bars has a pair of small chevrons out to the righthand edge, then some of the options are out beyond the screen edge.
Left click and drag the nearest vertical bar (in the menu area) to the left and see what appears.
Hover your pointer over the bar, it will turn into a double headed arrow, the left click and drag..
You can drag down to create more lines of menu bars.
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If it's just the address bar that's missing, go to View, Toolbars --> Address Bar to get it back.
If that doesn't get it back, go to View, Toolbars --> Lock the toolbars, uncheck that, bring the address bar back as above, and then recheck Lock the toolbars so it can't happen again.
This works for IE6 and Windows XP at least.
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I have a question. And it's not political in any way, although it might seem so on first reading.
My 13-year-old told me tonight that a teacher at his school has been parading around wearing a 'Don't Attack Iraq' badge'.
That angered me a lot, because to me, a teacher should not be using his position to try to influence the minds and beliefs of a young and vulnerable generation.
I'd say exactly the same if a teacher was wearing a 'Let's Get Saddam' or whatever badge.
Whatever my own beliefs about this war, I do not appreciate a teacher abusing his position to try to turn the minds of young boys.
My question is, is this a real violation of position? And does anyone agree with me that teachers should not be allowed to do this?
HF
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My question is, is this a real violation of position? And does anyone agree with me that teachers should not be allowed to do this?
I think it is abuse of position, and agree with you they shouldn't be allowed to do this.
With my 5-year-old having been at school for less than a year I have yet to really experience too much of the quirks of teaching staff, although I was getting nagged at the weekend for throwing newspapers in the dustbin and not the recycling box.
The "don't attack Iraq" thing though is expressing a simplistic view which obviously is different to that of the powers that be at this moment in time. By all means children of your son's age should be encouraged to debate the pros and cons of war, but it would be difficult for a teacher to be respected for their impartiality in such a debate when they wear their opinion on the matter on their sleeve, so to speak.
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Absolutely, DTD, and thanks for that.
I believe that the teacher in question has the right to wear that badge any time he wants to, UNLESS he's working in the school.
And, since you mention it, (sort of), neither of my sons has been given the chance to debate the war at school. I've asked them both, and bizarrely neither school has even mentioned the subject!
Glad yours are too young yet to have to get into all this, D.
HF
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Can anyone explain the mysteries of Windows Media to me please. I?ve tried downloading short movie clips from the Internet, (not always mpeg files), but I can?t seem to find any way of saving the files to my hard disc. This is not such a problem with a broadband connection which I have at my office, but with a dial-up connection (using Windows XP), there doesn?t appear to be an available option. I?ve saved mpeg files using Real Player in the past, but with Media, there is no option to ?Save File as..?. The particular files I?m looking at are asx files (I think).
Any guidance appreciated, I?m not a techie, so keep it simple please.
Many thanks
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It's because this is what's known as 'streaming media'
The deal is that, although they don't mind you seeing the video, they want to control the distribution, which they couldn't do if you could save it to disk and then host on another website, upload via file sharing, or give to friends on CD.
Sorry, no way around it, although broadband is getting more affordable so it might be time to take the plunge.
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