Profile for Afinkawan:
My email address is Afinkawan @ yahoo .com
Or you can Facetweet me here or here. But remember to tell me who you are!
Zombified by Happy Toast! Woo!
Recent front page messages:
Best answers to questions:
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- a member for 20 years, 3 months and 6 days
- has posted 23972 messages on the main board
- (of which 25 have appeared on the front page)
- has posted 12 messages on the talk board
- has posted 280 messages on the links board
- (including 51 links)
- has posted 155 stories and 81 replies on question of the week
- They liked 1050 pictures, 46 links, 1 talk posts, and 78 qotw answers. [RSS feed]
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My email address is Afinkawan @ yahoo .com
Or you can Facetweet me here or here. But remember to tell me who you are!
Zombified by Happy Toast! Woo!
Recent front page messages:
Election related repost:
Posters aren't the only way they'll try to get you to vote for 'em...
(Mon 30th Mar 2015, 13:13, More)
Posters aren't the only way they'll try to get you to vote for 'em...
(Mon 30th Mar 2015, 13:13, More)
Here, have these two - I think they actually match the compo guidelines. Sorry about that.
(Fri 17th Jul 2009, 11:57, More)
(Fri 17th Jul 2009, 11:57, More)
G'ning all.
Yesterday afternoon, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, so I am now a father!
Edit: Thanks everyone!
(Mon 4th Feb 2008, 11:33, More)
Yesterday afternoon, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, so I am now a father!
Edit: Thanks everyone!
(Mon 4th Feb 2008, 11:33, More)
It's amazing what you can do
with no proper image creation software. Or talent.
(Mon 4th Jun 2007, 14:16, More)
with no proper image creation software. Or talent.
(Mon 4th Jun 2007, 14:16, More)
As he approaches his 64th birthday, Paul McCartney wishes he'd made her sign that pre-nup...
(Thu 15th Jun 2006, 12:24, More)
(Thu 15th Jun 2006, 12:24, More)
Misunderstood cliches # 3
It never reigns but it pours.
Other Misunderstood cliches
(Fri 19th Nov 2004, 10:10, More)
It never reigns but it pours.
Other Misunderstood cliches
(Fri 19th Nov 2004, 10:10, More)
Best answers to questions:
» Conspicuous Consumption
Yes I have been photographed on a balcony eating a croissant as it happens...
On honeymoon on the Emerald Coast of Sardinia.
(Sat 30th Jul 2011, 12:09, More)
Yes I have been photographed on a balcony eating a croissant as it happens...
On honeymoon on the Emerald Coast of Sardinia.
(Sat 30th Jul 2011, 12:09, More)
» Heckles
There used to be a comedy club
called Screaming Blue Murder in a smallish pub in Wimbledon.
One night the comedian wasn't doing too well and got a random heckle (I don't remember what). He replied with something like, "And I suppose you think you are funny?" To which the entire audience pissed themselves laughing because they knew who was heckling him. The crap stand-up's face was a picture when he also squinted out into the audience and saw who it was.
It was Jack Dee.
(Thu 6th Apr 2006, 13:41, More)
There used to be a comedy club
called Screaming Blue Murder in a smallish pub in Wimbledon.
One night the comedian wasn't doing too well and got a random heckle (I don't remember what). He replied with something like, "And I suppose you think you are funny?" To which the entire audience pissed themselves laughing because they knew who was heckling him. The crap stand-up's face was a picture when he also squinted out into the audience and saw who it was.
It was Jack Dee.
(Thu 6th Apr 2006, 13:41, More)
» Useless advice
"London is a dangerous place"
Which turns out to be true. Yesterday I went into WHSmith and punched someone in the face.
(Fri 20th Oct 2006, 12:36, More)
"London is a dangerous place"
Which turns out to be true. Yesterday I went into WHSmith and punched someone in the face.
(Fri 20th Oct 2006, 12:36, More)
» Evil Pranks
A guy I worked with had a cousin in the States
He didn't like this cousin much but when younger he was forced to go with this family to visit their American relatives and ended up hanging out with this guy as they were the same age.
Anyway. At some point he jokingly called his cousin a wanker. His cousin asked what wanker meant and was told some lie about its meaning which made it sound good - told him it was English for 'cool dude' or somesuch.
So....his cousin adopted 'Wanker' as his nickname, getting his friends to call him it and all sorts.
Obviously when my colleague told us this, we didn't believe him. Until he showed us a photo of him standing next to his cousin who was proudly wearing a baseball cap he'd had printed up with the word 'WANKER' across it in bright red letters.
(Wed 19th Dec 2007, 16:55, More)
A guy I worked with had a cousin in the States
He didn't like this cousin much but when younger he was forced to go with this family to visit their American relatives and ended up hanging out with this guy as they were the same age.
Anyway. At some point he jokingly called his cousin a wanker. His cousin asked what wanker meant and was told some lie about its meaning which made it sound good - told him it was English for 'cool dude' or somesuch.
So....his cousin adopted 'Wanker' as his nickname, getting his friends to call him it and all sorts.
Obviously when my colleague told us this, we didn't believe him. Until he showed us a photo of him standing next to his cousin who was proudly wearing a baseball cap he'd had printed up with the word 'WANKER' across it in bright red letters.
(Wed 19th Dec 2007, 16:55, More)
» Corporate Idiocy
I used to work in a lab
for a small company. You've probably heard of at least one of their products. Very nice company, absolute arse of a director.
You know when you get medicine you sometimes see 'B.P.' after the name? That's short for British Pharmacopoeia - basically a list of tests which the product/ingredient legally has to pass if you want to use it in any sort of pharmaceutical.
We needed a new FT/IR machine in the lab (basically you prepare a sample, it zaps it with a spectrum of infra-red light and tells you if it's the right stuff).
We had a choice:
The obvious choice was to get the FT/IR machine which was certified as being B.P. compliant. i.e. it was certified to run the test exactly as specified in the B.P. using reference standards which were themselves B.P. certified and output graphs in the same format as the standards in the B.P.
The less obvious (i.e. stupid) choice was to buy the machine which wasn't B.P. compliant. Don't get me wrong, still a good machine but it needed a lot more work to commission it for our needs and it was less easy to run the test and compare the results to the B.P.
The stupid option insisted on by this director cost us about £900 less...but took two extra months to commission it, cost us several hundred pounds setting up our own reference standards and meant we had to pay for a different graph printer as we didn't get the B.P. compliant software. It also took slightly longer to prepare each sample, about 30 seconds longer to run the test and a minute or so more to print and evaluate the test. Doesn't sound much but it all adds up when you're running 100-200 tests per week.
Two years down the line, when we got inspected by the Medicines Control Agency, they noted that the calibration standards we were using were not B.P. compliant either. It turned out the same director had changed the order (after we'd placed it) to ones which were about £30 cheaper.
The upshot? I had to dig out all the retained samples from the previous two years and run them again, having calibrated the machine with the correct calibration standards. It took me three months to do them all.
Apparently, using the wrong calibration standard may also have accounted for the fact that we needed to replace the IR lamp on the machine about twice as frequently as we should have done...at a cost of £500 a pop.
The reason why this director had been so keen to save money?
Shortly before buying the new machine, we'd had the lab refitted. This director didn't like the basic but perfectly serviceable black plastic handles supplied with the new cupboards so he'd ordered them changed to lovely shiny metal ones.
22 handles:
Six. Thousand. Pounds.
TL:DR - company director spends £10,000 in attempt to save £900.
(Tue 28th Feb 2012, 14:44, More)
I used to work in a lab
for a small company. You've probably heard of at least one of their products. Very nice company, absolute arse of a director.
You know when you get medicine you sometimes see 'B.P.' after the name? That's short for British Pharmacopoeia - basically a list of tests which the product/ingredient legally has to pass if you want to use it in any sort of pharmaceutical.
We needed a new FT/IR machine in the lab (basically you prepare a sample, it zaps it with a spectrum of infra-red light and tells you if it's the right stuff).
We had a choice:
The obvious choice was to get the FT/IR machine which was certified as being B.P. compliant. i.e. it was certified to run the test exactly as specified in the B.P. using reference standards which were themselves B.P. certified and output graphs in the same format as the standards in the B.P.
The less obvious (i.e. stupid) choice was to buy the machine which wasn't B.P. compliant. Don't get me wrong, still a good machine but it needed a lot more work to commission it for our needs and it was less easy to run the test and compare the results to the B.P.
The stupid option insisted on by this director cost us about £900 less...but took two extra months to commission it, cost us several hundred pounds setting up our own reference standards and meant we had to pay for a different graph printer as we didn't get the B.P. compliant software. It also took slightly longer to prepare each sample, about 30 seconds longer to run the test and a minute or so more to print and evaluate the test. Doesn't sound much but it all adds up when you're running 100-200 tests per week.
Two years down the line, when we got inspected by the Medicines Control Agency, they noted that the calibration standards we were using were not B.P. compliant either. It turned out the same director had changed the order (after we'd placed it) to ones which were about £30 cheaper.
The upshot? I had to dig out all the retained samples from the previous two years and run them again, having calibrated the machine with the correct calibration standards. It took me three months to do them all.
Apparently, using the wrong calibration standard may also have accounted for the fact that we needed to replace the IR lamp on the machine about twice as frequently as we should have done...at a cost of £500 a pop.
The reason why this director had been so keen to save money?
Shortly before buying the new machine, we'd had the lab refitted. This director didn't like the basic but perfectly serviceable black plastic handles supplied with the new cupboards so he'd ordered them changed to lovely shiny metal ones.
22 handles:
Six. Thousand. Pounds.
TL:DR - company director spends £10,000 in attempt to save £900.
(Tue 28th Feb 2012, 14:44, More)