Absolutely.  Hey, does your keyboard have a key that makes a £ sign, or one for the $ sign?  Which one do you have to put the ASCII code in for, or do you?  Can you tell I haven't been to Britain since 1983?

Both. The standard UK keyboard differs from the US one in a few details, and has one extra key, 102 not 101. It looks like this

¬!"£$%^&*()_+

`1234567890-=

 QWERTYUIOP{}

 qwertyuiop[]

  ASDFGHJKL:@~

  asdfghjkl;'#

 |ZXCVBNM<>?

 \zxcvbnm,./

In particular the #, \, " and @ signs are moved and the left shift is single rather than double width with the extra \ key next to it.

So £ displaces # and # displaces \ to the extra key.  @ and " are exchanged.

I don't have to put in ASCII for any of these, just for things like °, ½, ² etc.  most others I use 'character map'.

Ahh.  Very interesting.

Mmm.  Liver and onions.  I love it, especially with bacon and ketchup.  WE can't get frozen liver here.  It's fresh or nothing.  I don't often cook it because there's a membrane on it that is a pain to remove.  If you don't remove it your poor little (or big) piece of liver curls up like an armadillo when heated - so much for cooking it on both sides.  We don't have stand-alone butchers any more, so I can't hand the liver to the meat counter attandant and ask if he can remove it.  He doesn't even know what I'm talking about -- it was probably trucked in from some central abbatoir last night and all he did was load it into the chill containers.

Shame.  Our supermarkets tried that and did a major favour for small shops. They are getting back to the idea of having specialist meat and fish staff on site, and the quality is improving but it has a way to go.  They advertise "If you want something special doing just ask for it".  I tried. The answer, when you eventually find the right person is "Sorry we haven't got any"   Oh well, their PR heart is in the right place but they still can't quite get out of the 'cheap and efficient' mindset.

Yup, that's the way it is here.  I think it's because they don't have an actual cow carcass or whatever hanging in the back.  Everything has been cut up already and trucked in, and of course they can't give you anything special.  We are lucky in that we are in Seattle and the fish counter is wonderful.  THEY can do anything you ask.  I am a wuss and always ask them to filet and/or bone the fish.  I hate eating fish with bones or with the skin still on, etc.  Shudder.

It used to be the same way here until all the soccer moms started driving vans.  They now drive things called mini-vans, but they didn't always.  And of course there are the idiots in the SUVs.  (Sport Utility Vehicles.)  I include my husband in the latter category.  It was bad enough to drive around with him in the pickup truck with four-wheel drive which we did not get much use from, as we are currently city mice.  Right before he went out of town (so I haven't been able to torment him as I would like to) he traded the pickup truck in and bought a Ford Excursion.  He just went out and did it.  Did not include me in the decision at all.  Just came home with it.  This is the biggest SUV made.  I don't even know if it's legal in Canada.  It oughtn't to be legal here.  
It is 227.6 inches long.  It gets 4.4 miles per gallon in freeway driving with the air conditioning on and 5.9 MPG with the air conditioning off, also on the freeway. 

Jeez.  I'll bet it accounts for about 0.1° per century global warming all on its own.  My 3.5 tonner (diesel) does about 28mpg at 70mph, that's about 23mpg in your money, and it's probably got more windage too.  The days when our air needs cooling are too few to mention, at least until Europe gets hit by the exhaust plume from David's car.

(wailing) I'm so embarrassed!

I know this because it has a fancy on-board computer that will tell you these things.  It is so big that it has an internal beeper that beeps if you are about to hit something, fore or aft.

That's handy if you can't drive. Yes.  We have very exciting drives, as it's always beeping when D. is about to hit a curb.  I just smile quietly to myself as he cusses at it.  I have one of those fresnel lenses stuck to the back window so I can see until I'm about 6" from the thing behind me. I did once hit a ladder protruding from the top of a smaller van though, but the bleeper probably wouldn't see that either at about 7' off the ground.

It is so big that Ford is stopping making it.  Too many people were buying them and then returning them because they don't fit in their standard garages or carports.  The one David bought was ticketed at $41K.  He was able to talk them down to $35K because the vehicle is not being made any more.  The car payments are still, even with the trade-in of his fairly new, fairly fancy pickup truck, $635 a month.

SHRIEK. 

<envy> It must be nice to be rich. :-)

My anger came from the fact that we are not all THAT rich, and I think once we start actually living on this new salary he is going to find that he can't really afford it. 

I was truly madly deeply mortified to be seen in it, and then I looked around and saw that the majority of traffic in Seattle is pickup trucks, minivans, vans, and SUVs, so we don't stick out too much.  I hate it.  I won't drive it.  It wallows when it goes around corners, and it has this front-to-back bucketing motion and also a side-to-side sloshing motion that are very painful on my physical body.  I associate these motions with a bad suspension, but oh, no, David says they are evidence of its good ride.  As my exquisitely vulgar former boyfriend used to say, "Don't pee on my shoe and tell me it's raining."

I thought all American vehicles did that - the concept of the Detroit Blimp is well known here.  It is evidence of a soft ride, great for going in a straight line over bumpy roads, but useless at anything else.  That's why American motor racing doesn't have a manufacturers' competition (so I'm told).

They have been getting better.  Back when we were going to buy ME the new car because HE was happy with his pickup truck, I was investigating the Ford Focus.  I was initially attracted to it because it looks like a space ship and comes in silly colors, but I was really impressed with it when I drove it.  Very tight handling -- which the salesman worried about, as he thought it was not good. 

Artyom showed me a headline in a lads car magazine. Their team had just test driven a Focus and were impressed.  Their headline took a little thinking about; "Focus sideways!".

I'm not interested in what "lads" think of cars.  I have a wonderful magnet on my refrigerator that shows a handsome teen guy in a car about to crash into another car and the caption is "He was too young... too fast... and had too much testosterone."
Washington State requires everyone to have car insurance.  That means there are insurance agencies that specialize in people with bad driving records.  They are called SS21 agencies, after the piece of paper that has your record on it.  There is one that has a hilarious ad on TV that features a bunch of what we used to call "stoners" sitting around on a sofa.  One of them is on the phone and says, "Man, I have a DUI record, glasspacks on the car and Keegans (or something like that) on the back end.  What?!?  You can cover me?!? IRON MAIDEN!!!"  I didn't know that Iron Maiden was being used as a statement of approbation, but whatever.
I'm interested in what rotund women in their mid-to-late 30s who still want to look cool and want to be able to zoom onto the freeway think of cars.  

The point was that you were not the only one to notice that the Focus had better handling than one gernerally expected of a Ford.

I figured as much, but I wanted to be snippy.

I was also interested in the Toyota Echo.  (Yeah, yeah, I love my little Toyota, but I was excited about the idea of a new car.)
This sort of suspension goes really well with chemo.  You need Zofran just to ride to the hospital.  I was discussing the other day with Natasha why she still gets sick on car journeys but never gets sick in the van any more.

I got sick on car trips until I was about eleven, if that's any help. :) Does she read in the car?  I needed to do that or I went crazy with boredom, but that was always my downfall.

Yes the discussion covered the effects of reading or drawing in the car.
Not easy to explain how that works.

It's because the car makes the paper vibrate and it's hard to focus on the vibrating print or drawing.  I understood that at seven; I'm sure she can, too.

It can't be that simple because it would be worse with hard suspension like the van, and it isn't.  It has to do with conflicting signals from the eye and inner ear as well.  When you watch outside, the eye sees movements that make sense of the balance signals.  When you watch inside, the eye image is stable but the ear-balance one isn't, so I guess the primitive brain says 'earthquake' or something.  There is something that happens to this mechanism when you learn to ride a motorbike and get accustomed to looking at the world gliding past at odd angles.  Well it did for me, I remember noticing a sort of reorientation was part of the learning process, and I can use that learnt skill in other situations, eg on roller coasters or at sea, to keep my mental orientiation in confusing environments.  Didn't happen with pedal bikes, I suppose you don't lay them over far enough.

I remember once we were coming back from visiting my grandparents in Arkansas.  I was around seven.  My father always wanted to start driving at around 3:30 a.m., so we could miss a lot of morning traffic.  So we would always get bundled into the car in our pajamas, and then we'd stop for breakfast around 8:00 a.m. and change into our clothes in the restaurant's bathroom.  ANYWAY, I was sitting in a miserable little heap in the booth at the restaurant and the kind-hearted waitress kept pestering me to find out what I wanted to eat for breakfast.  No, I did not want a Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n' Fruity.  No, I did not want a Ballpark Breakfast.  Finally I said, in a tiny voice, "Please could I have some scrambled eggs?"  She said, "Sure, hon, you like scrambled eggs?"  I said, "No, it's just that they're the easiest thing to throw up."
I still remember the evil look she gave my parents.

Heh heh.  The only good thing is that it won't fit in our garage, where my tiny, bedraggled 1985 Toyota MR-2 now sits in lonely splendor.  It won't even fit in the parking places in front of our house, as they are for compact cars and are very small.  He has to park it down the street and hike back to the house, complaining bitterly all the way, as he doesn't like walking.  Oh, the other good thing is that he keeps running over curbs in it, which should ruin the alignment or the balance or something pretty quickly.  Yay.
I can finally drive myself around again (at the high point, my leg was too grotesquely swollen to fit under the steering wheel in my Toyota) and am SO HAPPY to be able to do so.  Plus, I love my little tin can.  It has a mid-mounted engine and really skates along, making a  gratifying zoomy kind of noise at the same time.  I feel very small and virtuous as I zip along at 80 mph, getting 40 mpg, and surrounded by towering, inefficient SUVs.  I like to imagine that guys look at my teensy little coupe longingly as they whip their giant family-size vehicles onto the freeway which I have just danced onto, turn-signals ablaze, but I don't think they really do.  I think they still like the SIZE of their SUV.
Of course, my car was made before airbags were standard.  So even wearing my seatbelt, I have the comforting thought that if one of those SUVs creams me, I will die instantly, with none of this lingering in a head-injury-twilight for months while my family bickers over me.

Wow!  A well in the cellar.  Is the water still potable?  What does it taste like?

I don't think it was ever intended for drinking water, when I arrived here it was being used to pump water up 8' into the street drains to keep the water table under the house down.  When putting in the utility room drain in the cellar, my labourer discovered a culverted stream under the floor and diverted it into the foul drain, which is about 6' DOWN.  Water runs much easier that way, and the public sewer was short of water flow (kept blocking in the summer - not enough 'fall' (down slope)), so everyone benefited, and my cellar never floods any more even in storms.
I'm not sure where it fills from, I suspect it is the run-off from the spring somewhere, but attempts to trace it did not show up in the well. They used to collect drinking water from the spring at the top of the garden.  I have drunk that without ill effects, although there is no doubt a bit of last year's sheep pee in it, filtered through about a mile of shale.  Tough it out.  A mile of shale ought to filter anything out.  It tastes like water without chlorine in it. Wow, she said in soft wonderment.  I can't imagine THAT.

You definitely wouldn't be able to get insurance coverage for such a house in the U.S.  Over the past decade, the insurance companies have taken such a beating with natural disaster coverage that they are definitely standardizing homeowners' coverage.  Now, the federal government passed a law saying that people in flood plains HAD to be offered flood insurance.  I kind of approved of that, but wondered what people were doing living on flood plains anyway.  I guess the property developers and zoning authorities are mostly to blame for that.

Then I married a guy who impulsively bought the house I'm sitting in right now without reading the due diligence papers.  If he had, he would have discovered that we are in the Green River flood plain.  Fortunately, we can get coverage for floods as per the aforementioned federal law, but guess what?!? We are right smack dab in the eruption plain for Mount Rainier.  The map in the middle of the DD papers says so.  So if Mount Rainier explodes, as it is overdue to do, we will be drowned in a lahar.  (Boiling mud and ash.)  Hence our stunning sunset views of Mount Rainier.
It is a hassle to have the house on the market, but I am secretly glad that David is sick of Washington and wants to move.  You had better believe that, when we get to wherever we're moving, I am not allowing him to leave the hotel on his own EVER.  Call me a party-pooper, but the first house he wanted to buy was next to a federally-protected wetlands.  Yes, the wildlife-watching opportunities are delightful, but let's go see it at sunset.  Honey?  Those mosquitoes you're bitching about?  They're an extra added feature of a HOUSE BUILT IN A SWAMP.
Can you see why we fight a lot?  I'm a mean old wet blanket.

Yes. mozzys are so ROMANTIC.  Memories of a summer in Leningrad.  So many mosquitoes in the car headlights it looked like a snowstorm.<shudder>

Aren't those lovely?  Do you have a Dispos-All?  Can't think what the generic name is.  It's that thing that lives in the bottom of the kitchen sink that chews up food scraps.  I really love that.  Then the rubbish can doesn't stink.

Waste disposal unit?   No, I never got around to that.  The sink was about the only thing I didn't replace because the best on offer that would fit in the limited space was identical to what I had.  I'm not sure the drains would cope with the sludge anyway, I don't even flush coffee grounds, I sieve them out and put them in the bin.

That's exactly what he's doing.  Hey, I didn't vote for him.  And it isn't "W", it's Dubya.  Sounds more insulting and bubba-like.

W is easier to type, I can't pronounce Dubya.  :-)
Is it true that when he came to the White House someone had taken all the W's off the computer terminals?

No.  A couple of interns had taken the Ws off of their keyboards, but it was two or three people.

We all know that Dick Cheney is really doing the presidenting, and we're scared to death of him.  Halliburton, the company he is the former CEO of, is a majorly evil company securely tied into the military-industrial complex.  Said complex is just limping along, but its supporters do anything they can to protect and improve it.

So that's what it is all about.  That explains quite a lot.  Still presumably his company would be involved in the projects if only to save its ass, and it doesn't sound too well placed to make the sort of technological leap required to have this system in place before the big day. 

No, and frankly, I know Halliburton as an oil and gas drilling company.  I believe they also manufacture drilling equipment.  So I, personally, am not too sure how he fits in to the M/I complex.  I am brutally clear, though, on how he fits in to the plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Oh dear.  Does David's car need -that- much oil?  :-)  When my friend worked at the big oil refinery in LA he told me that they unload a supertanker every day there.  More oil than I can comfortably imagine.

("Sorry guys but we already put off Armageddon for 18 months so that Bill Gates could release Windows 2001, so you're going to have to come with what what you've got")  I guess we are going to have to rely on good old Amurrican incompetence to save the world.

Sir.  (Am I right?) Aye.  Same as you call a superpower with a nuke.
Horrible ethnic joke:
What do you say to a Samoan in a three-piece suit?
"Will the defendant please rise?"
(I'm so ashamed of myself.)

Quote Catharine "And that's why I don't tell any ethnic jokes." Girls who wear glass blouses shouldn't show bones (tee shirt seen in Oxford).I said I was ashamed of myself.

I don't think it sounds silly at all.  Remember, I'm a public health enthusiast.  I still think that all the TB-infested Russian immigrants who are coming over here are a last-gasp kind of Soviet plot.  They certainly are sapping the strength of the public health establishment here in King County.

Well yes but why are they sapping the strength of the former Soviet Union as well.  Sounds like a bit of an own goal. 

Oh, yes.  If I ever get well again I want to go to try to help over there.  I am proud of Bill Gates for donating umpty-jillion dollars (I'm not sure exactly how much it was) for the TB effort in Russia.  You know, he's really a jerk as far as Microsoft goes, but I admire him immensely for putting his money where his mouth is and donating large sums to public health efforts, especially in Russia and Africa.  (Two areas I would really like to see blossom.)

Well credit where it's due I suppose.  I can't help being suspicious that there is an ulterior motive, if only improving his public image and buying off the legislative dogs that would bring him down.  Then again, I guess he probably has nothing better to do with it, even from his point of view.

I don't care if he tattoos his ulterior motive on his forehead, the money may do some good.  I have hope.

Mind you that's pretty normal for the Russian regime, not so much shot in own foot as machine-gunned. Gorbachev tried to stamp out alcoholism by destroying the champagne grape vines, and so lost a major export commodity while making negligible impact on alcoholism - how many alcoholics drink champagne?  The system suffered (and still does) from a major structural information bottleneck between the people on the ground and the decision makers.

Rereading my previous comments on the ABM bit I sound awfully anti-American, which I am not.  You can be anti-American if you want to; I don't care. Just worried where we are heading.  Good old American incompetence is a strange thing:  with some brilliant successes (electronics industry, space etc.) America has the image of technological omnipotence, and yet when you look at the everyday stuff, cars, machines etc they are strangely slapdash.  It's because of the trade unions' inordinate influence in manufacturing. I have probably said before that I always buy American tools, they are the best in the world, and I am sure there has to be some underlying cause which relates this fact to the mediocre quality of many of their constructions.