So, my damp problem

No, wait, that's my parents' kitchen, currently undergoing 4 months of being torn apart and being put back together, along with the whole rest of their house. There's no floor/ceiling in parts of it, it's pretty awesome - you can see the remains of a bathroom up on the right.

This is _my_ damp problem, after a plumber has come out, taken apart a bit of the wooden panelling, and prodded the bit underneath:

Not nearly so bad, right? Of course, due to the incompetence of the people that the insurance company foisted on me last time, he didn't actually know about the problem before he turned up, the person assigning the job to him hadn't read the notes, and thus I had to explain things to him from scratch. And there wasn't a pipe where we thought there would be, either. However, there's definitely _something_ going on, as the wall behind those holes is very damp.

So, he's gone away, and is going to get a surveyor out to work out what the problem is. Which is what I was hoping I would get today. Tomorrow I get to phone up and hassle them again...

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-5-2010

• Zack Snyder will be directing Superman!
  (tags: ZackSnyder superman comics movies)
• Nevada Nuke Site Now Guarded By Robots
  (tags: nuclear nuclearweapons robots)
• Rural night sky vs Urban night sky. Oh My God, It's Full Of Stars.
  (tags: urban sky city photo)
• An awesome collection of pictures. I just wasted fifteen minutes on this.
  (tags: pictures EpicWin awesome)
• Fox News has basically bought the Republican Party.
  (tags: news politics media republicans usa)
• How the ONS got the figures for the percentage of gay people in the UK.
  (tags: statistics uk gay lgbt identity sexuality)
• Intervening in "unruly families" can save £40,000 in the first year, cut offences by 69% and antisocial behaviour by 48%
  (tags: uk family society)
• Health And Safety's Myth of the Month page
  (tags: health safety myths cartoon debunking)
• Lazy BBC hacks repeat Daily Mail ‘elf n safety’ myths. They really should know better.
  (tags: bbc news health safety EpicFail)
• Mutant Worms Produce Piles of Spider Silk.
  Aaaaand my skin itches all over.
  (tags: silk genetics TheFuture)
• Minister backs high-speed rail to Manchester and Leeds - Y-shaped line will split at Birmingham.
  (tags: trains transport uk)

This pretty much made my day

(they're taking donations towards dog rescue over here.)

File sharing and backup

I use Dropbox a lot. It syncs a bunch of folder between different my laptop and desktop. It backs up all of those folders to Dropbox's servers. And it allows me to share some of those folders with friends, so that if they change a file I (near instantly) have the latest version of it (and vice versa). It even allows me to roll back to a previous version of a file if I've made a stupid change to it.

It's an awesome service. And one of the thing I like is that if I refer someone else to it then they give me extra free space. Everyone gets 2GB for free, and you get 250MB for each person that takes you up on it (and they get the 250MB as well). So, if you'd like to give dropbox a go, and you'd like to start off with an extra 250MB of space, then click here, and take it for a whirl.

(I feel somewhat odd touting a service on my journal, but I genuinely love Dropbox to bits, and I was recommending it to people before you got anything for doing so, so I don't feel _too_ bad about it.)

Can't stop the signal

Some of you may have noticed the number of times I've mentioned getting a link/picture/video via octopoid_horror is not small.

Thankfully, he's now started posting his stuff over at Tumblr as Ths Is The Signal, which means that I'll be getting less emails, and can just add him (I have a tumblr account, not that I really use it).

If you like random videos and images* then you could do a lot worse than to drop by occasionally.

*And if you don't then what on earth are you doing here?