I REALLY wanted to flute practise tonight.

But...after I got home, I tried to play, and was so tired that I had to stop after 5 minutes. Bah.

Yep that's the phrase

The blue and black thing seems a bit mad. Go on, be rebellious and do it anyway

A load of the nice picture signatures on here have gone weird. Look at LooneyTunes' signature, for one...

I had to replace the CE mark from the top of my signature

Car Expert

Mine's got some funny stuff too... probably time to think of a better one anyway

Blue and black stripes are cool IMO, but tend to look a bit "goth"

Hi Lucky you can wear black with anything really. The saying used to be that blue and green should never be seen but that is old hat now. Blue and green are quite fashionable together these days and it isn't really surprising since they both contain the same tones.

I think these days, anything goes!

Reminds me of a time my husband turned up to a site he was working at, and the lady he was working for (and knew well) took one look at him and said "Oxblood shoes? With navy blue?!"

So he asked me, and I asked my mum, and neither of us knew, but now he doesn't wear his oxblood shoes at all (and no longer has a navy suit, either, but I think that's unrelated!)

I wasn't sure what colour Oxblood is (ok red was obvious but what hue) the sites Google supplied me with said that it was ideal with a navy suit.

Get your husband back in the Oxblood it's a lovely colour *goes off to convince MrB that smart shoes don't just come in black*

A mantra of Trinny and Susannah was 'NEVER WEAR A COLOUR WITH BLACK'!!!

Oh! Well that's just not going to work for me! I like the dramatic contrast.

Why do TV adverts seem to get more and more silly?

Example the GoCompare adverts

Sorry to hear this, nicki, though it's rather familiar from BerkshireSon's experience this summer. I think when you start a new job it really takes it out of you; give yourself 2 or 3 months to get used to the new routine, and I'm sure it will be less tiring. Meanwhile, there are always the weekends!

I work all day on Sundays

Waiting for repair man to finish repairing so I can start today's practice.

I had to get up 'early' for a silly, five minute appointment (eyebrow wax). They couldn't fit me in any later. I've had about four hours sleep and I'm *tiiiired*. Now I've nothing to do til lunchtime, but I seem to have lost the ability to fall right back to sleep. On the other hand, my eyebrows are well groomed...

I know the feeling!! I'm shattered!

That's always a plus! I love getting my eyebrows waxed. Makes me feel very neat afterwards.

We came down to breakfast this morning to find our fridge/freezer was showing a bit warm in both compartments (like -15 and + 8) and the compressor did not cut in when I activated Fast Freeze. So I unplugged it to give the electronics a reset - the effect of that when I plugged it back in again was that the temperatures indicated in each compartment went up significantly

So we set about emptying it, starting with the frozen food. Some 15 minutes into this the compressor cut in, and now the temperature in the freezer is -22 and in the fridge is +4 .

My mum never had this much trouble with her meat safe

I love flute playing

Recommended temps are -18 to -20 deg C for a freezer and 2 to 5 deg C for a fridge. Your fridge is Ok now but your freezer a bit on the cold side .

Thank you for that, F#min. I have just consulted with the handbook, which says "Fridge 0 to +6 Adjustable, Freezer -18 to -24 Non-adjustable".

Seems I have the only best setting available .

I think you might find things like ice cream are a bit on the hard side (yes even so called 'soft scoop' ) if you're at the -24 end of the scale.. if your fridge is zero, you might get some ice crystals forming on some items.

Not sure that qualifies as a random comment - I think it goes without saying!

I've got my favourite professor tomorrow! Hooray!

I should be doing my assignment for my musicology class... but somehow the forums seem much more appealing

I've just done a 14 hour day so am going to bum around instead of doing music practice, then go to bed...

had a lovely dream last night.............

A drunk woman on the bus was being very rude to my friend and I. And then when she finally shut up, she kept eavesdropping and trying to 'converse' with us

I've reheated my current cup of coffee twice already... and now it's stone cold again.

My dreams were horrible last night!

Celeste - I have a reputation for not finishing tea - I just let it cool down and then next time I try it, it is too cold!

My random thought is that I don't have any idea where my tuner is. It can only be in a limited number of places and it isn't in any of them...Hm.

I just found a dvd I've spent a year looking for!

Hmm...

I was depping in an orchestra for the sole rehearsal today and the concert tomorrow. Didn't have an idea what the music would be and thought I would be second flute. Ended up being first...which was ok, aside from some really stupid moments from myself.

Mine too, Nicki!!

I don't know why. The last 3 I can remember are a) being in a plane which is about to crash, b) my dad being really horrible to my family and c) an upsetting family issue!

However, aside from those dreams I did sleep really well last night.

Does anyone know if Clav is OK. He hasn't been on forums for 4 days, and I know he was poorly with cellulitis

I was wondering this too!! Not like him to be quiet for so long

I too am a bit concerned. I sent him an e-mail about a piece he is down to play for me at the Baroque Day and so far he has not replied.

If you read this, Clavicembalo, there is no pressure, just that we would like to know that you are OK.

Looks as though he hasn't been on for almost a week now - hope he's ok!

Maybe tomorrow's league table result will bring him out of the woodwork ... ?

Only just seen this! I hope the concert went well, nicki.

It actually went well considering I only sight read the music yesterday. But I wanted to stop half way through as was tired and wrists were hurting. Hm.

I'm worried about him too. It's been a week now since he was last on the board. I emailed him last week but haven't heard back from him. Didn't he mention that he might have to go into hospital if it didn't clear up I hope he's OK...

How did they decide on the order of keys on a QWERTY keyboard and is it standard throughout Europe?

I may be completely wrong, but I have a vague memory of reading somewhere once that it was designed to be the most difficult layout, so that typists couldn't type too quickly - with old typewriters if too many keys were pressed in too quick succession, then the hammer-type bits that struck the ribbon and made the acutal print (there's probably a proper name for these) could get tangled up together. The QWERTY layout was supposed to help prevent that.

I have no idea whether it's standard throughout Europe - I would have thought not?

MORRISONS SELL PEANUT PUFFS!

I believe it comes from the days of mechanical typewriters as crotchetymum says but rather than to slow folks down was a way of keeping keys that were likely to be pressed one after the other to be physically separated to avoid the hammers coming into contact and jamming.

It isn't standard across Europe and using other keyboard types is a nightmare if you are used to touchtyping.

I touch type and I can use the Italian keyboard without problems (except when I have to use accents). French keyboards are a nightmare though!

I've often wondered how they decided on the layout...

I knew it was something to do with jamming! But it was all a bit hazy

Russian keyboards are really bad. We have stickers on the ones at school in the language computer room with Russian letters on them, and because there are 36ish letters, they cover all of the punctuation as well so all of that is in a different place as well. There is absolutely no relation from Russian keyboard to English at all! I suppose it didn't help that because the Russian letters were only stickers, some of them had peeled off, so if you couldn't find the letter you were looking for you had to go through all of the missing ones before you worked out which letter you were looking for!