in thinnking that mn is too big now, and you cannot have a moan aboutanyting withough twenty people jumping on you now

[pukkapatch]

you cant moan about the cost of something, because there is always osmeone here who has a hell of a lot less, wo they lambast you for being able to even think about getting it.
or they moan at you for having too much time on your hands
or too little
or being a sahm
or not being one
or bloody anthing. its just not possible to have a moan about anything anymore. every one is soooo pc about everything.
its turning into real life.

am fairly gobsmacked that anyone believes it was fiction. just you wait until the next one comes along, its due in 2038.

if you want to know why, the answer's here, half way down the page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K

lets see, in 2038 I will be 71, so obviously still working, as the govt will be hoping I die before they have to pay me a pension...so as an engineer with many years experience I should be well placed to get loads of money for fixing it at the last minute

I'd never heard of that one.
Understandable though.

Nightynight, I'm just remembering the insane number of meetings I had to attend for our Y2K planning (over the course of a couple of years!) and the massive amount of work that went into our systems.... if you were able to get money out of an HSBC cashpoint on 01/01/2000, I am partly responsible (about 0.00000000000001% responsible, but still!)

Dp just said 'oh shouldn't be too hard to fix' then thought about it, and realised how much work it entails [frgin]

ah well. at least the 2038 one means we wont end our days in b+q

The geek shall inherit the earth

That's my ticker type thingy on another site. (the geek shall inherit the earth)

I actually quite like getting all sweaty and worked up about a 'contentious thread' every now and then it exercises the 'little grey cells'and it livens up an otherwise quite dull evening spent running up and down stairs settling children etc. You can get all hot and bothered then switch 'puter off for a couple of days and come back refreshed - perfect.

I also find I recognise a significant proportion of the posters on the threads I go on so mn still feels pretty small to me.

Dead discussions do get revived and dead horses are constantly flogged but who actually reads every post on a looong thread.

My fav saying comes to mind change what you cannot accept - accept that which you cannot change (or words to that effect)

Sorry if my post is prolonging your thread unnecessarily with my unwanted musings pukka

I don't know why so many people misinterpret the phrase "am I being unreasonable?" as a question inviting a yes or no answer.

Obviously it means "I am an entirely reasonable person who is surrounded by arses - please agree with me now"

Any damnfool newbie should be able to see that

Part of the problem with arguing with people on the internet is that it isn't like real life - you get forced into corners where you don't really want to go and you can't use mollifying language and body language to mitigate the effect of your arguments if they go down the wrong way. It's very hard to shrug and move on to something else without someone being obsessed with there being an "argument", which they have "won".

You may get embroiled deeply in an argument for about an hour and then go away and leave it. If you have a life, you may go away for days, come back and find a thread you were on has moved on, and that the person you were furiously arguing with has done a "ner-nuh, (s)he can't answer, my point was beee-est, ner-nuh" kind of post. And to go back and answer it then would be petty.

It's also difficult to build up an argument without it being fisked. This is frustrating as someone will think they have "refuted" what you say simply by taking on each point in turn, and they will have ignored the overall thrust. I'm reminded of the old Monty Python sketch about "that's not an argument, that's just contradiction!" "no it isn't" etc.

Oh NQD you are such a tedious boffin!

Wow.. fisking!! I LOVE fisking! I just never knew it was what I was doing before!!!

yy agree UQD

SOmetimes I want to post outrageous things just to see what happens. A bit like Moondog does

UQD - have been driven crazy by this "fisking" recently - I didn't know there was a word for it.

Do you have a recommended method of dealing with fiskers? Or should you just ignore them like my granny used to say.

I agree with UQD-everything I wanted to say but you have put it much more eloquently.
Shiny happy star- the term fisking has been around for a long time. Don't you remember all the fuss when Julian Clary declard he had just beem fisking Norman Lamont?

No. I have remained worryingly uninformed!

Apologies for terrible typing.
Maybe fisk 'em right back Iorek? I don't know

He fisted Norman Lamont
very different activity!

(NB he didn't really as we all know, in case any lawyers are reading in the hopes of catching anyone out a la morningpaper)

Nothing wrong with a bit of stylish fisking.

It's the Copy-and-paste style that irks....

shinyhappy - I'll have you know I am an interesting young-middle-aged boffin!

pruni - ohhhhh, that's what Moondog does!

There is good fisking and bad fisking.

Good fisking (if I've understood correctly) is where someone breaks down an argument line by line in order to disprove it, and bad fisking is where someone just picks out individual lines and refutes them in a way that is irrelevant to the argument as a whole.

I like good fisking, but bad fisking makes me v cross.

Don't know why it makes me so cross. You would think we all had better things to do really.

She found me Kerry.

Oh I like bad fisking too.. it's great fun!! (To do.. not to be on the receiving end of obviously..)

Had never heard of fisking. That's spot on UQD!

mn is huge but hardly anyo0ne posts..i had this conversation with justine at the xmas meet...but the same hardly anyones mostly post and so keep the whole thing going...i had the conversation obviously before my brain got stolen