No, not at all. I'm happy to be the sober one . As it happens your suggestion would be ideal but I tend to go out much more often then I get people in, so it would be sitting around for a while. I suspect next time I'm off to someone else's it'll go along as a present for them.

Jon

All set to do the rear discs on the car today, wonderful weather to do it in...

2 bolts just plain refused to come out, WD40, wire brush to clean off the rust and they wouldnt budge

going to grab a new bit for the wrench to try and sort it and a chefs blowtorch to heat the bugger up, would love an impact wrench but really dont have the funds to do so

In the end all I did was clean the calipers...again and the now front alloy with the wheel off so got as much as I could inside and out, will do the other wheel next time (switched the fronts/rears round)

Try a long bar attached to the wrench, to give more leverage. Surprisingly, the tube from a cylinder vacuum cleaner is usually long enough and strong enough to budge a tight bolt.

I've used a 2m scaffold pole before to increase torque when removing hub nuts, like a knive through butter.

I have one of these in my box
http://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/stor ... yId_165469
The head that holds the screwdriver bits pops off to reveal a standard half inch square drive, so it does sockets too.

Also being brakes its quite easy to get heat in with an enthusiastic driving style..

Although without an F1 pit crew to hand it will all be cold by the time you can get access to it.

Who asks for gravy with Cajun Chicken?

The same people who ask for ketchup with a roast.

That's just pain wrong.

It's brown sauce with roasts. Some people are so ignorant.

Nationwide's Internet Banking maintenance sucks.
Yet again the service is down when I want to use it and yet again their updates about when it will be back up again prove to be a total fabrication. I particularly like the Service Availability page saying the internet banking is running normally when clicking on the link to it brings up the 'down for maintenance' placeholder page. Grrr.

Fair enough, these things can overrun but don't bloody lie to me about it. Repeatedly.

They do tend to do their maintainance in the early hours. It makes sense as less people use it then. Working nights, I've fallen foul of that myself, but I can see why they do it.

I'm not criticising doing website maintenance in the early hour per se, what really bugs me is that every time I've run into it they've overrun and lie about when the service will be back up.
Also, I'm kind of surprised that they don't have a set of fail-over servers so they can maintain one group of servers while keeping the service live on the other or am I being overly optimistic about the capabilities of a major financial institution?

I often see server maintenance notices from two websites I visit in the evenings as they are hosted in the US. Fortunately they follow the Montgomery Scott code of quotations, 2 hours becomes 30 minutes, and 45 minutes becomes 10.

Not particularly, on a large system if they implement load balancing and have an update to the DB servers they will probably need to take them all down, especially if there is data replication involved.

Usually ours are 2 stage, put up a holding page and backup of existing db, creating of a new db with original data in tact, then deploy the new site, update configs then allow it back. If stuff goes wrong it's a quick rollback and any script that is performed must (where possible) have a rollback script too or use the backed up database (but that is slow so not preferred)

As far as downtime for a non replicated db on a non load balanced system I can personally do it in under 15 minutes, usually get everything ready and test on a local one before putting the system live. Measure twice, cut once and all that

Home made blue cheese and brocolli soup - check
Quality fresh bread - check
Butter..... only have some budget crap stuff that crumbles instead of spreading.