Microsoft Paint + car park touchscreen = You already know where this is going We take a trip to the seaside in our 12 Borks of Christmas as a parking machine touchscreen goes rogue... with inevitable consequences. The fair city of Brighton has many car parks, all of which will charge the visiting motorist an eye-watering premium in return for a few hours of parking. It appears that one customer has …
rather than the normal extortionate rates expected for a stay in Brighton and Hove.
This is supposed to be the season of goodwill isn't it?
Ok, I know that parking rates in Brighton are high but even they are not on the same level as those found in central London. And because this car park is underground, you won't have 50000 seagulls trying to poop on it after they have tried to steal your chips. Isn't that worth something?
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@IGotOut Between £3 and £5 all day in my town.
They should be more civilised like the French - most car parks give 2 hours for free 12h00 to 14h00, 'cos like you shouldn't have to pay extra to park while having lunch in a bistro.
I once pre-paid 0€50 at 17h00 for 2 hours, only to find I was entitled to stay until 09h00 the next morning.
That's actually not too bad.
In Downtown Seattle I know a garage (Car Park for our friends on the Right Side of the Right Pond) that's $25.00 USD the first two hours and $5.00 each additional hour.
Now I live in Redmond on the other side of Lake Washington. I take the Express Metro Bus, Round Trip, $6.50 [and also get to skip the several dollar Bridge Toll ... while reading my paperback/drinking tea/and generally not stressing about other drivers and traffic conditions].
Pretty cheap fix from my perspective and the money I save ends up in Seattle at one of the abundant places for excellent comestibles. [They get my money anyway, but I'd prefer something of value for it other than a rectangular space of asphalt to park my automobile ... like Curries, and Pints!]
You want to try driving to Hastings...well obviously you don't as it's not that nice, but what I meant was, if you were to drive to Hastings you'd find it a lot less enjoyable than driving to Brighton. Brighton at least has a M-way, Hasting is A road all the way, when I lived there, which granted was 20+ years ago, it could take 3 or 4 hours to drive the 50ish miles to London, there was only a few passing points back then, the rest being single carriage way.
Some tips from a local:
Waitrose car park (on the Hove border, actually) gets you an hour -- the minimum spend of £10 is essentially free, covered by the posh breadsticks and artisanal tapenade that you wanted anyway -- just enough time to wander down to the seafront and go up and down in the thing that goes up and down.
Sainsburys near the station gets you an hour and a half, time to nip down North Laine for that Balinese sandalwood incense-holder and those vegetarian espadrilles.
Morrisons off the Old Steine (redeem your parking ticket in-store with a couple of litres of White Lightning for the street-drinkers outside the entrance - it's an expected courtesy) is convenient for your H... sorry, S&M purchases in nearby Kemptown.
Or, simply park for free in Whitehawk -- a 15 minute stroll into the city centre, and you can collect what's left of your car later from a field outside Newhaven.
Ah, something cocked up then
Having driven to Brighton a few times in the past, the parking rate there is shocking. The fact that the rates seemed to be second ONLY to London is even more shocking. Even Park and Ride was expensive, to the extent I have parked as Worthing and walked in.
One of many reasons I haven't been fopr quite a while.
At least I can cycle to work on our fine new cycle lanes without being tailgated by some lard-arse in an SUV now, though. But YMMV (sic).
As it happens, I am also a sometime motorist (I'd get rid of the car like a shot if public transport here weren't both a bit shit and ridiculously expensive), and counter-intuitively the cycle lanes seem actually to have improved traffic flow on some routes - less lane-swapping and merging, I'm guessing.
Brighton, the London Riviera!
It has always had delusions of grandeur and been accordingly overpriced.
There are so many other nice places on the South coast, Brighton is easy to avoid.
The closest I like to get is the South Downs way, I have ridden it end to end on horseback a couple of times.
No, not bacon, Bacon rind. That's the bit that, like chewing gum, loses it's taste while chewing but never chews down like actual bacon and crispy fat. Of course, some people may not know what bacon rind is these days as bacon is almost always sold sans rind unless you buy from a farmers market where is may still come with the rind on. The rind is the pigskin on the very outer edge of the bacon. (And by bacon, I mean proper back bacon, not the thinly sliced belly pork they call bacon in the USA :-))
It's still wasteful. That bit is used in soup or beans. Adds tons of flavo(u)r and, as it's mostly collagen, tons of mouth feel. The trotters work better for soup, though.
Usually I cure the bacon sans skin ... I boil the skin to remove excess fat, and then dehydrate it in conveniently sized pieces (which last forever when stored in airtight containers). These bits then get deep-fried in manteca (hog fat) to produce chicharrón.
What was that about Yanks not knowing what Bacon is?
You're surprised that it has Paint?
It's Windows, being used for an embedded ePOS scenario.
I'm pretty certain it'll also have Candy Crush on there, along with Paint3D, Store, OneDrive, Mixed Reality Portal, and all the other shite shovelware that MS foist on even "Pro" variant users.
Anyway. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and peace and goodwill to all men - even Microsoft marketing managers.
(My chosen icon is a roaring log fire, as I look out my window and see 5" of snow all around. I'm pretty sure I just saw four small children following a faun and a lion across my front lawn, too...)
I think you mean "WTF is a full-blown general purpose operating system doing running something as simple as a parking meter in the first place?"
When I were a lad, they used clockworks ... and broke down a lot less often!
Do kids these days understand the phrase "spend a penny"?
I don't think it's cars Josh H has drawn, rather I believe it is a stylised erect penis and testicles which appear to be ejaculating. I mean it's pretty poorly executed, but as a piece of art, it is still a million times better than anything Tracey Emin has ever produced. Isn't Banksy from Brighton?
Two of same. One (unusually for graffiti) flaccid hanging down.
Just opened my "nudinits" calendar for 2022 NSFW??. Word and picture puns in the "Carry On" tradition. I buy the big format one for scribbled reminders - to hang on the fridge door.
Like a classic Giles cartoon - there's always another (suggestive) detail you only see on a later view.
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