BigBlue

If they're anything like my girlfriends friends, they aren't paying anything. This is a couple who, 2 years ago, bought a small place for £130k, with 125% mortgage (the extra 25% was to pay off previous debts, I believe) from NR. She is a new-ish teacher and has had a couple of decent pay rises due to re-grading over the past 2 years. Husband has a better paid job now than when they took out mortgage, so they could realistically be reducing that debt while the going is good - girlfriend says that they have an extra £1000 / month coming in at the moment. GF reported to me that she suggested

Saw similar on the way past the one in Cheltenham. 'All stock must go' plastered all over the windows.

Exactly. If they'd said 'One time D list non-celeb who made TV that almost no-one watched is reduced to accepting a well paid job for Flash', the story wouldn't have been quite so 'interesting'.

Are you Gollum??

Exactly. I pulled mine out if IceSave last week. I was toying with moving it to Kaupthing because of their FSCS promise. Glad I didn't now. Now that up to £50k is 'safe'*, everything is going into Bank of Brown. Not that I thought 35k was safe - but if I was to trust 35k, might as well trust £50k.

I think that his branding sell-off has come back to bite him. I believe that there are only a few Virgin branded products that he is still personally linked to, the rest have just acquired the rights to use his brand name, but are run by completely separate entities. Virgin Media being a case in point, people find their customer service to be terrible, and they blame Branson, whereas I think that the management and staff are NTL as was. Virgin radio are the latest sell off by the look of it, they are to become Absolute Radio as the buyers didn't want to buy the brand along with the station.

Missing full stop on point 1.

For various reasons, I read the lo-fi version of HPC at work. Do the admins have control over the layout of the lo-fi version? The reason I ask is I think it would be good to put the breadcrumb trail and the page x/y link at the bottom of the page instead of or as well as the top. This is the natural position you would be at when at the end of a thread, whereas at the moment you need to scroll back up to the top to go back to the main index or to go to the next page. Ta!

And if anyone thinks that the FSCS is any better protection, they are deluded. None of these schemes, no matter what guarantees they offer, would be in a position to pay out in a reasonable time scale in the event of a failure. It's all just words to keep people from panicking. Edit - I'm not a gold bug, I have my deposits in a couple of high interest accounts, all too aware that I will need to move quickly in the event of something bad happening.

I don't doubt that people are experiencing problems. I have now tried 4 browsers (safari, camino, shiira and firefox) with and without signatures enabled and with and without ad blocking enabled and I can't get the site to run slowly. I will never use IE and I'm only on OS X at the moment so I can't vouch for XP or IE. Maybe you could monitor the page loads to see where the process is hanging? http://getfirebug.com/net.html My first guess would be hanging while loading someone's missing avatar or signature image, which could explain the apparent randomness. Or some javascript or php snaggi

Yes, it must be the keyword filter that The Mods have installed to monitor known troublemakers.

What I'm saying (but I didn't think I'd have to be so explicit) is that if it was the website, or anything under their control, then it would obviously affect everyone. The fact that it can serve pages consistently quickly to me, and others in this thread, would lead me to believe that the problem lies elsewhere. Or maybe 'The Mods' have decided that I'm the lucky recipient of the dedicated feed this month? (See, I can do sarcasm (and conspiracies) too)

I think you all need to look for some reason other than the site, it's been consistently fast for me over the past few weeks.

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/salesguy.html Edit: HPC seems fairly zippy to me. I'm on VM.

Plastic titted, deluded hag. *shudder* If she's 42, I'll eat Krustys hat.