Semi-alug bbq

A bbq was announced at short notice in #alug on Saturday morning.

daven came over and checked phone cables. Then he looked at our bbq. Yes there was a full canister of gas, but no it isn't a gas bbq. Last week had turned up no coals in all the supermarkets (Christmas now, innit), so we went to see if we could get the end-of-season-sale gas bbq noticed in the Range. It was still there, and not surprising: it had no innards. What's the use of that? We bought an ordinary bbq for about £7 so we could try burning wood in it.

It started to rain. Thunderstorm, lightning, car alarms going off, and hail that gave concern for the windscreen, so I pulled off the road. The rain was so heavy we couldn't see the lightning.
The sky cleared and the indomitable bbqers went searching for filling stations that might have some coals left. Just as daven located a hoard, quinophex phoned to say he and wildduck and toddler Bea were waiting outside number 5 and had instant bbqs with them. We headed back, having told him that it's 7 not 5.

The Ruin'd Folly makes a good outdoor kitchen, especially soaked from the rainstorm and thus unlikely to burn down.
Noodles arrived, with bbq coals. He too thought it was #5. Weirdness.

Full of food, housemates vegged in front of the tv with Jane Eyre, while geeks tested cables and phone sockets and the router and took phonethings apart, and wildduck sat in between ;) Noodles noticed my laptop and took that apart as well.

We talked about qualifications and jobs and corporate preferences for m$oft, and the way "doing things in Windows" is taught instead of theory and algorithms, and came up with a new word - "microsoftened" for what happens to people brought up on Word, Excel, and Windows.

quinophex: Bea, pass me the IDC punchdown tool
and later...
Noodles: is the burny thing still on?
daven: oh shit!
[both run]

There were very few photos (4 on Fotopic), and daven banned the one of him and the purple snake :(