Bilge Rat

I am working on an art project and I want it to smell really strongly of perfume. Can anyone recommend a cheap brand that I could use for this? The stronger the better!

I want to employ the smell of perfume for an art project. It should be strong with a cloying or overpowering quality but I don't really care what it smells like beyond that as long as it is recognisable as perfume. It should be cheap since I might need to use a lot of it, plus I think that will add to the effect. I am located in the UK.

At 115 lbs (according to Wikipedia), is AJ Lee the lightest person to ever hold a WWE title belt? No, I checked Hornswoggle. He is 142 lbs. Are there any other title holders who weighed less?

WWF era champions count and feel free to mention anyone from WCW, TNA or even other organizations if you happen to know of any. Including Japanese titles won by inanimate objects may be pushing it though.

My company wants me to move to a different city. It is too far away to drive so I would have to move house, which I have no intention of doing. I believe that under normal circumstances I would be entitled to redundancy pay since my old job will no longer exist.

However, I have also been told that if I do not move then I will be expected to go out on field jobs all the time, which is very different work from what I have been doing up until now. They know that I hate traveling but in theory I am capable of doing this. They have also told me that staying where I am will eliminate any prospects of promotion or salary increase (although of course I do not have this in writing).

Since they are theoretically offering me a (terrible, dead-end) job in the same area, does this mean that they will not have to pay me redundancy pay if I refuse either option? It seems to me like the travel-based job is only there to circumvent the need to pay me statutory redundancy pay. Why do any companies give out redundancy pay if they can get away with doing this? If rejecting their offers means that I will effectively be deemed to have quit then this could also affect any future attempts that I may make to claim unemployment benefit (though at the moment I have no intention of doing that).

Where do I stand?

I have been told that at the end of the month I have to make a decision between two options. One involves me moving to a different city, the other involves me staying where I am but with significant changes to my job description and picking neither option will result in me not working for the company any more.

If I go for this third option then where do I stand? Will this likely count as me be fired, or will it count as redundancy? Alternatively, they may consider that refusing either option counts as me quitting. I'm not sure how to play things to end up best off.

At the moment I have no plans to claim unemployment benefit or anything but if it did come to that then it would be kind of silly if I couldn't get it due to the terminology used for the way that my job ended. Also, does redundancy imply that I am entitled to some sort of severance pay or is that not how things work?

I can't really trust my bosses so I can't talk openly with them about what will happen. I wouldn't put it past them to screw me over if they get the chance.

My current job is way too stressful and I am considering applying for a more basic one. It may not pay as much but I think I would be more content doing something simple and straightforward.

However, I have good qualifications and work experience in a more advanced position, so I am worried that I would be rejected out of hand for being overqualified. Would it be wrong to dumb down my CV by missing off qualifications and understating the responsibilities of my past jobs? Would this technically be fraud? I am deliberately misrepresenting myself, although in a negative way instead of a positive one. I'm not going to outright lie though.

I have a punching dummy that is made of hard plastic and some padding (it lights up to provide targets), and it came with a pair of velcro boxing gloves. However, I feel like the gloves are the wrong shape as they don't do much to protect my hands.

The glove padding mostly covers my fingers but there seems to be almost no padding between the knuckles and my target. Also, because of the curve of the glove there is a tendency for my punches to glance off, causing my hand to buckle and hurting my wrist.

Is it likely the gloves are poorly designed or am I just punching incorrectly or too hard? Maybe my hands are just a weird shape? It doesn't help that the dummy has a lot of edges and hard parts, but I guess a real person is the same. What is most likely to be causing the problem?

I am currently staying in a hotel with open WiFi. I cannot connect to the wireless network at all from my room on the 4th floor, despite an 'excellent' signal strength. It seems to time out while trying to assign an IP address, and I think it said something about the network denying my connection.

However, the same WiFi connection works from the hotel lobby. I do not have to change any settings, it just works. I can literally carry my laptop down the stairs and it will start working without me changing anything other than the machine's position in space. It stops working again when I carry it back up.

The signal strength in the lobby is actually worse than it is in my room, so how is this possible? I don't especially need it to work in my room, I just want to figure out how this is happening.

The only thing I can think is that my floor has some sort of secondary router or signal booster that amplifies the WiFi signal but that does not have the authority to allow connections. This would seem like a pretty useless thing for it to do but maybe the hotel set it up wrong. Maybe my computer just uses some weird method of connection that it doesn't like.

Any ideas?

I recently worked through a book to teach myself PHP and SQL. My problem now is that I can't really create any applications other than those that run in a web browser (and then they need to be hosted somehow). I've had a few ideas for some home projects that can take advantage of SQL and there is also a potential application at my work, but I need to learn a language where I can actually build an executable program that can be run anywhere.

All of the applications where I work seem to be done in C# for whatever reason. However, I don't want to remain there in the long term, and the job adverts I have seen often seem to list C++ as their language of choice. There is also Java, the language of apps, which seems to be a very popular choice for the modern world. I get the impression that all of these languages are roughly similar, but which one is likely to be of the most use? Are they similar enough that I can focus on one and possibly pick up what I need to know about the others later? Are they so similar that I could probably just get away with learning one of them? If one of them is more complicated then that would seem to be the one that would give me the most versatility. From what I can tell Java is a somewhat dumbed-down version of the other two.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

I am working on a spreadsheet with some colleagues in Russia. After I sent them my last version they returned it with the column titles translated into Russian underneath my existing titles. The Russian text shows in the same cell as my English text but clicking on the cell only shows the English text for editing. I have no way of editing the Russian text.

How do I get Excel to do this? How can I display the text in different languages whilst only allowing the user to edit one of them? How would I access the second text string if I wanted to change the Russian?

How does double entry bookkeeping deal with assets that are 'destroyed' through use? A simple example might be buying coffee for a small business's staff room. Money is credited from the petty cash account and then debited to the 'kitchen supplies' account. However, once the coffee has been drunk it is gone forever. You could credit it from the kitchen supplies account but then where would it be debited to?

The above example may be a trivial one but the same effect must be seen on a larger scale, say with hospitals that feed large numbers of people or something like a gritting company that buys grit but then loses it all by spreading it on the roads.

It doesn't make sense to leave these assets on the books as they no longer exist and no longer have value. However, their 'disappearance' upsets the accounting equation, assets = capital + liabilities. The assets are gone, but surely neither the capital or the liabilities are affected?

Can anyone explain how this situation is handled?

On two separate courses in entirely different parts of the world I have been told that contact lenses should not be worn if you are using emergency breathing apparatus. However, the reason for this has never been given.

This has applied to both small, portable escape masks and full SCBA kits with mounted tank and face mask, designed to protect the wearer from hazardous gases such as H2S. Since I am only likely to be using these in an emergency I want to know if I can get away with wearing my lenses with the mask for short periods in unlikely circumstances.

I assumed that the compressed air could dry out the lenses or something but I have practiced with both types of mask in training and had no problems even with the lenses in. Does anyone have any more information?

How come there has never been a land-based analogue of a battleship? I can see military benefits to a gigantic vehicle with ridiculously thick armour, huge-bore guns and the ability to steamroller entire buildings, so why does such a vehicle not exist?

Since we, as a species, are capable of constructing massive vessels like supertankers and aircraft carriers it surely would not be beyond us in terms of time or resources to build a colossal rolling fortress the size of a city block.

Is it to do with the fact that ships support their (buoyancy-reduced) weight across the whole area of their hull whereas a giant vehicle would require their entire weight to be supported by relatively small treads and axles?

Anyone got any theories?

They have starting showing Toys R Us adverts that I remember from years ago. However, I realise that even after all this time I have never been able to decipher one line of the lyrics.

I can hear the first bit fine, then the guy talks for a while, then at the end they play the bit I can't understand. It goes:

********************************** all under one roof,

It's called Toys R Us, Toys R Us, Toys R Us!

The closest I have been able to come is 'There's millions of debris all under one roof' :p

What is she really singing here?