[Dave Rice]

No meat in Lidl so I went to the online butcher we use for Xmas. 6 kg of diced meat for stews and curries, a couple of beef joints, 3 trays of sausages and 1kg smoky bacon will be delivered on Friday. They’re predominantly a catering butcher (no shop) so I don’t know how long they’ll be able to stay open.

Some batch cooking action over the weekend I think.

[Dave Rice]

Things are moving very quickly, lots of panicky calls from the small businesses I look after re working from home. One small accountancy practice is in a shared office building and the landlords have said they could be forced to shut down at little notice.

I have moved them all into the cloud, most have their own private clouds via Synology NAS boxes, so it’s not going to be too difficult. Draytek routers help too as they can take any ISP connection known to man (and / or a 4G dongle) and dynamic DNS means we can just lift up the office infrastructure and drop all or parts of it elsewhere. This means no reconfiguration of VPNs and drive mappings and any PC going elsewhere just need a VPN client installing.

I just hope the ISP infrastructure can cope and am thankful I went down the Synology route rather than MS Teams which by all accounts is struggling. Probably too much video conferencing!

[Dave Rice]

It worked a treat but I’d forgotten how much I hate George Formby.

[Dave Rice]

Nolan, our surgery has been like this for the last year, apart from the physically locking the door.

All first contact is via a browser form and a clinician will phone or email you back as appropriate. If you need a face to face consultancy you will get one that day, much better than before. I’ve only needed to visit for the annual blood tests.

I get my repeat meds via patient access with most of them being managed by Boots for me. Any new one off meds, like when I had eye problems, automatically go to Boots and I get a text. As my Tramadol depends on use I deal with the repeat via the Patient Access website and again it goes to Boots, but I give it 5 days to process. When I was working away in Portsmouth they didn’t object when I ordered early.

[Dave Rice]

Just change the choice of crash out location and you have Percy’s day. This is after waking up the food providers at sparrow fart and before the evening meal and stroll outside (weather permitting). It’s a hard life.

[Dave Rice]

I’m afraid over reaction is rife. My daughter is on her way home from Bangor University which has stopped all face to face teaching for the rest of the academic year. Details of how they will be teaching online has not been made clear. I would expect a University to be able to organise some sort of confernecing but I’m not holding my breath. If Railbookers can manage this to sell me rail holidays…

Where the foreign students are going I have no idea. Staying in halls / rented accommodation I would expect as they won’t be flying home even if they are European (Bangor has a huge Chinese contingent, ask @SGB).

She and her mates have been winding themselves into a frenzy in the last 4 or 5 days with 24 / 7 news on 24 / 7 I have told her I’m fed up of her bombarding us on the phone and WhatsApp but have been accused over being complacent.

In contrast, #2 son went to Prague on the weekend of 1st then up into the mountains skiing. He got caught in the cancellation of Czech flights, but one of the resort managers was a Brit who was due to go back as well, so they drove to Krakow (3 to 5 hours depending on where he was) to get the last Ryanair flight back to Manchester (Dan lives in Leeds) as Poland shut it borders too. Ryanair have been brilliant about tickets and he’s actually quite pleased he didn’t have to drag up from Stanstead. No drama, he WhatsApp’d his siblings with the outline of the plan and phoned us yesterday after he was back home.

Back to Bangor, Harriet lives in rented accommodation and rent will still have to be paid. What are Student Finance going to do re loans? The house will be empty of people but full of things like computers and bulky possessions. If I was a Bangor tea leaf I know where I’d be looking and everyone knows where the local student houses are, especially in a small place like Bangor.

Bangor itself is going to suffer; population of 18,808 at the 2011 census, including around 10,500 students all of whom buy locally, even if it is only alcohol and pizza. Will the foreign students be back in the autumn, especially if Brexit turns nasty?

[Dave Rice]

How would that work?

[Dave Rice]

There is no detail in anything. How do you isolate a child? You cannot throw them in a room and lock the door like we’ll be doing with OAPs 😉

I am still clueless how I can get any help should I get into financial difficulties. Thankfully the wife works for the Post Office so a regular wage shouldn’t be an issue.

What about testing? How do you know you had Covid-19 when you were isolating? Are you now immune? Surely that would be a good thing to know for lots of reasons.

“Lets make ventilators” shows how bad things really are. They do not have a clue about how the world works. They clearly hadn’t sought any advice from anyone who could actually do it. I see the Germans got their order in quick, where were we?

In 6 months time there is going to be a reckoning and those governments that cocked it up are going to be in real trouble. Time will tell where BoJo and his mates are going to end up on the zero or hero scale but remember we are the herd, not them.

I any die hard Brexiteers think we’re leaving on the latest schedule I’d think again.

[Dave Rice]

Just seen this:

AN URGENT MESSAGE FROM YOUR POSTMAN.

From Tomorrow if you receive a parcel or something to sign for, the Postie will knock and retreat 2 metres and wait until you collect the item before walking away.

If the item requires a signature, they will ask for your name and sign it as “Covid 19”.

This has been put in force across the country to protect everyone from the Coronavirus and help prevent the further spread.

Please be kind to your Postie, they don’t think you have the virus and they are just doing their jobs.

Please help them by staying at your door.

[Dave Rice]

Got there just before 10 and Tesco was very busy (opens at 9:30 for browsing) with long queues at the checkouts. But, whilst everyone seemed to have 1 pack of bog roll, I could see no sign of stupidity and most, like us, just had a small trolley and were doing top ups.

Big boxes were popular but only 1 per product. The woman in front of me will probably explode her lower intestine by the end as her trolley had a dozen cans of baked beans and a dozen tins of kidney beans and other Mexican ingredients including 4 fajita kits. She had a 24 pack of bog roll though 😆

Shelves were full and long date items were the order of the day with the meat aisles full of product but empty of people. We did manage to get the eggs Sainsbury didn’t have yesterday and Sir Percy of the Bed has his supply of favourite cat chow guaranteed for the next 4 weeks (we always buy a months worth as it’s on offer in that quantity).

Having a milkman may turn out to be a good move as they can deliver me fruit and veg as well as the full range of dairy products and everyday things like bread. Not cheap, but I use them to support the local farms rather than the supermarket and the veg quality is in another league.

[Dave Rice]

Off to get some cat food soon as Salisbury yesterday didn’t have the brand His Majesty prefers 😀

I fully intend to “do a Bob” if I see any idiot with a trolley full panic buys.

[Dave Rice]

Out if interest I looked at some threads on this elsewhere. Hilarious. People talking about cameras strapped to shelves and bar codes needing to be orientated so they can be scanned when removed / inserted on shelves. The usual over engineering.

I once tried keeping a list of my spares box / cupboard, total waste of time. The effort of keeping it up was worse than just eyeballing the contents when needed. I have a reasonable idea what’s in there and that’s proved good enough. But as Boris has found out, sometimes I need a day or two 😊

[Dave Rice]

I’m not hugely worried, it’s just to keep the dust out of your mouth and nose if you have to look up when cutting. We should be able to go downwards and if not it’s bandanna time.

[Dave Rice]

I know of no way to pre-pay for a parcel to an unknown address besides buying stamps. I can’t see how there could be.

[Dave Rice]

I need a dust mask as to finish off the sound system job (we have to cut 3 x 270 mm holes in a ceiling). Not one to be had at trade counters anywhere in Bristol. We can probably attack it from above, but what a PITA this all is.

I’m trying to get jobs moved forward by the customers as I don’t think it’ll be long before everything dries up. Already CCTV camera shipments from China have been much reduced. Those with big bank accounts are soaking up stock from the distributors.

There’s going to be a lot of businesses going bust. I’ve already heard of “accounts dept closed due to corona virus, so no invoices being paid”. I’ll bet they’re not using that excuse to the landlords and utilities suppliers.

In that light what help are we going to get? Eff all I expect.

[Dave Rice]

I doubt it. Windows picks up from the key and installs the appropriate version. But why use home when you have paid for pro?

[Dave Rice]

I bought a card wallet with RFID blocking purely because my old one wore out and I thought I might as well. If you don’t have one get two enabled cards, they interfere with each other something rotten. The more cards the more the interference.

The one I bought will be 5 years old soon and still looks like new. It cost a bit more but I bought it for the now proven longevity rather than the RFID blocking.

[Dave Rice]

I think it’s OK. As well as capacity there is single / double sided to consider in the “supported” mix.

[Dave Rice]

My Ubuntu servers are all set to automatic security updates and so far so good. You do need to login now and again to check for reboots and of course other updates.

[Dave Rice]

Contention means MT have oversold their product. Virgin do that around here.

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