[Richard]

Usually this should be down to a slightly displaced part. For example a memory item not properly seated, or the processor or its fan not fully home, etc. just reseat each item piece by piece before going further.

This does assume that you have fully checked for short circuits below the board and for correct connection of e.g. the video adapter, etc., check, check and check again. Even the power connection to the board can give this sort of trouble if it is not fully home in its connector. The all too usual and understandable reaction is ‘Panic, I’ve broken it.’ while usually you were simply tired and missed some careful step along the way.

Good luck with the fault-finding, initially with the power off!

[Richard]

Bob, you are right, this year has been one for every rose aspiring to become an astronaut. Even some normally shorter items have grown taller than usual including, but by no means limited to, a couple of bush-rose cuttings I made several years ago. I have made a small but more determined foray into the world of taking cuttings this year. I have dabbled in the past rooting bits of geranium or probably more accurately pelargonium, via roses, chrysanthemums and now rosemary. At least these are all low level activities, no step ladder required. The rosemary mother plant is possibly about 20 years old now and having read that they usually only live for about 10 years, cannot stand the cold, need restricted water supplies, etc. I guess it is living on borrowed time. It has become a bit over sized and having large amounts of ‘old wood’ it is unlikely to deal well with hard pruning. They only regrow from recent growth sections and not from older wood parts. It is possibly now close to 5~6 feet tall and 6 feet wide, so it is not a tidy little potted plant. If the cuttings take I may aim for the more modest form by regular clipping and perhaps culinary use of the clippings.

I had my MRI last night, thank goodness I could get comfortable as I was in the machine for a long time. I did not check the time but it was something like 40~45 minutes. The only issue was getting up after the scans had been run, that took me several minutes before I could lumber off zigzag fashion, to get changed.

[Richard]

Yes they are starting to look far more interesting and leave Intel in the shade these days. Both their CPU and their GPU lines are an up tick and their micro code appears to have avoided being blessed with the attack vectors Intel have collected. Clearly there are interesting times ahead.

[Richard]

Correction, it was a pole pruner, not the lopper that I used and though I took off multiple dozen dead heads, when I came in I could see there were still more that leered at me. Still, there is a new day tomorrow.

[Richard]

Leather straps and my wrists not go well together; they tended to rot out in short order in the past. The metal strap on my present watch has however lasted pretty well since the mid 1970s. It does have some adjustments but appears to be on the last notch at the moment, so would need a link added to make it larger. I suspect my wrist has expanded since I bought it about 47 years back, though when I lost weight a while back, even my wrist slimmed down a bit.

[Richard]

I am now in trouble using any step unless they come with hand rails, so I can go for three or four stability points. It’s due to spinal issues,  the signals telling me how well my legs are set get lost, (balance is not all down to the ears). I have an MRI later today; for the moment the step ladder is out of the question unless I can fit it with hand rails and a harness! Even then I would lack confidence. If I turn too quickly, I loose visual stabilisation; I have fallen obeying Newton’s gravitational discovery a few times, so far with only bruising and no breakages. It is a bit limiting to put it bluntly; the lopper should be a practical tool as I should be able to limit my head movement and lean against a chair back for added stability. It is worth a try to keep the rose flowering well.

Like you Bob, I like the colour and vigour roses bring to a plot and yours are clearly doing their thing with you. Some of mine are approaching 30 years and the end of their life, but others are really doing quite well and flourishing. I fear they have all had much the same treatment, with periods of neglect and periods of care cross playing with each other. I am targetting increased care, but…

[Richard]

Bob, I know what you mean about dead heading roses, I should do the one on the right in this picture, but it is somewhere between 6 and 9 feet above the ground and I have huge problems with that sort of reach these days. I have just remembered that I do have a pole pruner that I might be able to use; they tell me there might be another day tomorrow. I should try to get those old heads off as it did possibly the best ever show it has given this year and will now be wasting energy on seed heads that no one wants.

Anyway the point of the picture is that a few weeks ago I wrote about working on the rose arch and the pink/red rose on the left was the beneficiary of that attention. It is not yet in full bloom; I am hoping for some further blooms to make its show a little more complete, perhaps I shall have to wait for next year’s performance. I can see a lot of new growth so the promise is there.

The job on the tumble drier was not in the normal filter area, that is cleared after every use; this was a strip down variety of action with a torch and probes exploring its inner workings. I should do it more frequently in the future; it is a gas machine so at least the interlocks did what they should do in stopping it lighting when it was not happy.

[Richard]

Or perhaps not so soft with BA whose show of other people’s privates has got the GDPR folk hopping mad, with a proposed pricy bill.

[Richard]

I have had a few LED bulbs fail over time, but the failure rate appears to have tapered off as the LEDs have become more established. The garden ones have all come via Amazon but it did not occur to me to investigate the time before they failed, most were only a few pennies anyway and survived years, rather than the months of other garden bulbs. A few household LEDs have failed, though after several years. The CFLs were far worse, being far from long life. Most of the LEDs have been bought when the old tungsten lights fail, even though I have about a 50 years supply of spare tungsten bulbs! Probably half of the in situ tungsten bulbs were put in when we moved in 27 years ago and have yet to be replaced, I now replace them in sets if one fails, mobility is becoming an issue, so I just hope that the LEDs last at least as long as the old tungsten ones.  Often the LEDs came from whoever had a sale when the humour took me; I bought on prices, pure and simply. With some rooms having as many as 10 bulbs in their ceiling fittings, costs and physical challenges can mount up, so price drives me.

[Richard]

Interesting, sometimes people forget there are real human being at work in the services. This is a good reminder that like other ‘services’, they need their ‘down time’.

[Richard]

Ed P wrote:

My mate who was a security professional of the ‘bang shoot dead’ variety stated that security always has to be appropriate to the task. Lock something down 100% and the insiders will start to break open the security and normally in ways that makes them or the installation harder to protect. By definition this also meant that it was necessary to detail the task and the malefactors.

I tend to agree with most of that statement, though I am not sure it is always essential to detail the malefactors in less stressful situations. The access to functions is defined by a person’s role, this should have the effect of automatically excluding those who lack that initial pass through the authorisation gate. The problems start to arise when someone’s role should enable them to pass the checks but the system fails to allow them the expected access. Unfortunately this broad definition also includes those who fail to gain control because of the overly complex or trying access methods employed. A bypass then becomes vital.

I have an example of this effect with a little used credit card account that is having the existing on-line access and payment methods withdrawn in favour of a selection of methods I find personally unacceptable. The result will be that I shall be using a cheque payment dropped into the Post Office in the future. I am not sure this increase in cheque use was what they wanted to achieve, but it is the result they have produced.

[Richard]

There is no getting away from it, if You want to get something done, security is an obstruction, but if you want to stop someone else misusing your set up, security is essential. The arrival of one the pretty amazing new stuff (PANS) things generates the desire to just make-it-work is often pandered to by those who seek only user satisfaction and a lack of user complaints of difficulty getting things started.

I agree that this is most acute with home gismos but even in a work situation security is often seen as ‘the enemy’. Almost no one wants to think about ‘what could go wrong and how to stop it happening.’ On another site there has been a row over the idea of outsourcing some software design to a poor chap in a shack in India on minimum pay as some thought it implied that the chap in a shack was dedicated to only turn out sloppy work. In fact the device builder was dedicated to doing the least possible for the lowest price achievable. They wrote the specification – there was a specification I trust, (a lesson for Boeing somewhere in there) but it will not have included any very meaningful references to a security module in most cases. Do not all put your hands up at once, but how many have come across shared use of logins and passwords. Or even the idea that the most deadly levels of access were assigned to the most senior persons on site, even though they would never understand the access implications and never use the access anyway, it was then shared with most of the staff who had some rudimentary need or understanding. So much for audit rails in those cases!

So Dave I agree, so until the OEMs either decide or are forced to decide to wake up and do something at least minimally sensible with their (hopefully) included security modules no one else can or will ever make the necessary changes.

[Richard]

My wife is usually the one to watch the Glasto broadcasts but this year commented that she was very disappointed. On Saturday I sat through part of the performance by the Killers;  though they changed the title of their song it appeared to always be the same one. I went for a bath, and they were still on the same song when I returned, though they had changed its name several more times and the light had changed as darkness fell, so it was not on a loop tape.

[Richard]

It is not quite fair to accuse anyone of leaking. It appears that the concern is present in the UK and was being discussed in 2018. It has again been raised in the past few days, with the British Veterinary Association (BVA) “This is a complex scientific issue that may involve multiple factors, though the overarching link appears to be grain-free diets.” I am unclear why the fad for grain free should have caught on, since dogs, foxes and wolves have been eating a variety of grains alongside other food sources since before there really were any things resembling modern dogs.

[Richard]

Dave, to put it another way; the only bad back up system is the one you should have used when you had the chance.

[Richard]

A real incentive was to escape the future rapacious demands of the USA tax people who demanded an outrageous sum when he sold a UK based house. The USA has some ‘unusual’ expectations, if you have the misfortune to be born in the USA, even if you did not remain there for more than a few moments you automatically become a citizen and tax payer. Thank goodness our children were not born there but in Japan who have no truck with such nationality and territorial out reach games. Apparently he left the USA when aged 5 or 6 but since the UK does not tax home sales, he could not offset any UK liability against USA tax demands on the sale.

He was of course a politician before the renunciation of his secondary nationality. Renunciation is a costly and time-consuming process with a bundle of USA tax to pay.

[Richard]

I agree on the scorpions, apparently some small ones were worse than the larger ones. Though, whether this was because the bigger ones were easier to spot than the tiny ones was not something that I ever wanted to put to the test. It was cooler here yesterday though it was an indoor day apart from cutting the grass in the morning using the new mower to ensure that it worked, it did and it ‘just cut the grass’. This was a remark worthy innovation as the old mower preferred to plough up the grass rather than cut the darned stuff. It has been down graded to hedge cuttings collection service.

I really hate having to sort out plumbing issues. We have had a dripping drinking water tap and though I bought the inserts to upgrade them, it resisted all attempts to remove the works to allow them to be changed. This called for plan B, replace the unit. However, it is at the back of the kitchen worktop in a sort of triangular spot behind the sink, squashed against the wall and the side of the cabinet, so it is a right pig to access. It is not the first time that I have had to change the hardware, but all previous attempts have caused hours of stress and colourful language. History can be a teacher and this time I was prepared. Yesterday’s plumbing battle was over and done within half an hour, including correcting a weep from a nicely accessible plastic compression connection. Now it drips no more.

I am trying to replace the lawn’s victim areas from last summer’s roasting with the green stuff using grass seed but with limited success so far. Transplanting removed bits of a neighbour’s building project has been far more successful, but the excavation phase of their job is done and dusted so no more transplants. I shall use the remains of the grass seed packet and if this is not successful I shall get some turfs inserted in the autumn.

The rose arch project has been almost completed, about 20 years late but well under budget and in time for the rose to start flowering perhaps later this week. The delay was down to a planning disagreement; sounds like a government project does it not? That issue was happily resolved to the comfort of both parties, with SWMBO now agreeing that it adds visual framing and interest, rather than obstructing a view. I am hopeful that this year the flower show will be greatly improved.

[Richard]

I guess you are referring to the ongoing disputes over the use of guards as seat warmers now that they no longer have to hand crank a wheel to apply the coach’s brakes as they once did. It is but one battle in a long history, take ticket offices for example. I understand that currently well over 90% of the increasing numbers of passengers do not use a ticket office, yet the unions demand to have fully staffed ticket offices and fight against mixed use staff or horror of horrors close or reduce the size of ticket offices, perhaps making some mixed use with other retail functions. I accept that ticket machines are a pile of crap at the moment, though to be honest I avoid using them and did use a ticket office on the three occasions in the past six months that I used a train. Had a good, reliable, intelligible ticket machine or online option existed I might well have used that method, reducing still further, (by 12 tickets, they were return journeys) the number of tickets sold.

I am not going to defend either side in this mess neither are worth the time of day. They are in a hostile environment right from the off, having to listen to the sad depressing dirge of you must have a ticket or pay a penalty fare, blah, blah, blah after every station made me want to scream. The problem of fare evasion may be a real one, but treating every prisoner sorry passenger as a thief in waiting, does not make the experience the slightest bit better. This has been the case for long before the time of your favourite whipping boy Greyling. He is not the managers or the union reps though he does have to try to control the costs. Expensive fares only cover part of the cost; subsidies, (explanation, yours and my taxes) make up the rest. ‘The Government‘ does not have any money except for the taxes extracted from every tax payer and in the case of this one, I want value for money, don’t you? I cannot see it anywhere near on the horizon in either the railways or that other loss-leader the NHS where legacy restrictive practices rule the cost base and woe betide anyone who rocks that boat. Oh, before anyone suggests I would like to see it privatised that is not what I am seeking; but some better cost management, improved training where needed and improved, not increased management with less empire building would be a fine starting point.

[Richard]

Sadly the folly of unions demanding excess jobs long predates your whipping boy Greyling. Trains that were designed to have a driver only in the cab as they did in most of the rest of the world when they moved away from steam. British rail forced the design to have a three man team because otherwise the fireman and stoker would not have anywhere to go for example. So the over manning and waste has a long, bitter and expensive history in our reviled railways. Tis a shame in my mind that dinosaurs on all sides neither listened cared nor wanted to advance the system to be future fit and fully functional, so it is still best suited to generating arguments then success.

I do not have the time to dig into the history of the strikes and other miss fires of Crossrail, though I am aware that it misses out on several key stops that many complain should have been included in a real, well planned Crossrail project. I see that it started in 2007 though its planning history can be traced back to 1941 both well before Greyling was anywhere near, so the reference does appear poorly aimed. The earlier stages of the program suggested the American project leader was brought in following her proven track record on other ‘mega’ projects, a status that none based in this country could match. Yes, dealing with the civil service, and the mishmash of unions in the construction industry is a nightmare for anyone stuck with the task. However, she worked through the teams of managers brought in for their specific expertise in various aspects of major project work. No one person could, should, or would control all aspects, good project managers should construct the team below who will make their work look easy. As I hinted before big projects mean big chances for mischief-making and no doubt some took their chance.  I have not seen any great burst of news about such disputes on the civil construction aspects of the project. It is one of the largest rail projects, so perhaps it is no surprise that challenges should be encountered on a grander scale than many were able to appreciate. No doubt there will be even more arguments about automated trains, guards, station sweepers, ticket sellers and the like when things get closer to the start of operation.

Happily I am not likely to have my travel plans go anywhere near the place.

[Richard]

Bob, I do not dispute your distaste for HS2 but remember it was an EU project that was supposed to go even further to tie all parts of the EU together with high speed rail. Cross rail was a different project, designed to provide an in-house need. While it was an expensive London centric project, remember that most of the taxation revenue comes from London, so it is right that there is necessary expenditure to support the milk cow. Where I will agree is that funding of other projects outside London to turn them into money generation and life improved areas is also vital and currently neglected. The sad history of too many projects starts with a fond desire and ends in an expensive mess. In my opinion the rail unions most share the odium insisting on outmoded staffing models for the sake of history, making rail less efficient, rather than urging better planning and execution to benefit both their members and the wider good. In the past the German model has worked rather better to achieve this end, airports excepted! Frankly planning and great management are not our strong hand, but are they anybody’s these days?

I have long held that public, (putrid?) transport is expertly designed to run from where I am not to where I do not want to go, at a price that I do not want to pay. I hate visiting London, though I have done so three times in the past six months riding shot gun for my wife on hospital visits. It is unlikely that we will be repeating the forlorn experience ever again. The level of knife crime and the perception of a crime round every corner made them stress full experiences. I never felt this way when I worked there nearly 20 years ago but now, you can have it as a gift, just do not expect a gift wrap.

[Author]

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