[Richard]

Wow you are very trusting and generous Dave, but I do not feel able in all conscience feel able to accept. Still the other part of your comment gave some good advice about trying to plot signal strength. Perhaps that way I can find the key reasons of the building murdering WiFi signals over the next couple of weeks.

[Richard]

Wow, that is a name that I had largely forgotten about since I was last in that area, Brent, my goodness.

I see it is quite a big area wrapping up many other names; Wembley was not the top area back in the late 60’s/early 70’s though the area round Willesden Green is far cleaner and greener on Google than I ever remember it being in the flesh. The bones of many of the buildings I remember are still there, but the whole nature of the place, the shops and the style of the place evokes no echoes in my mind. I guess I did not belong there nearly 50 years ago and I don’t now. Mind you, I have no plans to return there, there would be no reason for me to even visit.

I heard Dave’s lament about today. Back then I faced the prospect of endless quest and no easy way to buy a house and settle. I had to make my own luck and, when an overseas job came up, I grabbed my shovel and dug my escape tunnel to overseas shores. Now, I don’t really belong anywhere; I am a tax paying pensioner alien, destined to remain as such till the sands of my time run out.

[Richard]

I too also suffer from walls and quite possibly ceilings that are about Wi Fi hostile as possible. I have put in three APs and some Powerline equipment to overcome the issue. Wi Fi is almost limited to the room with the AP. My latest router claims to be ‘very powerful’  yet its coverage really only extends to one or two adjacent rooms. I am reluctant to try the expensive Ubiquiti, though I noted that the preference is to install it below, rather than above the ceiling. Some modern materials may include foil for improved thermal performance, other items may include materials with similar impacts.

[Richard]

I had been scheduled for that procedure at 10:00 hours with another different one in another hospital at 14:00 hours. Delays pushed action back until well gone 12:00 hours , so a 2 hour sedation recovery before being moved would have blanked out my afternoon procedure, so Hobson’s choice ruled my life again.

If Ed’s assessment of the sedation is correct, then do take the option unless force majeure rules your life too. (I also abreact to some sedatives, I go ‘active shambling happy drunk’ and so does at least one of our children on the wrong one! A ‘recovery time’ is thus essential.)

[Richard]

Good luck, my wife and I have had a few of those. Direct through the mouth or up the nose and down again, though at least one of those was to look inside a lung. Worthwhile as it found an infection. My wife has a hiatus hernia which causes her problems and all they every do is comment that it has grown, though a speech therapist, (I kid you not, they deal with such matters) gave her excellent advice about swallowing.

The stomach person I saw ruled out colon cancer, thank goodness, but also said my BMI was 32, in May. It is currently 24… so I might want to raise a glass or two that shortages of skilled people exist.

I have declared UDI and dropped a couple of items, one of the blood pressure pills and Naproxen in an effort to manage a range of stomach and other issues. So far the benefits are not obvious, but the BP appears to be holding steady for the moment. I have been put on a ‘waterworks’ tablet some of whose undesirable effects overlap those of a BP tablet and I could do without a double does of issues.

If you opt for sedation for your procedure you should not drive for at least 24 hours I was told. I did not have the sedation but that was for other reasons than the shorter recovery.

[Richard]

I pretty much agree with you @Speedly, though for that to be possible you do need a dynamic market and that can be where a market maker does something valuable. You will only buy or sell if the market is moving your way and by publishing a price the market maker creates a more open market place where, in theory anyone can chose to buy or sell. Some people have to sell at a point in time, a tax bill is due, there is something that needs replacing or fixing, they are distress sellers who need the cash now. By creating a moving market the market maker makes that sale possible. If you @Speedly wanted to buy or sell something but did not want the commission or hassle of a market maker you could chose to do so by dealing directly with the other party. Since these are not securities you do not need any form of official sale, though if you make too much money HMRC might want a share of the loot.

There is no real reason to either buy or sell such ‘intangible goods’ the market runs only on sentiment, if the sentiment is favourable, the price will rise partially to garner headlines and hopefully attract buyers. If sentiment falls and becomes negative, the price will fall, and may fall sharply leaving holders, including market makers,with over priced or potentially worthless stock. History is littered with examples, The South Sea Bubble, The Black Tulip, the Wall Street Crash, etc., in most cases, ordinary customers lead the rout. This is why, ultimately it is the customers who set the market, even if the sentiment that leads them by the nose is partially generated by market movers including those infamous Twitter bods, more used to pushing dodgy diets or expensive cosmetics.

The most dangerous market price mover of the lot is a rumour; that then causes a stampede, the old shout of fire in a crowded place, is a good example.

[Richard]

Ed, you were very nearly right. According to The Register the problem came about because of some rather dim witted web site design that all owed code to be sucked in from Feedify to satisfy a desire for statistics on an area of the site that should have been secure. No need to guess where Feedify are said to come from. Apparently many other sites have also been jiggered by the same problem that the hosting site have been unable to stamp out, perhaps their customers should become ex-customers with all haste. Only secure applications code should deal with security requiring transactions, external code from outside parties does not appear to cut the 2018 mustard.

[Richard]

Essentially the gamblers do. If you decide that you want say a nibble coin for £100 that is your offer price, if someone accepts the bid that becomes the spot price for a nibble coin. However if demand rises you may well find that the prices offered also rise in this respect it is like any other item. The problem is that the nibble coin is not backed by anything that can be used to justify its value, so if demand slumps than its price will also fall. today you offer £100, tomorrow you might get back 10p or nothing, or a lot more. So it is with all of these offerings. They are a gamble and sometimes gambles pay off if a strong enough reason emerges for the items in question to continue their existence, the nibble coin does not fit that profile!

Others will suggest I am being too hard on the concept, it is for you to listen to as many inputs as you feel able to collect and process. Then you must decide what to do with your money, I cannot, nor will not try to colour your view.

[Richard]

Dave, I can only agree though I was never outsourced as such I can recognise those symptoms of an outfit in terminal decline/forced destruction. In the end I only kept going in because it was so much per year on the pension for every day I was ‘working’. I knew I was close enough to retirement that redundancy would buy most of the time I lost when the chopper fell. Combined with the time and saving in travel costs I felt I was looking at a better bargain.

In the case of BA, it is still not at all clear quite where the problems happened, though the radio reports at lunch time were pretty clear. Rather belatedly they knew all was not well after the problem had existed for a fortnight. The indications were that they knew what software had been used to manage the extraction, its location and possibly its entry route. Outsourcing may well not have been the prime root of their difficulty, hints were dropped that a supplier or other associate might have some hard questions to answer.

I am no fan of dodgy outsourcing, the outsourcer who became very involved with parts of the outfit for whom I worked went bust indicating how well they knew their business. In one case I realised the documentation for some of their kit, (they were a once large scale hardware builder) was plain out wrong, so my area avoided the problems they had ‘supporting’ another business. For some reason I did not explain the error to them, one bit of job satisfaction was briefly retrieved.

[Richard]

Thank you, I used a 14 day trial of EdDraw Max which came close but was (a) expensive for a none regular user and (b) did not appear to have all the symbols I needed. I will give those options a try as it would be very useful to have something available that I could use when needed.

In trying to draw a picture I have also realised that the number of legacy devices might also be pruned. For example one print server has as its main feature the fact that it still has a Centronics port plus two USB ports from days gone by, the A3 printer that it currently connects, could share a USB port on the other server serving a Canon printer for example. However, the mental and physical energy plus time band width to take on extra tasks is currently limited. The issue is coming to a head in the next few days following a planned ISP service upgrade (I hope!) when new router will arrive with its own slew of ‘interesting features’. One issue is the quantity of legacy devices I still hold. The Powerline route uses GB power line devices, though I have not checked their link speed, they currently ‘work’ and that is enough to keep baying hounds away.

At least I have a better idea of my setup for when I make progress with a drawing program.

 

[Richard]

Dave, I admire your drawings of your home networks set up. I installed a copy of a drawing package, (unlicensed and it shows). I had to use a couple of packages to edit and re-edit the output, not so satisfactory in the end. This does give a very rough idea of my layout and the way that I have used a couple of displaced routers to give both extra switch capacity and additional WiFi APs. The house is longways with several blockwork internal walls through which WiFi does not really travel. The only way to get the Amazon fire stick to get any signal was to provide it with its own AP, in this case served by a Powerline connection, the same goes for the kitchen, though the PVR has a wired connection. A WiFi AP almost directly above had a rubbish signal so the Powerline replacement was put in place. A while back I did play about with using the WAN port of a discarded router, the results were at best frustrating and very inconclusive. While a second logical network is certainly possible, ISP routers might provide a steep hill to climb. On the other hand, using them as a wired AP is relatively trivial, provided that you disable the unwanted functions and give each ‘AP’ a suitable reserved IP address. It does mean that the mobiles must be set up to understand all three APs and then hope they will select the best available option. They are not moved about much when in use – fortunately.

[Richard]

Ed P wrote:

“That means a sand and varnish on the wood floor, but the wife wants to get someone in to do that!! ” Just one comment John, you may be better to put down some ‘office-style’ carpet tiles as computer chairs play hell with wood floors. (4 square metres should be under £20 – cheaper than getting in a carpenter!)

That is the real truth. Those wheels that sound and look such a good idea are like those on a pipe-cutter that will carve their way through many types of floor. I removed them and used some ‘glide type feet’. Some felt pads have then seriously arrested the rate of wear. This allowed me to do some local refinishing that has lasted about 5 times longer than the chair wheels took to destroy the original finish.

[Richard]

That is a great price.Smaller drives have been dropping recently though I did read talk that even larger capacities might soon drop.

I think the first HD I bought was 5MB, it weighed pounds and cost far more than than one would consider halfway reasonable. Its replacement 10MB was a reasonable buy as I sold on the 5 to a colleague. Both were ‘full height’ 5.25″ drives. As for memory, I found an old anti static case with a price sticker £400 for a few MB, that was only about 25 years ago.

[Richard]

I must admit that the glass sticking to photographs was something that I was warned about many years ago. I came into photography as the old papers were going out of fashion and new resin coated stock was coming in. The old ones used to be glazed by applying them to a heated polished roller as I recall with dire warnings about making sure that the drum was highly polished and totally clean. That was something that I never dabbled with, I arrived as that era was slowly closing and the resin coated papers came in. They were high gloss which made very smooth surfaces which allowed for little chance of air voids, unless they were created by the matt spacing the image from the glass. The issue also arose with printed images, e.g. posters or cuttings from magazines where the very smooth surface of the image would not only easily contact the glass, its surface also appeared to possess the ability to absorb just enough dampness or other stuff from the air to form a bond better than contact adhesive: I cannot now remember the ways that were suggested for recovering cherished images that became stuck, it did depend, then as now on how heavy the image material was. If it was lightweight then ‘don’t touch’ was the order of the day; for heavy weight photo-paper a very thin very sharp razor type blade could, with skill be used to ease the two materials apart. However, the ‘don’t let it happen in the first place’ was probably the only real solution. Once they are stuck, you are in effect stuck, so live with it though a mega expensive expert might be able to help, though perhaps not.

[Richard]

While I can understand the issue with an internal WiFi device not being white listed by the BIOS, external ones are sold specifically to overcome the issues of an inbuilt one failing, being missing  or falling short on performance. I can see no reason why an external USB device should not work, subject only to ensuring that the USB is compatible, (i.e. USB version 2 not version 3). They are quiet inexpensive at >£20 for a range of well known makers. So if you need one to try when the device arrives if the WiFi is too slow, there is good reason to be optimistic. After all you can usually use a USB mouse to bypass a tracker pad should you so wish.

[Richard]

Assuming that you do get the remains off of the glass, remember that images should always have a art card or art paper matt frame with the matt between the image and the glass. The matt is there to give it an image a frame, but more importantly to prevent the glass and the paper coming into contact in future. Otherwise you need a more complex, (i.e. expensive) frame that mounts the glass with an enforced separation.

[Richard]

Not for the first time I can understand all view points. Frankly if your son was KO’d by the accident it not only had the potential to be serious, frankly it was serious and I hope that he is making the recovery you all hope for. Being a hero when there is something to gain is one thing, trying to be a hero when that does not apply is a high risk strategy. I can understand his Mum’s reaction, after years of experience I always remember a colleagues wise words, always dirty their hands and let the other party decide. I will generally pay back a better dividend than keeping silent, which never works out well. I trust that it will continue to turn out well. That was a less good weekend after all.

[Richard]

Sorry Bob, sometimes direct action is the only way to get through to people, though I have to say that ‘our lot’ are generally a fairly good crowd. The lads on the truck do what they can not to miss or mess things up and I have to say that they appear to have some of the best skilled drivers I have seen at work. They never rush where it would be daft to do so and navigate with skill and finesse. Years back it was not the same as our close is quite tucked away and invariably new crews would manage to miss us out – or drive onto a softer area and expose the lack of load bearing capability of water mains, two days later we had a water feature, that no one wanted!

[Richard]

That should hold about the next 150 years of discarded knives for me, can anyone see the slight snag.
Why would anyone be sorting black bag rubbish? The recycling potential of a very few grams of steel is close to zero, already a large amount of ‘recyclable waste’ ends up burned or buried. Stanley knife blades, especially the ‘break a bit off and get a new point’ variety are very, very small beer

[Richard]

tadka wrote:

If it’s carpet you’re after make sure you go to a small local shop if there is one. I saved a few hundred pounds by not going with the Carpetright.

I second the ‘if there is one‘ bit of what you said. You can wear out an awful lot of shoes walking many ‘High Streets’ these days. Then if you find one, will they have anything close to what you would like? In general I found is better to go to a place that has a fitter who will install the carpet within a tenth of the time it would have taken me even in the recent past and they are responsible for any errors. Time things right and buy the underlay as well as the carpet and haggle for a good deal before letting someone else do the hard work. Carpet fell out of popularity a while back, so deals should still be possible in the right store. The only one I know near to us is as far from a high street as it is possible to be. A ‘shed’ at the back of a trading estate might undersell its location. However, that is about what and where it is.

[Author]

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