[Richard]

I am surprised at the general level of ignorance shown by most as to the part played in the Second World War by the Polish in all sorts of ways. Their airmen who fly in the RAF were a fierce dedicated bunch determined to avenge their country. Perhaps because I went to school with children of some of those who fled Poland a few years before or because I read a great deal in the past, much of the more recent ‘news stories’ sound very stale, albeit with a few snide snipes added. I had always understood that a number of Eastern Block countries had built their security organisations from ‘hand-me-downs’ from earlier times. We used our knowledge to listen in to the communications networks that had been tapped, one interception facility was built by the Americans using UK hardware to confuse investigators when it was inevitably traced and found.

Interestingly, when I was studying the performance of ‘rest homes’, the Poles appeared to run some of the very best available in the UK, but you had to have good connections with Polish war time service to be admitted.

[Richard]

This does not appear out of the way if you are really worried https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharpsguard-Sharps-Bin-litre-Yellow/dp/B002ZGQ8IA

To be honest I have usually put the bits of blades from those that trim of quarter of an inch segments or the full final segment in the disposal waste bin NOT the recycling. I see others use a sharps bin or ask a friendly medical centre to slip them into their sharps bin We have one on the go at the moment but I am not open to running a commercial venture on the basis of medical need.

A modelling club might have a suitable waste scheme set up and might be able to help

[Richard]

I missed the details of the direct target, BT / OR are always a different story. They approached us about making a length of access via an underground feed, the close agreed and that must have been about 15 years back. Not that they are slow or anything, I was reminded as they were working on the pole yesterday…

[Richard]

You ain’t seen nothing yet, just wait for the next instalment of your broadband and the back burner which has been simmering away on a slow heat – or have things warmed up on either of those two touchy subjects yet?

[Richard]

Bob, I would think you are not only well ahead on points, but also in a different league when the undesirability of the way you got there is considered. It is hard to consider if this was simple hard luck or simple, what?

It is easier to suggest that in spite of it all you have battled back from the medical and non-medical insults to life the first part of your life with some degree of self respect and feeling of success along the way.

Well done for all that.

Now you have only to overcome the sludge traders from the digital obstructors and the housing morons and you will be almost on level pegging with the world – until the next slingshot of misfortune arrives.

[Richard]

That was   major downer, I know what you mean about hands that do not go where you want them to go and never with the care and gentleness you need. An injection in my left worked for a while but recently I can see it slipping back into trigger finger status when it just locks up a finger or two so they are not like the grand old Duke of York, they won’t go up or down.

Those cards always look about to break, but I have not had one go yet, but getting them into some of the mounting slots in some devices is a total pain. Once stressed they will go when provoked, sorry, but well done for succeeding in the end.

[Richard]

All is well now, I guess that is what matters in the medium term. Thank you Lee, sadly the great distributor of goodies gave some goody bags to those without the brain sense to use their gifts.

[Richard]

That is a good point, my daughter’s head phones are not BT but a semi stand-alone system gaining sound from a device but providing the point to point drive from the dedicated base station that also doubles as the charging point. I guess it is a matter of horses for courses. BT is much more limited, even before about 25 feet even on one level and with a wall or two it will likely fail.

[Richard]

Bob, it was all explained in a book, the Petter Principle I think it was called. People advance until they just cross their final fronter of incompetence. In other words when the bull* becomes short supplied they can no longer ride the crest of the wave.

Anyway, hopefully your problems will soon be done and dusted – why do I fear that will not really be the case? Still we can live in hope for you.

[Richard]

My daughter has some Panasonic cans that she is able to wear in several areas of the house when the source machine is upstairs she can come down to the kitchen and perhaps move a little more, a minimum of two or three walls and a diagonal of 30 feet plus. The walls are notorious Wi-Fi killers so the headphone signal must be pretty good. I suspect that is close to the limit for headphones. They are full cans, with rechargeable AAA batteries.

[Richard]

Ed P wrote:

“They simply were not allowed to order spares and certainly no growth ‘spares’ without a long convoluted process to gain authority.” I think you put the finger on one of the major problems that the Civil Service and many other Government organisations face. Throwing systems at a carp manual process is simply a waste of money and adding bureaucratic overhead and reporting rarely improves control . The now almost disused Organization & Methods procedures need to be dusted off and the whole manual process streamlined well before any code is written!

Yes EdP I read over 40 years back, what most business do not need is a computer system, they need a business system.

If any supermarket is still messing about with hand held data checking stock monitors for anything other than stock checks they deserve to fail and do so soon. Neither of the chains are easy to access from home,. The descriptions, (from others) create no desire to try them. I did visit one or the other while on holiday, possibly about 15 years back. Apart from a load of unfamiliar products they were ‘sort of OK’ though hardly customer focussed with a rough and ready slow till. They were conveniently close to where we stayed, but that was all that could be said for them.

[Richard]

Dave Rice wrote:

Automation has been replacing many IT jobs for years. I could upgrade 25,000 Office installs in a managed way inside a week all by myself (same goes for MS updates etc.). It would usually take 2 of us to mop up the failures, in the case of spectacular problems – usually Adobe related – we’d have a task force of 6 – 10 but the need for any physical hands on a box was very rare. It took only 2 of us to manage the AV for the same number of seats and that was mainly because you’d need cover for absence. When I first started it was all hands on. I remember spending all day in Truro installing W95 and Office on 2 PCs via a box of floppies. But then the number of PCs in the organisation was probably measured in (many) hundreds not tens of thousands. Especially when you had to write a fully costed business case to get one!

Back in the mid 1980s I was looking at automated data entry. One task took 4 person weeks to build a 2000 customer record system. Then about 3:00 p.m. I got a call asking if I could do something about  a number of thousands of records that needed to come from one sick setup to a new relief machine ASAP. Including developing and testing I had the first 2000 records live by 21:00 hours that night. With further development work I could load 2000 records synchronised with the stand alone billing records in 2 hours. I guess my development time was less than one week. The error rate fell from about 1% to a decimal with zeros over 25,000 customers. The mind numbing labour reduction was something like 1 person year. There is still a huge potential for such savings in eye-strain and human time wasting.

[Richard]

JayCeeDee wrote:

‘Chopped’

The Marsden issued a booklet to me called “Eating well when you have cancer”. There’s a pdf on the Marsden website. LINK. I found it areally useful reference. Plain advice, no preaching. Hope you find it useful. PS – as you’ll read in the book, you’re not drinking enough water. One consultant told me that more water will help dilute the toxins in the body – I asked him wouldn’t it dilute the treatment also – he didn’t have an answer for me!! However, I’ve been told on several occassions, by several health professionals, that I should drink more water – I still find it a struggle.

If you are having tablets for the treatment the last thing that you want is for them to sit in your stomach so water can be important to stop that from happening. However, most appear to be delivered as infusions that are then fetched out by the kidneys and dumped into the bladder where they or their metabolites may not be what either the kidneys or the bladder most desire so, according to my wife’s oncologist they are best flushed away ASAP as they have done their work by the time they end up in kidneys or bladder. He advocated rather more water than my wife still drinks though probably less than I take on board on a usual day. I am surprised that your person was less than ready with a usable answer as it appears fairly straight forward to me. In fact with some of the infusions they also packaged in a litre of saline drip to keep things moving as there was a risk of tissue damage. They had to be intravenous as the blood flow helped to cushion their impact on the body, if they missed the vein and made contact with nerves or other tissues, the consequences could be dire.

For me a poor day sees about 2~3 litres, but more usually 3~5 litres, which I know is pushing it a bit. Increasing that, should the need ever arise, just might be an issue for me. So far I am just about reaching about 2 litres today, but more to come I am sure.

[Richard]

EdP in one outfit the ledger was seriously not the issue. They simply were not allowed to order spares and certainly no growth ‘spares’ without a long convoluted process to gain authority. We used to buy stuff on what was either our slush fund or petty cash for them on loan to overcome their process delays. Mind you some boards were  bit on the pricey side when they failed at tens of thousands of pounds each, but some of them were covered by a (human intervention) swap repair maintenance agreement. The major issues are not with the political class but with the two brain dead sides of industry who cannot see any point in preparing for change until after the factory gates close one last time.

[Richard]

That Bob is the real issue with the NHS not enough of the right skilled staff when you need them*. That is certainly interesting stuff about the NHS Dietitian, none has ever been offered to either of us for any reason, though about 20 years ago our eldest did see one, once.

Apart from grapefruit and its juice and broad beans for other medicines, that has been about all the controls for us. We both tend to skirt round the rather dodgy advice columns on dietary foibles. We have eaten wheat for well over half a century without issue, so gluten stays in our diet with only the volume bread being monitored.We knew one, now late friend, who was convinced she was a coeliac, except she has lethal stomach cancer. Tap water has been good enough for years, though we do filter it  to a drinking water tap. Hard water might be related to some things, soft water to to others, I cannot remember the anecdotal accounts. Neither of us have had any alcohol since Mid may when I had my thing dug out of by nose and my wife started chemo, (only two more sessions before the operation). That is probably a good dietary step since we had started  to find glasses (oops be honest) the bottles a bit small. Different subject, the latest dietary discovery is that our boarding dogs think their meal is greatly improved by the addition of chopped broccoli and cauliflower. They leap up from sleeping and clear the veg perhaps leaving the odd trace of dog food. Meal sizes have varied for my wife with a general swing in favour of fruit and a reduction in vegetable with the meal. I think this is partially because the fruit is outside of the meal slot and can be grazed on demand. She can only allow a limited intake at many sittings. Unfortunately there has been some sort of reaction, cause unknown which cause discomfort and profuse sweating. That is currently under investigation, she is also reacting to every type of sticky thing used to anchor the PICC line.

*I said before about the ‘skilled NHS worker’ who could only load one sample at a time into an automated culture incubator when the machine should do 40 sample batches, because ‘that was all she could manage’.

[Richard]

No EdP I do not accept your always looking on the dark side of everything. I accept that farriers are now relatively rarely used and horse troughs likewise are more useful for feeding flowers than watering horses, in short change happens. I read several accounts of Mr Haldane’s comments and none aligned with your superficial dismissal of his comments. I read accounts of a speech that sounded a real and sensible warning that time is running out. Likewise you are too exercised by the tiny coterie of eye specialist surgeons. We are currently crap at diagnosing and, more to the point successfully treating many eye problems so there is huge scope for improvement in that area. Current eye treatment hardware is not given away with the cornflakes it is unlikely to ride a tide of new, ‘just for fun’ developments. I remember accounts of the child who had their cancer discovered by accident because a lay person simply noticed the asymmetry of the poor kids eyes in a photograph. They lived after an operation(s) but had it been a few weeks later they might have been suitable just for organ donation. For this reason even with new machinery I see a vanishingly small chance of eye specialist surgeons disappearing any time soon. Steve is very right in my opinion and sets out the same model for low level screening I advocate in the High Street ‘buy some specs people’, not to specialists set above and behind the front row shock troops. It was to the specialists such as surgeons I was referring when I spoke of small and subpar numbers (not quality), perhaps in the low thousands, maybe even less. Perhaps properly feed with screened patients both costs and effective results would improve.  In a way professionals or even educated clerical types have less to worry about, I always found the ready to adapt and retrain.

I found I was unable to relate in any way to your casual assessment to the idea of the self discarding AI robot that could summon a replacement off the next cargo cult shipment. It will take people to test, order replacements including doing the (electronic) ‘paperwork’ via a new series of chains.

We killed the railways by clinging to passé steam, the ship building industry with yards that were too small and relied on rivets, to coal when its problems were already obvious. With attitudes like those seeping out from your hand I feel you wish to chase the wrong dragons.

Part for ‘force majeure’ neither my wife nor I have used a ‘traditional’ high street in years, to us they are as much the present day as the horses and carts, they are past it and suitable only for a museum, far away. We need to run with a new future seeking model not tied to the anchor chains of Luddite tendencies.

[Richard]

I read Mr Haldane’s comments along with his reference to those fields employing numbers rather than any other aspects when referring to the possible employment effects.

I would be very surprised if there are many eye specialists to be affected by any change. There is already a backlog of action at the moment due to the shortage and costs of skilled staff with the ability to deal with current issues. Unless you are prepared to pay you will often go close to blind with easily treated conditions before you get treatment. The eye specialist still monitored the work done on my eyes, though he was likely one of a smallish number of specialists – by small I doubt that there are more than a low thousands, hence the wait lists. Mine commented that the cycle time for new techniques and hardware was often as little as three months, though he avoided the more bleeding edge methods as he had seen them come and fail in the past.

In contrast Airfreight employs 137,800 people according to the best data I could find, many of them are in the ‘pile ’em high sell ’em cheap’ jobs Steve wrote about. Some jobs will touch other transport means so there will be inevitable double counting, but there must be at least the same again in other versions of the logistics industry, airfreight is small compared to shipping and road haulage. Just look at the road transport effort involved in flinging food about the country. A likely total would likely exceed 300,000 so even 10% of that would be a lot of impact. There must be richer pickings to be had anywhere that uses big numbers of bodies. Postal sorting was a manual activity, it really is no longer and neither is a lot of other logistics. Harvesting and gathering are crying out for some automation relief of their drudgery as fewer people want to freeze their vitals off in the cold wet and often dark fields of night-time work.

A heratic’s thought, who will build, service and repair these support worker robots? Other autonomous robots?

[Richard]

I had to stop writing last night, I had another of the rare but disrupting ocular migraines, which this time was followed up by quite a long time when I could barely string two words together that made sense. Hopefully I am a little better today.

I do already have a 5 port gigabyte switch sat next to the router for the additional ports. This is in part to serve a 100 Mb switch in the lounge with one PVR and several wired devices – so much more reliable than the Wi-Fi. It also serves several switches upstairs, some of which are slower speed devices serving printers and lower speed computers, but one 8 port Gb switch also serves the server (8TB storage) as well. To give extended Wi-Fi coverage I have recycled a couple of old routers as part switch, part AP as the walls are not very good at letting signals pass. One serves an Amazon Fire stick via Wi-Fi as well as a wired PVR in probably the most distant spot from the main router. Because of the various redeployed routers (2), several print servers (3), the DHCP has been set up to allow reserved address ranges for different functions. We currently have three Mobiles all of which use the Wi-Fi, though they are only used in parts of the house but need good Wi-Fi coverage. The portables all use 2.4GHz but wired is so much superior in many ways, especially for back ups and updates. My wife’s mobile can use Wi-Fi calling but I have yet to set that up, it should help with the otherwise crap mobile signals we get at home.

Because it has all grown over a number years it has become complex and would probably benefit from a total rework, but I do not want the work at the moment. The ubiquity sounds an interesting upgrade route should/when/if the time comes, that plus with Wi-Fi calling for my wife’s mobile, it should improve things and keep her doctor’s calls from getting cut off so often!

So thank you Dave for your help, interest and guidance to date.

[Richard]

Yes you are right, it is certainly more than fast enough for internet by a wide margin, it is just the PC backup and interconnect with local devices.

I am still wondering what I will do; one benefit for fibre connection is that it allows also additional capacity for my wife’s and my mobiles phones should we ever do much with them when out. However, neither currently use more than a tiny proportion of our existing capacity so it might not be worth while.

[Richard]

Keeping well away from the original topic, it now appears that my existing devices are less promising than I hoped. One has gigabyte ports, but its fibre handling is no longer on spec, the other has, or appears to have the fibre capability, but falls short in the port department with slow 100 GB ports only. So it is wet towel and dark room time to decide if I want the hassle of change or not. The stand alone modem looks the more tempting offer if I do jump, though the internet speed gain might not be all that worthwhile, would there be a great benefit from a three times data rate? I am not sure.

However, thank you Dave for helping me to firm up my thought processes.

[Author]

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