Posts made by PeterCharles

I am a believer in the UK's National Health Service. It's just that at the moment it's going downhill fast. For example my father-in-law was sent to the local hospital to be checked over for a lung shadow.
We arrived and he was seen within 15 minutes and put in the assessment ward. Various checks were carried out speedily and he was transferred to ward "you'll need a biopsy on your lung".
Alas this is where things started on the downhill slope. He was put under a consultant who after a couple of days "went on holiday" without making any arrangement for the biopsy. Over the next couple of weeks his condition deteriorated. We asked what his treatment was and how he was progressing, but were told to speak to the doctor who was rarely around. I took an afternoon off work to ensure we saw the consultant on his afternoon round. We told the ward sister we wanted to speak with him and she assured us he had started his ward round and we could speak to him when he reached father-in-law. Time drifted on, but yes he knew we wanted to speak to him. Then the registrar came in, sorry the round was taking longer than usual but he would be round to see us. Finally a staff nurse came in to the six bed side ward and announced that the consultant had left and would finish the round the next morning! Oh, did you want to see him, could you come back in the morning. To this day I don't know how I didn't lapse into Anglo-Saxon.

On another visit my wife heard a faint voice from the next bed. The poor old guy had been given his dinner but it had been left out of his reach. Also it was sausages but he wasn't strong enough to cut them up, so she did and moved it to where he could reach. He died a couple of days later.

Shortly after this father-in-law died, although the circumstances were not clear. My wife and son went to visit him and found him dead in his bed. Initially they weren't believed by the ward sister, but then doctors and nurses arrived from everywhere, but to no avail. As far as we were aware he never did have his biopsy. Our letter of complaint was replied to in a half hearted way.

These days I don't worry how the service is funded, only how well it is delivered. Too many institutions are like Fawlty Towers, the patients just get in the way of it's smooth running. Private medicine gives a direct link between the patient and the money, offer crap service and the patient goes elsewhere and there is no money. Public medicine doesn't have that link so those who give crap service get away with it. Nobody gets fired, they're just sent for "more training" which is a cop out. Perhaps that's why there are so many hospital bugs, lack of enforcement of standards.
Visit a NHS hospital and die!

@dermotcoll said:

I am sick of Audi Q7, Range Rover Sports and Land Crusiers blocking roads in the morning because stupid "bints" can't bloody well drive them.

Driving my Fusion along a country lane met a large 4x4 coming the other way. The brain dead female expected ME to pull off the carriageway onto the verge!!!
Needless to say I just sat there in neutral with the handbrake on until she saw sense

I don't think you can beat the Collins/Rossiter Cinzano ads .....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirMZGL-0mQ

Our American cousins always leave me in a state of confusion. While appearing to be a deeply religious country it is also a country that produces vast quantities of "adult entertainment" videos that end up on the internet? (Adult entertainment, a euphemism for pornography)

@alan fraser said:

I think the future of the monarchy might all revolve around how William V performs.

His full names being William Arthur Phillip Louis he'll probably call himself something other than William. How about taking the name Arthur so we can truly have a King Arthur on the throne!

@khai said:

nothing like sportsmanship is there.....and that was nothing like it.

But I knew what you meant

@khai said:

no, confused is ordering 3ft of 10mm plywood... and the shop understanding you... (I used to do that all the time in the UK...and I still do it here in Canada....)

I like to see the positive in everything so it's ambidextrous not confused.

We're not confused, we're just ambidextrous, like Ronnie O'Sullivan playing Snooker.

Maybe one day Apple will launch a product that I can afford with British pounds.

But I'm not holding my breath......

Just sometimes I think "everyone hates America", even their own citizens.

I remember back to when "everyone loved the USSR". A workers paradise, everyone with plenty to eat, wonderful homes, and it was the Nazi's who killed all those Polish officers. But with the passage of time now we know different.

Maybe with the passage of time all will become clear about 9/11, but not yet. And maybe just as some refuse to believe the truth about the USSR, and others don't believe the Nazi's killed millions of Jews (and others), some will always refuse to believe the truth about 9/11 whatever that truth is.

Please correct me if any of the following is wrong -

As I understand it the building was steel framed with most of the main support steel being clad with gypsum wallboard. Other steelwork was protected by spray on coatings.
In the event of a 'conventional' fire I can imagine this being an effective heat protection to the steelwork. But when being impacted with a passenger aircraft full of fuel (do we at least agree that loaded aircraft flew into the towers) I can quite imagine the wallboard and sprayed on coating being blown away. Steel at elevated temperature isn't very strong so without protection it would soon have started to buckle and collapse.

Maybe things would have been different if the steel had been given intumescent coatings as fire protection.

http://www.leighspaints.com/en/Video/Firetex%20for%20Steelwork%20New%20Construction%20and%20Refurbishmentswmv.html

@honoluludesktop said:

If you are a windows pc, use WinMovieMaker to go from avi to wav.

Sorry, I thought there was feature in SketchUp I'd missed.
But why change from an AVI to WMV?

for conversions you might consider this.
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

Excuse my ignorance, but how did you get a WMV from SketchUp, I can only see the option for an AVI ??

@gaieus said:

And of course, lost a gooddozen of colonies due to this "Taxation" (without representation)

Damned American insurgents, we should have fought harder to destroy the insurgency

@tig said:

Making beer was probably originally a way of purifying water [with enjoyable side effects] - it's said that about four pints of 'small beer' was drunk by agricultural workers every day in England, before the industrial revolution: it was about half the strength of current beers but still gave a welcomed boost, and they could be sure that it was 'sterile'...

Latterly the drinking of tea significantly improved the health of the UK population as the water has to be boiling to brew the tea, and tea has anti-septic properties.

I've been intrigued by the argument that normal filament bulbs are "bad" and fluorescent bulbs are "good".
I have a 40W fluorescent TUBE that has lasted 20 years. I originally put it in my kitchen then moved it into the garage. But NONE of my fluorescent BULBS have lasted any longer than a normal filament bulb. So on a purchase price basis they are a poor investment.

Much is made of the filament bulb "wasting" energy, but I don't see that this is true in my house. I have loft insulation, cavity wall insulation and double glazed windows in an attempt to keep in heat. A recent TV programme explained that the filament bulb wasted 99% of it's energy input as heat. To illustrate they 'roasted' a chicken in a very well insulated box heated by one 100 watt bulb. Yes it was cooked (but steamed not roast, and looked very soggy). But in truth all this proved is that the better the insulation the more heat you contain and if the heat input exceeds the heat out flow then over a period of time the internal temperature will continually rise until steady state condition is reached. Sorry, in my house any heat generated from filament bulbs just means that the central heating has a bit less heating to do. And my lights are only switched on when it's dark which is also when the temperature drops (summer here is one week sometime during the months of May to September!).

Never forget the theories of Malthus.

http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Thomas:Malthus.html

@unknownuser said:

3.Management have burnt their fingers.
I know of a few examples where a company had the benefit of having a proactive CAD manager who had over a period of years developed the CAD production system through customisation. When that member of staff left the practice there was nobody that could pick up the system and support it. After struggling for a few months the management pulled the plug and issued instruction that all software had to be replaced with standard installations with a complete ban on customisations. When the the support issues start to negate the productivity benefits, the use of plugins no longer remain a viable option.

The only managers who get their fingers burnt are the incompetent ones. The ones who invest in new application, have it installed in 'out of the box' form then wonder why they they don't get the productivity return they anticipated!

Our first CAD system was chosen by an engineer who then had the sense to allocate one of the users to be the 'development' draughtsman who went on to create a whole raft of macro's that doubled productivity. This system was later dropped in favour of AutoCAD (as you can pick up an ACAD draughtsman outside Woolworths) and out went the customisation of the old system, and down went productivity (although the new management failed to notice this).

When Inventor was introduced one key reason was it's ability to produce flat pattern dxf files. But the laser didn't like the files produced 'at the click of the button' and management kept saying that Inventor didn't produce dxf files. I had many heated discussions saying it was our problem because we wanted dxf files with bells and whistles, and these could be produced with the correct workflow and customisation. It's all in the box, you just need to use it. It's a bit like sitting down to a steak and using a spoon because that's all that's at your place setting even though a box of knives and forks is at the end of the table.

Maybe I'll just have to learn to use that Sandio 3D mouse then.

So much software has the ability to gain extra productivity through macro languages. The MS range (Word, Excel etc) have VBA, AutoCAD had Lisp and now has VBA, Inventor (and SolidWorks) have VBA. Any programme worth it's salt has the ability to do this. SU has Ruby, it would have suited me better if it had VBA, but I understand why Ruby was chosen.

Why aren't Rubies used more, in the same way macro's in other pieces of software aren't used more, only a small percentage of users write them. You name the software, most users use it straight out of the box. Such is life.