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Posted by richard

Here is a tale of woe. I’ve told it before. I’m sure others have told it too.

I called last week to get an appointment at the doctor’s. This was at maybe 11am. I was told there were no appointments left, but I could pre-book in advance. I inquired about that and they then said there were no pre-bookable appointments left until three weeks in the future.

She told me to call in the morning when they open to get an appointment. Given that they open at 8am, and the average phone call might be 1 minute, and they have something like 4 or 5 doctors operating at any given time, that’s conservatively 30 appointments per hour with a 10 minute appointment each. If we assume three people answering the phones that’s 3 appointments they can make a minute, so by the time I call at 8:13am that’s 39 appointments they can make.

I was told at 8:13am that there was ONE appointment left for the entire day.

James Street medical practice is terrible. I’ve heard people all over Louth talk about this, always complaining about them. I’m seriously thinking about moving to the Newmarket practice. But I seriously wonder if they’re going to be any better? Is this what Labour has done to the NHS? Is this just incompetent management?

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Posted by richard

I suppose it’s difficult to imagine how a weather service can be so biased, perhaps other countries don’t have the same issues as we do? When you see it once you might not notice it, but if you watch the weather every day you’ll begin to see it. The vagueness of weather forecasting above Oxfordshire, anything past that is “up north” and probably not worth worrying about from the weather forecasters point of view.

This morning I woke up expecting snow. It had frozen hard overnight, and was doing so at midnight when I went to bed. The national service had generalized snow clouds in the area, so I thought they might be right.

I went to weather.com to check it, checked this area and guess what the forecast says? Rain all day. Clearly wrong, there’s a few centimetres of snow on the ground and it’s coming down thick as I write. Accuweather for UK & Ireland has it right though, snow all day, and snow/rain for the next few days.

As for temperatures it’s definately 0 or below.

Can our weather services get it right at least once, please?

 

Posted by richard

Why would russian spammers add a western email address to send their cyrillic email to?

Idiots.

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Posted by richard

I had a weird problem tonight, freaked me out.

I hooked up my bluetooth adapter to transfer some stuff to my phone. Everything seemed ok. I fired up my skype and was talking to a friend when the screen froze. I rebooted but when it came back up it gave me a BSOD. I was a bit puzzled but rebooted.

It kept on doing it. Heart rate increased…

I was beginning to think I might be ordering new computer parts but on a webpage I found some guy mentioned removing hardware parts just in case, if you’d added something. I thought that the only thing I had added was the bluetooth adapter, so I removed it, rebooted and it came up fine.

So it was the Belkin Bluetooth adapter, giving me the acpi.sys BSOD, on Windows 7. Watch out for it.

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Posted by richard

The snow revisited this part of the world again last night. Paddy texted me asking if I’d seen outside and when I looked it was coming down thick. It’s pretty to see, makes me think of when I was a kid I suppose.

It had started to stick, and the cars were only just making a dent in the snow on the road, but you could tell by the sound of them as they went that it wasn’t going to stay, slush was starting already. And it wasn’t cold enough.

This morning, barely a few flakes remain. So much for that!

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Posted by richard

I called the HMRC today. I thought it would be one of those kinds of phone calls where they give you the run-around, you know the kind I mean, the sketch-type phone call that comedians get a great laugh from.

Quite the opposite.

The lady I talked to was helpful, told me what had gone wrong, and gave me two options on how to fix it. Not bad for a government agency! Although, in retrospect, they do want my (our) money so it’s probably best for them to be efficient!

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Posted by richard

My modem is dying, I need to give it a decent burial and move on.

I got home tonight, and in fact for the past few days too, it wasn’t connected. There I am feverishly hitting the ‘connect’ button on the admin backend and it won’t connect. Finally, after nearly two hours, it connects and I’m away. Nevertheless I sense the end is near.

So I’ve bought a new one, should be here in a day or two, it’s a LinkSys ADSL2+ Modem Router – always had good luck with them in the past. Once it’s here, the Belkin is consigned to the flames, I’ve had enough of it’s temperamentality.

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Posted by richard

Had some more snow last night, another inch or so, and this morning as well with the blizzard-like wind conditions. We’re forecast for some more today and tomorrow, with rather a heavy amount, so they say.

This morning I had issues with my internet connection too, TalkTalk are reporting problems with a broken cable in the area and BT are on it. That’ll be the day… It’s odd though that it took me 15 minutes this morning to get connected, but since then I’ve been fine. Seems more of a ‘net problem than a landline issue.

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Posted by richard

Humans think they’re the most intelligent species on the face of the planet because they can wipe out any other species.

Dolphins think they’re the most intelligent species on the face of the planet for exactly the same reason…

The reason I posted this is because of this article I read on the Times Online site:

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.

It’s about time, I mean they’ve saved countless humans, we know they talk to each other, they can solve complex problems, they feel pain, what more proof do we need?

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Posted by richard

We’re not used to this kind of cold!

After our nearly-white Christmas, we are now promised more snow. Although I love snow (it’s one of my first memories as a kid coming back from Kuwait), I have to say I don’t love the cold that comes with it. Unfortunately the weather here seems to favour ice and freezing temperatures rather than masses of snow.

Nevertheless, as you can see from the picture taken from then, we do get snow. I’ll upload some more tonight to my Flickr account. And that was thick for us, a couple of inches, so of course being Britons, it caused mayhem and brought the country to a standstill…

My feet are really beginning to feel a bit chilly right now!

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