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?

I was in the pub and they had a pub quiz. The question was, where on a women’s body is the curliest hair? Strangely I got it wrong – apparently the answer is Africa!

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?

Idiots.

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.

On the TV the other day though, they were saying this really damages Toyota’s reputation, how are they going to recover and so on, but that to me seemed odd. I mean, they’re doing the right thing, protecting the public from a fault that has been found. How can that be damaging, in the long run, to Toyota’s reputation?

If they had done nothing, that would have been bad. But instead they’re biting the bullet and coming forward and making sure that profits aren’t the most important thing to them – we are. This kind of “let’s get this fixed before anyone else gets hurt” attitude might do them well in the future, assuming the media can stop hyping this up so much.

I’m not the only one that seems to think that this is being overhyped, Investopedia also thinks that we might want to compare this to other recalls, and not jump on the ‘hate Toyota’ bandwagon too soon.

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!

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!

Can’t people move on and get themselves a decent modern browser? It is literally a click away. Opera and FireFox are so easy to install and get running, I installed Opera on a machine the other day and it was as simple as one click to download and one or two to install.

IE6’s problems with css cause so many headaches, it’s a real ball ache.

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.