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  • This is why

    So, I have often railed against the concept of for profit healthcare. I believe, with my whole heart, that its a bad idea. A bad idea at its core. Making money from people who are sick I find unpalatable, but I think it places those working in the business in a massive conflict of interest.

    Instead of the patient being someone who’s best interests are your whole and entire point of working, they become a source of cash. They become your means of being paid. It twists what should be broadly altruistic into something with a reward for a specific behaviour. Denying care or giving extra treatment may make you money.

    It worries me, from the vague concept to the fine detail.

    And then you see stuff like this. And oh, look, the things I thought were true about for-profit healthcare, they are. I understand that in Europe they’ve managed combined or single systems of for-profit/charity/government healthcare in a way in which that does, apparently, work well.

    But the UK has an appalling record of privatisation leading to disaster. And now we’ve let the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats wrestle the last piece of our grand experiment from our hands. The mechanisms to privatise the NHS aren’t just in place, they’re functioning. Private companies are running NHS trusts and slapping that proud blue rectangle on their work, saying “look, we’re NHS, trust us”. And I trust them as far as I can spit them.

    It makes me painfully sad. It makes me want to cry. I see where we’re going. Don’t say we didn’t warn you when we get there.

  • Distance

    So, the plan remains to move to Canada. As those of you who are up on the whole plan thing are aware, this has been the plan for a long time, and we poke this plan with pointy sticks every so often just to check its not curled up in the corner and died.

    It hasn’t, the plan is still the same. Kathryn found somewhere that looks gorgeous, and there are, incredibly, jobs posted to work in the ER of the local hospital. Well, I say the ER. They are to work in the entire local hospital, including the ER, because the entire local hospital has fewer beds than my current ER. I was going to say ‘less than my current ER including the observation ward (8 beds)’ but then I realised the addendum was unnecessary. It’s actually fewer beds than majors and resus combined, completely disregarding the trolleys in minors.

    Wow, that’s dinky.

    So I’d guess that you just are a nurse there, and that anything that comes in is ER’d right there on the spot. So that all sounded quite fun. And the area is simply gorgeous. The photos of it just make my soul sing right there and then.

    Valley.
    (looksie, more)

    I just look at those photos and will myself into being there. So I took it upon myself to explore the two slight problems that exist with this concept. See, you may have noticed that we’re not straight. There’s a certain amount of gayness in our union, and communities out in the boonies can be less than accepting of such things. They can also be awesomely, totally pro such things. Indeed, Hebden Bridge is one fine example of exactly how cool places can be (all things considered*). But some places can be less pleasant, and if, say, you were going to move thousands and thousands of miles and landed up somewhere that was filled with homophobes, that would be bad. So that was problem the first. I have no idea whether they’re pro-or-anti gay, all I’ve managed to discover is that the area is represented by the NDP, which is positive. But hardly a resoundingly solid answer. But at least it wasn’t a *bad* answer. No, it’s the other one which makes things a bit sticky.

    So, we found the job spec for the nurse there, and there, after the happy little ‘3-5 years ER experience’ was their Mission Statement. It was….god-y. Quite god-y. And we posited the (optimistic) possibility that it was a phrase more honoured in the breach than the observance… So I’d held onto that until today. When I watched a sort of, well, I suppose an infomercial for the hospital and it turns out that it is really quite a problem, in that the hospital is part of the United Church of Canada, and they’re quite shouty about it. Well, maybe not shouty, but certainly… it’s something they mention and say it’s an important part of how and why they do what they do.

    If you can imagine me deflating somewhat, that’s what happened. See, I’m not Christian. I’m sort of vaguely Buddhist, if I needed to put any kind of fixed thing on it, but even that’s really overstating it. But being in a strongly Christian workplace? That would work out to be rather friction filled, I suspect. I’ve helped patients maintain their faith, that’s fine, but I think I would struggle and find myself really uncomfortable in a place where it seems expected to make Christianity part of your life. Ah well. Never mind.

    And I’d gone and subscribed to this blog’n all. Still, I guess it’ll give me a flavour of life in remote Canada, anyhow. Feh. So I guess we keep on looking :-/

    * Don’t you just love NPR? I love NPR almost as much as I love the BBC.

  • Less plan, more replan

    So, I had good intentions for today. I thought I’d wash, get dressed, and work. Take a brief break to run some batteries to the metal recycling with Nikki and her handily available review Renault ZE (she asked for a real world test suggestion, I thought running the half ton of batteries to the scrap metal merchants was an excellent suggestion – incidentally, the ZE did this job without a hitch and actually, seems like quite a neat EV – more my taste than the leaf (in the wholeheartedly practical vehicle sense)), but basically set aside today as a Dissertation Day.

    Annnyhow. So that battery lugging bit went quite well, but battling with Scopus was frustrating and…long. Scopus is a database, for those of you who don’t know, and actually it’s just because each database has its own search grammar and trying to take one search across to another database just doesn’t work, so there’s lots of tweaking to make it work that makes the whole job frustrating. But unlike Ovid which is old and painful, Scopus is actually fairly intuitive, and it was just tedious tweaking the search to work right.

    After a while though, I got that sorted and worked my way through the hits. The plan then was rinse-and-repeat for Web Of Knowlege (that being the last database I need to re-search) but it’s been informing me, helpfully, that:

    “Thank you for using Web of Knowledge
    A system error has occurred.”

    Which impedes my ability to search somewhat. So instead I decided to tackle another thing from the to-do list. The final tweaks to Kathryn’s Bicycle. Now it has brakes (at least working, could do with a bit more tweaking) and gears (all 3 actually seem to be working), and I’ve fitted the replacement cotter pin (to replace the one I munged fairly dramatically). So I shall maybe take it for a quick test ride on Wednesday :)

    And for all being such lovely people, here’s a picyture.

    Untitled

    I also discovered today that ripping to MKVs from blurays is all very well, if your media player can handle them. It turns out that the VMP74 can’t. So the poor old media server is now tasked with transcoding them to MP4 / M4Vs, which it can manage at about 6 frames per second.

  • More techery geekery

    So, I have so far failed in my quest to lay my hands on a Slim Devices slimp3 (or any of the later Squeezebox with a VFD display). And so it has come to pass that I have spent a few (literally £3) on a new microSD card with which will allow me (hopefully) to put new firmware on the crappy Superpad 2. My initial impressions of the Superpad were that it was limited by Android. It is. Android 2.2 (I thought it ran 2.0, but it’s 2.2) is just not very exciting. Also, Android has the irritation of applications that are installable only on specific devices (despite not apparently using specific features of those devices). It’s also limited because it can only install free, not paid applications. All of this makes it a bit crap.

    The touch screen (resistive, not capacitive) is somewhat vague, meaning that misclicks are a bit of a common occurrence (believe me, I’ve recalibrated the ass of it, trying to coax it to work more reliably). And the screen, whilst an adequate resolution, is not the nicest display. It’s got a bit of a light streak in one corner, and is not hugely bright.

    Despite all this, the audio decoder hardware is actually somewhat better than that on the Viewsonic box.

    And it means you don’t have to have the telly on to listen to music, although it will require more finicking with the setup of mediatomb (the slimp3 would have used squeezebox server, which I was playing with, with some success). Which is nice.

    And so, a bit of googlefu (not really very much fu, to be honest. More like a teensy bit of googling) lead me to discover that there is a community created update for the firmware (the update firmware option on the device brings up ‘err 301’ before failing), but you have to have a microSD to achieve such a thing. So a microSD’s been ordered, and will hopefully arrive shortly.

    And then shall begin the removal of audio and video media (with the exception of vinyl and shellac, which is special) from the lounge. Of course, this does make us more reliant on the media server, so perhaps I should take steps to back that up too. Thankfully, it runs linux and is thus relatively easy.

  • She riiiiides. Sorta.

    So, a while back, some of you may recall that I bought and brought home a rusting heap.

    Untitled

    The plan was to get a bike for Kathryn, but my fondness for things ancient and solid overwhelmed my common sense (not difficult). And I was somewhat optimistic about the state of the bike when I bought it from ebay. To be honest, when I got there I thought ‘oh arse’. But unless someone’s description is misleading I’ve always felt that once you’ve bought it, you’ve bought it. So I heaved the rusty heap into the car and drove home.

    And then there was the misquote. See, I asked for a quote for a wheel rebuild and was misinformed about how much it would cost, and looking at the bike I realised that actually, it was fairly solid. Lots of surface rust, complete and total destruction of the chromework (impervious to water my ass), but the frame itself was pretty good. And having slathered the poor beast in penetrating oil, the brakes freed up and quickly came back to life. I started to contemplate what would be required to fix it.

    ….and make it look less shit.

    (more…)

  • Post nights geek

    …I started this post while I was on nights, so…err… yeah, make of that what you will. Now I’m sleep deprived (or depraved) instead.

    So, whilst I’m starting to poke at my audit with sticks whilst I’m still on nights, I’m also having a toy with the concept of ceasing to have CDs and DVDs around the house. I’m not quite at the stage where I trust digital media in the way that, well, I trust little bits of plastic in which audio data is stored. But I’m quite honestly very done with DVDs. Or more accurately with unskippable, tedious PSAs about how I’m the spawn of satan if I were to have illegally downloaded a film.

    Whatever my personal opinions on that, sticking an irritating unskippable PSA on the matter in my face when I’ve just PAID FOR THE DAMN DISK, well, it annoys me.

    And then there’s the award winner, one of the millenium trilogy disks that won’t let you even skip the trailers. The fracking trailers are unskippable.

    So, I finally ordered a cheap Blu-Ray/DVD/CD-Rom with which to extract the data from these disks. I didn’t want to use my laptop’s drive because last time I did extensive data ripping I upset several CD-Writers / CD-Rom drives. By upset I mean they died spectacularly.

    So, cheap external reader it is.

    As a component of this I’ve been looking at solving the audio playing problem somewhat, well, better. At the moment the little Viewsonic box does an adequate if unstellar job of playing music. It lacks depth* and feels a bit feeble. Also, to use it requires the telly to be on, which, frankly is an unsatisfactory solution.

    So I’ve been looking for a audio-only, self contained media player.

    My ideal is the rather ancient, but also rather nice slimp3 from Slim Devices. These, however, are rather uncommon. Irritatingly, one went on ebay for not-much-more than I’d bid, then someone listed one for more than twice the sale price of the one I didn’t win.

    I’ve also considered later versions – the various early Squeezeboxes, and a Squeezebox classic.

    I’ve also considered an O2 Joggler – which is quite a nice looking bit of kit. No VFD display on that though, so less pretty points.

    Then it occured to me that I’ve still got some other bits of kit kicking around. There’s the illustrious iPaq 3660, circa 2001. That’s probably the nicest bit of kit, but it does lack WiFi. I’m thinking that I’ve got a PCMCIA sleeve for it though. So there’s that. The only problem is it runs PocketPC 2002. That’s the latest update it’ll run, it can’t run any later versions, which is a bit sad. It will run Familiar Linux. Except Familiar Linux is not available ’til October, for some obscure reason.

    So I decided that I don’t want to spend money for no good reason, and I thought it would be good to use the SuperPad III. Off I went to find a decent UPnP client that’s free and in the android store. Whilst I’d happily pay for it, the Superpad III doesn’t do paid apps. Unfortunately, the free app looks to be somewhat shonky, and the paid-ad-supported-limited-free version of another app which does appear to work and is *way* faster, and is quite pleasant to use has some really irritating limitations in the free version.

    However, conceptually it does work. Indeed, even the sluggish free version after a bit of fiddling worked reasonably well. Which means that this can be done for no cost**. The Viewsonic box plays HiDef media rather well, and the Android tablet plays audio adequately. Which means that when the drive arrives it will be time to sell the region free DVD player and the dead Blu-Ray. Which means no more disk hunting and a much better solution for audio and video. Yay :)

    * in a wholly pretentious faux audiophile way.
    ** although just to wind me up the overpriced Slimp3 is back on ebay at the price I suggested I’d buy it for. However, the guy wants £15 quid for shipping a small metal box. I presume it will be hand delivered by a unicorn.

  • TMI, then more i, with less TM.

    So, when I’m stressed, traditionally I get something akin to IBS. (more…)

  • The Avengers

    Spoilers may well abound (I don’t think they do, particularly, but hey, tread carefully people).

    (more…)

  • Be more careful, Kate.

    So, I knew my liver function test results were fine, but was under the impression my cholesterol levels were not-great. Err, high, would be the word. Obviously, there’s good and bad cholesterol. I couldn’t remember the numbers, the overall value was on the high side, and so paranoia kicked in. I’ve been mentally beating my body with sticks. High blood pressure, high cholesterol and an iffy liver, that was basically where I was at. Oh, and lousy allergies.

    But it’s been bugging me, so I rang the GP and got the actual figures. Yes, the ‘bad’ cholesterol is the highest acceptable ‘normal’ value. This is less than ideal. But the ‘good’ cholesterol and overall levels are also just within the acceptable limits. Probably a bit high for my age, but given the shed-loads of cheese I eat, understandable.

    So I can chill a bit, and only berate my body for its poor quality liver and high blood pressure (which I’m keeping an eye on, but am not going to ‘do’ anything about unless it gets significantly high until after my dissertation. Because I suspect that’s what’s making it high). Actually, given my blood test results actually show my liver’s actually *working properly*, I’m going to go easy on my body for a bit :)

    Well, apart from the 24 odd miles a week of cycling.

    Easy apart from that.

  • A visit to the engineers

    So, I toddled along to meet my prospective engineers today. Having had a brief e-mail conversation in which I sent them some diagrams (not of my making) of the motor, and describing what I was hoping to achieve, and then having had a chat with the big cheese from the company (it’s not a big company), he requested that I turn up today when the other partner, who coincidentally is the owner of a Morris ‘Tho was there, and please to be bringing the 8″ Motor with me.

    So, Kathryn and I loaded the rather heavy lump that is the motor into the back of Chester yesterday, and this morning I spent twenty minutes pondering and looking and drawing some very sketchy engineering diagrams of the mounts I want fabricated.

    So I turned up, and the head of the chap I’d been speaking to walks over and says Hi, and shakes my hand, and greets me with “You’re very clued up for..a…girl”. I think he realised that his sentence was walking off a cliff that, perhaps, he didn’t want to walk off, but he soldiered on anyway. Ignoring the blatant sexism (oh, fun), we went on to have a nice chat about what I want, what they can do, what work they normally do, and how good my drawings need to be to get what I want done.

    Not very, it turns out, is the answer. My quick and dirty sketch from this morning:

    Quick and dirty sketch of the mounts

    Plus some dimensions, would be sufficient. The slight problem there, of needing dimensions, that makes things a wee bit more complex. It means probably delaying the project start date until after I finish my course, because I’m going to have to actually go down, strip the engine out, and measure things.

    After much discussion it was decided they didn’t need to see the frigging motor. So, that shifting of the bastard heavy object out of the garage? Unnecessary pain on our part. Never mind.

    However, after their unwarranted bout of sexism I now feel the need to produce good, high quality, engineering diagrams. I’ve played with Google Sketchup before, and am having a little dink with ‘DraftSight’, so we’ll see which one ends up taking my fancy. I can’t work on it at the moment, anyhow, but… I’m quite excited.