2015 — 16 July: Thursday
I've just been listening — despite my general distaste — to the BBC's main radio news and a battle royal between the guvmint Health "top chap" and an equally "top chap" from the BMA. Apparently if you're admitted to an NHS hospital on a Sunday, your chance of dying is currently 15% higher than going in on a Wednesday. That's supposedly 6,000 "avoidable" deaths1 per year, and is being blamed by a recent report (or an upcoming piece of Ministerial waffle speech, I couldn't really care less) on an insufficiency of senior consultants, it seems, on typical weekends. (Perhaps they should try closing golf clubs at weekends to medicos?)
LIP Service, or Bother! Part 2
Browsing HP's HPLIP service website this morning strongly suggests yesterday's latest code release is, erm, not yet actually completely bug-free. Perhaps you recall that wonderful essay "Programming Sucks" I mentioned a while back? (30th April 2014, should you be curious.) Here's a tiny snippet:
Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it's literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by
teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone...
Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving
bands of mutants.
Back to my HP woes. Their bug hasn't succeeded in stopping me from using the scanner portion of my fancy All-in-One. And since I so rarely need to do any printing these days (the exceptional recent flurry of Probate paperwork relating to dear Mama's estate being now, hopefully, all finished with) I shall simply keep an eye out for a bug-fixed release in due course. Besides, I still have the earlier LaserJet sitting lower down that particular stack of kit. I'm pretty sure I can drag it back into service if absolutely necessary. There's also an Epson network colour printer buried under stuff at the other end of the living room somewhere. I've yet to play with it under Linux.
Of course, that may just expose a whole different slew of bugs :-)
After my next...
... supplies run this morning, and my lunch date, there's an "Eek!" from Iris to look into. It seems this month's Microsoft Update Tuesday is still trying to shut her PC down after installing stuff, and has been trying all night so far. I read several online complaints about the syndrome but (of course) have no clue how best to deal with it. A hammer, perhaps?
I fear Big Bro will...
... be needing a hefty swig of what's left in his bottle of Chivas Regal when I tell him how much it's just cost to send one of his two £60 value parcels of die-cast toys down to NZ: £64-65! Splitting parcel #2 into two half-the-weight ones would still cost about £40 total. I shall consult him on Saturday. My current a/c can take the strain for now. Barclays, meanwhile, sent me the closing statements for dear Mama's current and savings accounts... both now completely drained. And O2 has confirmed I've just finished buying the fancy smartphone I signed up for two years ago, too. So that's an extra tenner/month. Ev'ry little helps.
Time for lunch, methinks. Whose 'shout' is it this week, I wonder? [Long, appreciative pause] We've now added Romsey's "The Old House at Home" to our little list. Very tasty.
End of an era
I don't know exactly when dear Mama started banking with Barclays, but suspect it would have been in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Mind you, when Dad died, I discovered she didn't actually know how to write a cheque...
I've just managed...
... to talk Iris through a complete power-off and reboot cycle to fix her hanging PC. I think that deserves first a cuppa (for the thirst), followed perhaps by a quick scan of the discount shelves of Asda to give the car slightly more of a run than just putting it straight into the garage from the drive would. (I left it out in case her updating glitches required me to visit.) Meanwhile, my Android SHIELD Tablet PC is now finding wireless access Right Here in River City tricky for some reason. It seems to be the season for kit troubles. Let's hope I can still reboot my kettle. After all, I can't diagnose anything without copious quantities of tea...
Nor is HP's own self-diagnosis and healing tool able to sort out my printer, dagnabbit. So what chance do I have? Mind you, it did say Mint 17.2 isn't supported. I need to break this habit of fixing things that aren't broken in my new Linux world. (It derives from bitter experience with Windows, of course.)
The shelves in Asda...
... yielded the following crop of DVDs:
For £23 I think that's a goodish haul. After all, my evening "meal" was just a simple brown bread roll with cheese and marmalade. And a very decent Granny Smith. Yum.