Friday, February 17, 2012
Gossip: Hospital computers
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Gossip: Hospital computers: Hospedia supplies computers to this hospital and most of the hospitals in the West Midlands. I've had one of their systems' personnel out t...
Hospital computers
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Hospedia supplies computers to this hospital and most of the hospitals in the West Midlands. I've had one of their systems' personnel out twice and even she could not get the touch screen to function properly. If an advert appears there is no way to close it down which means you have to return to the main menu and start again, losing anything that might be open. When I get out I intend to complain about the poor system. It is most annoying because the service is not cheap.
Another of the system's shortcomings is a message box which pops up pretending you have a genuine message, or messages. This is just another way of locking the screen because if you go into it you cannot get out and any tabs you may have open are lost forever, including any work.
So I'm reduced to using my phone, the touch-screen of which is much better, though not perfect. This means I'm going to be largely incommunicado for however long it takes before the operation.
Another of the system's shortcomings is a message box which pops up pretending you have a genuine message, or messages. This is just another way of locking the screen because if you go into it you cannot get out and any tabs you may have open are lost forever, including any work.
So I'm reduced to using my phone, the touch-screen of which is much better, though not perfect. This means I'm going to be largely incommunicado for however long it takes before the operation.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Only when I laugh (2)
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After my near-sleepless night on the admission ward, and following some 17 hours observation, I was moved to a more general ward. All protestations to take my daily 2 hour walk fell on stony ground. The dogs must be really missing me - at least I tell myself that. But the truth is they are still being walked, just not by me, and for dogs I suspect loyalty is only as faithful as the next walk. So here I am, relaxing and pontificating, with my body getting used to a miscellany of drugs, most of the ones I binned more than eight years ago.
Apart from a student-nurse waking me up to see if I was breathing (so much for those who think I snore) things have gone quite well and I am settling in to a new regime, sleeping well (too well) and anticipating a significant wait before the operation, if other inmates' experiences are anything to go by. Despite rumours there is no escape plan. People are free to come and go, including visitors. Our NHS is great, doctors and nurses, and other staff. So what's the problem?
Over my bed is a television screen, a facility provided by private enterprise (as can be deduced by the cost to use it). Although I do not watch much television I thought this might be a useful means of keeping in touch with the outside world since it has a built-in touch-screen internet link and a telephone which is free for outgoing calls to home numbers, but 50p per minute for incoming calls from private lines. So I paid for £25-00 of usage (5 days). This would not have been unreasonable if the touch-screen worked properly. Instead it has a mind of its own and I have already lost a substantial amount of blog-text because of its peculiarities.
It is worse than just being inefficient and slow. The slider-bar which moves the screen up and down is temperamental and very often does not work at all. What's more it is close to the advert thumbnail and guess what! It is not unusual for an advert to fill the screen when you try to move the slider-bar. Most of these adverts are for internet providers, probably advertising on the basis that their services are better, and cheaper, than the hospital facilities; and whatever you do there is no way of avoiding having to look at these adverts. For example, if you try to close the advert thumbnail, with the close ad tab, this opens it up. Worst of all, once an advert is open it cannot be closed. Similarly when you press one of the on-screen keyboard keys you can never be quite sure what letter will appear. It may be the letter you press or the one next to it, either side, or the one above or below. But it doesn't matter how incomprehensible is the text you are working on because once the advert is up it remains up until you hit the return to MAIN MENU tab which, of course, closes everything down. There appear to be no alternatives, for example, the on-screen keyboard has no control keys, so the user is stumped.
Naturally I complained first thing Monday morning, and laid it on thick about sick people having to struggle with unworkable hardware for which they had paid over the going rate. When I added that I was sure she had heard all this before, she said she hadn't. From that I inferred that she had either been told to say that, or that patients do not complain. Having no reason to mistrust her I later asked the man in the next bed, Paul, if he had struggled with the touch-screen. He had, but he had not complained. Anyway, tomorrow the maintenance man for this company will be here, and, poor man, will have to hear the complaints all over again. You get what you pay for used to be the maxim.
Apart from a student-nurse waking me up to see if I was breathing (so much for those who think I snore) things have gone quite well and I am settling in to a new regime, sleeping well (too well) and anticipating a significant wait before the operation, if other inmates' experiences are anything to go by. Despite rumours there is no escape plan. People are free to come and go, including visitors. Our NHS is great, doctors and nurses, and other staff. So what's the problem?
Over my bed is a television screen, a facility provided by private enterprise (as can be deduced by the cost to use it). Although I do not watch much television I thought this might be a useful means of keeping in touch with the outside world since it has a built-in touch-screen internet link and a telephone which is free for outgoing calls to home numbers, but 50p per minute for incoming calls from private lines. So I paid for £25-00 of usage (5 days). This would not have been unreasonable if the touch-screen worked properly. Instead it has a mind of its own and I have already lost a substantial amount of blog-text because of its peculiarities.
It is worse than just being inefficient and slow. The slider-bar which moves the screen up and down is temperamental and very often does not work at all. What's more it is close to the advert thumbnail and guess what! It is not unusual for an advert to fill the screen when you try to move the slider-bar. Most of these adverts are for internet providers, probably advertising on the basis that their services are better, and cheaper, than the hospital facilities; and whatever you do there is no way of avoiding having to look at these adverts. For example, if you try to close the advert thumbnail, with the close ad tab, this opens it up. Worst of all, once an advert is open it cannot be closed. Similarly when you press one of the on-screen keyboard keys you can never be quite sure what letter will appear. It may be the letter you press or the one next to it, either side, or the one above or below. But it doesn't matter how incomprehensible is the text you are working on because once the advert is up it remains up until you hit the return to MAIN MENU tab which, of course, closes everything down. There appear to be no alternatives, for example, the on-screen keyboard has no control keys, so the user is stumped.
Naturally I complained first thing Monday morning, and laid it on thick about sick people having to struggle with unworkable hardware for which they had paid over the going rate. When I added that I was sure she had heard all this before, she said she hadn't. From that I inferred that she had either been told to say that, or that patients do not complain. Having no reason to mistrust her I later asked the man in the next bed, Paul, if he had struggled with the touch-screen. He had, but he had not complained. Anyway, tomorrow the maintenance man for this company will be here, and, poor man, will have to hear the complaints all over again. You get what you pay for used to be the maxim.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Only when I laugh (1)
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It's not funny. I'm in hospital. Having come to do a routine test on Tuesday I ended up being admitted. The test was at 10.00 a.m. but there was a long wait before the bed was available at midnight. Following a sleep-deprived night before test, and partly because of it, I was exhausted and really looking forward to a good night's sleep. First of all I was fitted with some stick-on extra nipples which made me look like a great Hampshire sow, then I was linked to a heart-monitoring machine like a Friesian milker. After the machine was switched on there was a regular bleep, with its echo, at two-second intervals like the sound of ping-pong games in the early days of personal computers. This would last all night.
On its own this was a novel experience, but the man in the bed opposite, was something else, poor chap. Whatever his problems - and weight was one of them - they were of a very serious nature, which meant he needed regular attention, from dedicated staff who are a credit to the NHS. Just because some people are worse off than yourself doesn't make your own lack of sleep any more bearable; and at least the man opposite was sleeping even if it was not a peaceful sleep. With every breath he emitted an unspeakable noise which was a kind of pained snore, impossible to translate. Sleeping was something the staff, for some reason, did not want for him, or for me I felt, so they kept coming and waking him up. As soon as they had finished with him he was back into his impossible to translate snore pattern. By 4 a.m. I had not had a wink of sleep. Every time I felt I might shut out the ping-pong repetition and nod off something happened to make sure I didn't. A female patient who had been admitted that day was disorientated and screaming at the nurses, and, I learnt later, was hitting the staff with a walking stick. By the time security and staff had sorted things out it was 5 a.m. Some time between then and 6.30 a.m. - when they woke everybody up - I fell asleep.
After a wash I enquired of the man in the bed next to me:
"What time is breakfast?"
"I'm a little mutton Jeff."
"WHAT TIME IS BREAKFAST?"
"The doctor's not been down yet!"
"Thanks."
On its own this was a novel experience, but the man in the bed opposite, was something else, poor chap. Whatever his problems - and weight was one of them - they were of a very serious nature, which meant he needed regular attention, from dedicated staff who are a credit to the NHS. Just because some people are worse off than yourself doesn't make your own lack of sleep any more bearable; and at least the man opposite was sleeping even if it was not a peaceful sleep. With every breath he emitted an unspeakable noise which was a kind of pained snore, impossible to translate. Sleeping was something the staff, for some reason, did not want for him, or for me I felt, so they kept coming and waking him up. As soon as they had finished with him he was back into his impossible to translate snore pattern. By 4 a.m. I had not had a wink of sleep. Every time I felt I might shut out the ping-pong repetition and nod off something happened to make sure I didn't. A female patient who had been admitted that day was disorientated and screaming at the nurses, and, I learnt later, was hitting the staff with a walking stick. By the time security and staff had sorted things out it was 5 a.m. Some time between then and 6.30 a.m. - when they woke everybody up - I fell asleep.
After a wash I enquired of the man in the bed next to me:
"What time is breakfast?"
"I'm a little mutton Jeff."
"WHAT TIME IS BREAKFAST?"
"The doctor's not been down yet!"
"Thanks."
Monday, February 6, 2012
Another war pending
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Julie Pace in The Huff Post writes: "In a letter to Congress Monday, Obama said the tougher sanctions are warranted "particularly in light of the deceptive practices of the Central Bank of Iran and other Iranian banks." One of four countries in the world without a Rothschild-owned central bank is Iran. What Obama really means is that 'we' cannot control Iran's money supply.
This is what a Nathan Rothschild said about my country in the nineteenth century:
'I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England's empire. The man who controls Britain's money supply, controls the British. And I control the money supply.'
I have resigned myself to the fact that the United States is going to war with Iran. I wish my country would not get involved but fear it will. Sanctions are already being imposed by William Hague and as everyone knows, that is the first stage in waging war on oil-rich countries. Our (US and UK) governments over the last twenty years have had little regard for international law and the fact that Russia and China used their UN veto will have no consequence on the actions of these nation states any more than the League of Nations could control the actions of Japan's occupation of Manchuria (following the Muckden Incident, 1931), Mussolini's Italian excursion into Ethiopia in 1935 or Hitler's German ambitions in the Sudetenland in 1939. Eventually the world passed judgment on these aggressors.
A further confirmation that Israel, the US and the UK are planning war is the removal of staff from the US embassy in Syria. A fleet of warships is already in the area awaiting commands. Aggression never pays in the long term. Today it is the US, UK and Israel who are the aggressors. And they think they are invincible. Judgement day is coming for all. Let this cup pass.
This is what a Nathan Rothschild said about my country in the nineteenth century:
'I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England's empire. The man who controls Britain's money supply, controls the British. And I control the money supply.'
I have resigned myself to the fact that the United States is going to war with Iran. I wish my country would not get involved but fear it will. Sanctions are already being imposed by William Hague and as everyone knows, that is the first stage in waging war on oil-rich countries. Our (US and UK) governments over the last twenty years have had little regard for international law and the fact that Russia and China used their UN veto will have no consequence on the actions of these nation states any more than the League of Nations could control the actions of Japan's occupation of Manchuria (following the Muckden Incident, 1931), Mussolini's Italian excursion into Ethiopia in 1935 or Hitler's German ambitions in the Sudetenland in 1939. Eventually the world passed judgment on these aggressors.
A further confirmation that Israel, the US and the UK are planning war is the removal of staff from the US embassy in Syria. A fleet of warships is already in the area awaiting commands. Aggression never pays in the long term. Today it is the US, UK and Israel who are the aggressors. And they think they are invincible. Judgement day is coming for all. Let this cup pass.
Gossip: Nine years of neft-theft
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Gossip: Nine years of neft-theft: Neft ( нефть) is the Russian word for oil. Nine years ago the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was hell-bent on a war with Iraq at the behe...
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Nine years of neft-theft
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Neft (нефть) is the Russian word for oil. Nine years ago the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was hell-bent on a war with Iraq at the behest of his transatlantic partner in crime, George W Bush. By that time many of us had realised the nature of Blair's politics, which had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with his own feelings of self-aggrandisement, which were borne out when he posed with a big cheesy grin on his smarmy face, photographing himself in front of some incendiary event. In the run up to that war I wrote a weekly magazine on behalf of Small Heath 'Stop the War' campaign to try and raise funds. It was called Chimps and ran to 5 issues, by which time the war was already underway, and trying to stop it seemed even more futile than in the run-up. I am proud of my humble effort to change the world, though it was a rather forlorn hope with Blair at the helm of UK politics.
As regards neft-theft Blair lied through his Cheshire Cat grin when he said if the war was about oil he could have 'cut a deal' with Saddam. But the truth was there were oil companies waiting in the wings of his theatre of war, so that when the battle-scene was over, BP, Tony Buckingham and a whole host of other western oil companies could tap into the mineral wells, and make rich people even richer. As Malthus reiterated 'the poor are always with us'. And Blair showed no concern for them. In his book they were expendable. It did not take a genius to know what was going to happen to poor civilians when the NATO pirates went in, all guns blazing.
The last issue of Chimps was written after the bombing had started. One of the first civilian victims was a little boy called Ali Ismail Abbas. In the bomb which killed his parents and other members of his family Ali lost both arms, had severe burns to his body and it was touch-and-go whether he would survive. I wrote a poem called Tony's Child which I published in Chimps. It finished:
Tony's child liked volleyball but now he has no arms
he cannot show the skills he learnt, all those magic charms.
No arms to touch, to love, to feel, he has no arms to kill.
It might be better if he died, and who knows perhaps he will;
he lies all day in bed and cries, for Tony's child is very ill.
The bomb that killed his family and took his arms away,
scorched his growing torso and God I only pray
this kind of thing will soon become a feature of the past
when men were seen as savages who used to maim and blast
little children with their bombs, and Tony's child's the last.
Again it was a forlorn hope. Tony Blair believed that history would judge whether his decision to go to war in Iraq was the right decision. I have news for him. As far as Iraq is concerned he is already part of history. As far as oil is concerned he has proved himself to be a liar and a thief. Let's hope there is a higher judge than history to try him for his neft-theft, because all the perfumes of Arabia could not wash away the stench of thousands of deaths on his blood-soaked hands.
As regards neft-theft Blair lied through his Cheshire Cat grin when he said if the war was about oil he could have 'cut a deal' with Saddam. But the truth was there were oil companies waiting in the wings of his theatre of war, so that when the battle-scene was over, BP, Tony Buckingham and a whole host of other western oil companies could tap into the mineral wells, and make rich people even richer. As Malthus reiterated 'the poor are always with us'. And Blair showed no concern for them. In his book they were expendable. It did not take a genius to know what was going to happen to poor civilians when the NATO pirates went in, all guns blazing.
The last issue of Chimps was written after the bombing had started. One of the first civilian victims was a little boy called Ali Ismail Abbas. In the bomb which killed his parents and other members of his family Ali lost both arms, had severe burns to his body and it was touch-and-go whether he would survive. I wrote a poem called Tony's Child which I published in Chimps. It finished:
Tony's child liked volleyball but now he has no arms
he cannot show the skills he learnt, all those magic charms.
No arms to touch, to love, to feel, he has no arms to kill.
It might be better if he died, and who knows perhaps he will;
he lies all day in bed and cries, for Tony's child is very ill.
The bomb that killed his family and took his arms away,
scorched his growing torso and God I only pray
this kind of thing will soon become a feature of the past
when men were seen as savages who used to maim and blast
little children with their bombs, and Tony's child's the last.
Again it was a forlorn hope. Tony Blair believed that history would judge whether his decision to go to war in Iraq was the right decision. I have news for him. As far as Iraq is concerned he is already part of history. As far as oil is concerned he has proved himself to be a liar and a thief. Let's hope there is a higher judge than history to try him for his neft-theft, because all the perfumes of Arabia could not wash away the stench of thousands of deaths on his blood-soaked hands.
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