Re: 'Exit interview'
Exit interviewer: "So why are you leaving us, Mr Mangler?"
Me: "Because you're making me redundant, remember?"
Exit interviewer:: "Oh, um, well good luck. Bye"
43 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2012
Alternatively, this might represent a niche in the greeting cards market. About 50 years ago there was a cartoon in a UK daily which showed a shocked shop assistant saying "You want a get WHAT card for your boss?"
Anyone care to come up with suitable verses? I'll offer:
Effluent stinks
Rotting garbage is vile
But not nearly as much as
Your management style.
Swivel chair racing was not confined to IT. A long time ago, in the analytical lab of a chemical company long gone*, the sport of swivel chair jousting was developed. The blindfolded sitters were equipped with wash bottles of demineralised water (not the alcohol or acetone ones!) and tried to squirt each other as they passed, pushed by the human 'horses'. This was, of course, in the days before Health and Safety were invented.
*The chemical factory shut down not long after the solvent stores caught fire and nearly took out the local pub.
A bit of sleuthing is required to determine the veracity of this story. Firstly. there is the mention of turbo pumps. In my mind this suggests that the rocket was liquid fuelled. The great British success in sounding rockets was the Skylark which was, I believe, solid fuelled, so I think this rules out the Skylark. Similarly, the Canadian Black Brant was solid fuelled. There's the V2, of course, but what other liquid fuelled sounding rockets were there?
Oh dear. That reminds me of an embarrassing moment in an open plan office. I was on the phone to a customer who managed to dig himself into a hole. It was a bad line and I had to speak loud. Suddenly, the entire office went quiet as everyone, by chance, stopped talking. It was into this silence that I heard myself bellow "Have you mounted your grandmother?".
It took about three seconds for the first chuckle to be heard, but within 15 seconds the entire office was filled with guffaws.
But they do have the same problems. I see lots of drivers unaware of how wide their vehicle is, how to turn off their fog lights, how to operate indicators, how to park entirely within a parking space, even how to steer round junctions properly. The list is, sadly, endless, and driving is far from a pleasure these days as a result. I can only console myself with the thought that I don't have to provide these idiots with IT support.
"The experience of COVID-19 has shown that more collectivist, “tight” societies like Singapore and others in South-East Asia have fared better than more individualistic “loose” societies like the USA and the UK."
I fail to see how this is an argument in favour of the motion. It says lots about decisive government action and nothing about sharing medical data. Repeat after me: "Association does not imply causation". This, of course, is yet another argument against basing medical treatment on statistical studies. I would submit that there are far too many unrecorded confounding variables for many of the statistical studies to be of any value at all. I would much rather see the time, money and effort put into real medical research into the underlying causes of disease instead of epidemiological studies of dubious value.
There seems to be a general belief that a far higher proportion of extradition requests made by the US succeed than the proportion made by the UK that succeed. I was surprised to find that this is not the case, at least according to these data from an FOI request:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extradition-requests-between-the-uk-and-us-from-april-2007-to-may-2014/extradition-requests-between-the-uk-and-us-from-april-2007-to-may-2014
I didn't find any data relating to the period after May 2014, but I didn't look very hard.
If Siglent block this hole it will upset a lot of people. These scopes are sold with a variety of bandwidths and features. The hardware is the same in each case. The backdoor is used by many as a means of hacking into the scope to obtain a free upgrade from a cheap entry-level version, although I believe Siglent have been trying to make that more difficult lately. Head over to the eevblog for more details.
I've just got off the phone after a very frustrating conversation with our GP's practice manager concerning privacy and security issues. The practice has two online methods of ordering prescription repeats.
1. A secure website that requires registration.
2. Just drop us an email.
I have no problems with the first, I have a big problem with the second. When I raised the issue with the practice, the response I got was: "NHS email is secure". When I informed the practice manager about the realities, including some free email providers reading emails for targetted advertising, she replied, "Yes, I know, but its' the patient's choice". I could not get her t understand that it's not an informed choice.
The NHS Privacy Policy says:
“Sending information via email to patients is permissible, provided the risks of using unencrypted email have been explained to them, they have given their consent and the information is not person-identifiable or confidential information.”
While it say nothing about patients emailing the NHS, my contention is that the NHS should not be encouraging patients to risk confidentiality by using insecure methods to request repeat prescriptions, especially when a secure method is also provided. I think pretty much all Reg readers would agree that the vast majority of people are uninformed as to the risks involved.
A side issue here is that the practice manager confirmed that there is no verification that the person sending the email request is the actual patient...
A quick trawl using a well-known search engine suggests that many GP practices in NHS England are encouraging repeat prescription requests by email. So, as the title suggests, is it just me, or is there a real problem here?
While hurling well-deserved brickbats at Crapita, spare a thought for the poor sods who are going to have to sort this mess out: the schools' data managers. These downtrodden individuals have to work with SIMS (or equally appalling products like CMIS) all the time. As non-teaching staff they are treated as being the lowest of the low and, usually being term time plus some holiday working, get paid three-fifths of damn-all with pensions to match.
Summer holidays? Forget it. School management will leave it until the last moment to tell you about the assessment scheme they want you to implement for next year, so what with that and exam results analysis it leaves precious little time to squeeze in a vacation.
Some will even be forced to produce the school timetable using Nova T6, a package so evil that 'user hostile' doesn't come close to doing it justice.
Couple all of this with execrable software from practically all suppliers to schools, dealing with teaching staff who have all the IT skills of a small piece of putty, laughable local authority support and lies from Capita and you'll get some idea of how happy I am to be retired.
One of the problems facing schools is the relatively low take-up of some GCSE options in combination with serious funding issues. Teaching GCSE computer science is not a full time position for which they've been able to recruit specialist staff. Therefore what most most schools have had to do is to migrate staff from the old IT curriculum to teaching CS.
I would add that, while working as support staff in a secondary school, I've seen an experienced PE teacher teaching IT very well and an experienced IT professional being a totally useless teacher. It's not all about professional experience in the subject being taught.
"for example if you have less than £75,000[1] of pure profit per year you are not required to have a VAT number at all."
It's got nothing to do with profit. It's on non-VAT exempt turnover. The current UK threshold is £82,000.
See: https://www.gov.uk/vat-registration/when-to-register
After the HP-Agilent split in 1999, the healthcare divisions were the first to be sold off -- to Phillips. Components spun off as Avago. Test and measurement (the original HP) shrunk a lot, I think, and recently split off as Keysight Technologies, leaving Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis as Agilent.