Windows 7 and TP-Link wi-fi adapter weirdness…

Those of you who’ve been paying attention of late will know I have a shiny new PC, running Windows 7 and Office 2007 and, now I’ve got my head around the sheer, bloody-minded obtuseness of the latter, especially Word, I’m very happy.

There was an amazingly annoying, and initially elusive, problem though.

When typing, in Word, Twitter, or anywhere else, online or off, every few words the cursor would go skating up the page, and the insertion point would go too, leaving me typing blanks.

Simultaneously,

The end of writing?

According to the Guardian, today, students are engaging in a mega-whinge because having to, you know, like, write makes their hands sore. (Mind you, the first thing the young freelance hack writing the article does is use “data” as a singular form (as in “data is”), which makes me wonder what the subs were doing.

However

Chronicles of the Heart, Part 27…

Just finished a letter to my new cardio consultant, partly because with 20-20 hindsight, my heart problems may well go back to the seventies, and partly because my GPs since 1984 have been fuckwits, as you’ll see, and I have no confidence that their records will reflect anything even approximating the truth. As, of course, I already know my hospital records don’t. There’s also the problem of one of the tests I think he has in mind being quite high risk, as I’ve mentioned previously (22% risk of stroke).

This is the letter (sorry folks but it is, of necessity, a bit long):-

The hypocrisy of Cameron…

McDonald’s to create 2,500 UK jobs, says the Guardian, before going on to quote David Cameron as saying:-

“I am delighted to welcome McDonald’s announcement of new jobs.

“McDonald’s has

Thank you, Tweeps…

My thanks to all those on Twitter who were concerned about me last night and this morning.

Yesterday evening something blew the main circuit-breaker here, and it took me ages to figure out that it was my just-out-of-warranty fridge-freezer. I changed the fuse, which was clearly burnt, plugged it back in, but it still kept tripping the breaker – until suddenly, it didn’t. It was however, as silent as the grave, and clearly not working.

It’s a giant, American-style model, with

Is David Cameron actually sane?

Given his rabid hatred of chronically sick and disabled people, I have questioned, many times, whether Cameron is actually sane on the subject.

I believe, as I’ve said, that he’s using his late son as a benchmark against which our degree of disability is judged, and found wanting, or he hates us for still being alive. Or both. Probably both.

Now, though, he really has slipped his clutch, losing all contact with reality.

In Monday night’s Telegraph (hat tip to @langtry_girl), he says

Renationalising the utility industries and NHS?

Note – I published this earlier with a title that didn’t really mean much, so I changed it.

A guy on Twitter last night was getting his knickers in a twist over George Osborne selling off “our” water to the Chinese  (who bought into 8.68% of Thames Water – hardly a buy-out).

For openers, the basic premise isn’t just flawed, it’s about 30 years out of date. Thatcher sold off the family silver,  privatising the publicly-owned utility companies, including water – it hasn’t been “our” water for a long time.

This BBC article  does suggest that Osborne is directly responsible for the deal, but it normally takes weeks, or  even months to set up such a transaction, not a few days, and for it to happen now it must surely have already been in the pipeline. However, if Osborne really is forcing through deals like this

Selling off the family silver has already been done…

This post has been republished as http://ronsrants.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/renationalising-the-utility-industries-and-nhs/ as the title didn’t really match the subject.

Changing from XP to Win 7…

Yesterday I abandoned my long love affair with Windows XP and upgraded to Windows 7 which, frankly, sucks, being fragile and unstable, at least as far as Windows Explorer is concerned.

You must have seen those dorky ads MS used to run, with people claiming “I’m a PC!” and that they were personally responsible for elements of Win 7? Well, if they were responsible, it must have been on the days when they were let out of the asylum for a bit of fresh air.

Blue Badge Buggeration . . .

Don’t you just love witlessly crap civil servants? DirectGov has an online application for Blue Badges, and it beggars belief.

Apparently, if I apply online I have to provide one of the following, in the form of a “certified photocopy” whatever the hell one of those is. Certified by whom? A notary? (Where