Week 140, Danger of death

"Do you know anyone interested in this?"

A mystery person offering items found at the end of a rainbow.  A rainbow that distributes bounty on a semi-regular basis to this one person.

I say mystery person, a local wide-boy known to one and all, the only mystery was the conveyor belt of 'things'.  Always with the stray goods, the odd items, always found in "a derelict house."  Of course they were, that's right, there's millions of derelict houses with stuff lying around waiting to enter the marketplace.

A Penny Black on an envelope, a fondue set, a collection of first edition Beatrix Potter books, a laminated badgers foot, a solid silver cocaine spoon, a gold disc commemorating over 200000 sales of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards version of Amazing Grace, you name it, he'd had it.  On this occasion it was an Eventide 2016 rack-mount digital reverb unit, brand new in 1983 and probably less than a year old at the time.*

I guess I was being asked if I knew anyone because I played the guitar.  Surely it wasn't being offered to me - I had a guitar bought off a mate for a tenner which was worth at least 8 quid less than I paid for, and played through an amplifier made out of a broken cassette deck I'd retrieved from a bin.  I wasn't in the market for anything that cost more than a loaf of bread or that wasn't edible.

I passed, but I guess someone, somewhere, stumped up the 25 quid he was after for the bit of professional kit worth a factor of a hundred more than all my other gear put together.

It must be a risky business going in all those derelict houses, or that one bountiful derelict house, as he ended up dead at an early age.  That's the sort of clunky cause and effect explanation that was offered to me in a pub, "Did you know x is dead?  He had a brain tumour, it must have been all those drugs."  I'd say it was just one of those things, there's always the danger of death, it had nothing to do with the derelict houses, or the consumption of a rainbow array of drugs which consisted of nothing more than a bit of hash and a few mushrooms.**  But who is interested in boring facts when you can populate and reinforce your belief with your prejudice.

* I have no idea what it was but this is the right era.
** Karma?  No, that suggests a punishment, it's random chance.  Plus that's a wooly belief system.

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Week 139, The Last Tuesday

A supposedly soggy day

Clammy

Yet, not humid enough to cause discomfort

Stuffy

Not without joy

A frown at the basket of flowers

Where none were requested

Take my work and burn the residual once consumed*

* Based on non-existent events and devoid of meaning

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Week 138, I want my cone tree back

Some not inconsiderable gusting has shaken and rattled through the branches.

As John Major might have put it.

The fruitful bounty of the trees has been denuded of that plenty by the arrogance of selfish, ignorant blowhards.

As someone else might have put it.

And the wheels turn, grinding our fruit to mulch.

etc.

There is no appetite for the type of exit that will damage us.

...

You get the picture.

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Week 137, British Electric

Let's go back in time.  Back to when homes had as many as two electrical appliances, both of them lightbulbs, to the decades before Tricity ovens drove an upsurge in demand for the supply of electricity.

In 1910 only 2% of British homes had electricity, by the start of the 1920's this was still under 10%.

In the early years of the last century The British Electric Transformer Co. were contracted to provide a quantity of these transformers in the South of England and another quantity of them for the North West.

Generally it was the more well-off that could afford to run electricity, although not all of these transformers are in prosperous areas.  Whether these area were prosperous a century ago is another matter.  The one pictured below however is in the Sheffield suburb of Ranmoor, one of the most affluent areas in the country, and almost directly next to the substantially sized Ranmoor Hall.  Ranmoor Hall having many rooms, and probably more than two lightbulbs, was almost certainly part of the reason why there is one of these transformers at the end of their road.

Standardisation of voltage and frequency, and the National Grid, did for these charming pillars what sticking your head in the oven did for town gas.

There are three of these boxes in Sheffield, one in Audenshaw, two in Surrey and one in Wimbledon.  All are Grade II listed.  There are possibly more lurking within the pages of the Historic England listings and out on the streets but I have yet to locate them.

Here are links to the Historic England listings. 

And here are some fusty old ceramic and copper relics inside.

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Week 136, Leg o' Lamb

I've no idea why this leg of lamb, wrapped up and all the way form New Zealand, ended up resting on the grass behind the office.  Apparently these things cost a lot of money, I have no idea, I haven't eaten lamb since before The Darling Buds of May* was on TV and don't recall ever having bought any.

It is no surprise that a meat thing should be so pricey, this one was the size of a small car.  And while it lay in the blazing sun it was picking up a few passengers keen to make use of a mass of free protein.

When I returned to dispose of it later it was gone.

Taken by a fox? - Surely too large for that.

Taken by one of the late night garden revellers who leave their detritus? - If they like their meat 'ripe' then perhaps, but surely not.

Taken by the carnivorous grass? - This is obviously what happened, the earth absorbed it and next week the bone will be regurgitated and wrapped in the shredded plastic like a land-based owl pellet.

* This is purely here as a navigational aid to indicate the year as roughly 1990/91.

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Week 135, The bees are all mine

Or they would be if they were a type of miner bee.

I'll go out on six tiny limbs and say that these are probably Bombus terrestris, a variety of bumble bee.

They certainly look like bumble bees rather than mining bees - mining bees are a much different beast.

The bees aren't mine, other than by default due to living in a cavity underground next to a wall in my garden.

They are welcome, and more power to their minuscule elbows.

Each time one comes out of the ground I cry - up the workers!

ISO 6400 shutter speed 1/1250th and the wings are still blurred, super fast bee.

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Week 134, Encryption begins, IT illiteracy continues, bluebell ends

The IT systems failures at the end of last week has handed the Tories a stick to beat the NHS with.  Journalists who should have access to expert analysis found themselves either unable to locate experts, or unable to understand the experts they had located.

It appears that the Tories don't understand the cause of the problems, or if they do they are taking advantage of widespread ignorance to pass the buck.  It is obvious that the journalists don't understand the cause of the problems and are failing to hold the Tories to account.


Summary of events:

• The Tories cut the NHS budget.
• Replacement for NHS software systems that only run on Windows XP cannot be funded.
• Windows XP goes out of general support.
• The Tories cut funding of Microsoft extended support for NHS Windows XP systems.
• NHS systems inevitably and predictably get infected with malware due to a security vulnerability of Windows XP.
• The Tories (specifically Amber Rudd) say the NHS "must learn" from this and upgrade its IT systems.

It was Theresa May who was responsible for cancelling the extended support for Windows XP from Microsoft when she was Home Secretary, a post with responsibility for cyber security.  Support which would have meant patches would have been available for many out of date systems run by the NHS.

Why weren't NHS systems updated to newer versions?  Reasons why that might be are: lack of availability of software; lack of technical staff with the right skills; contracted-out services with no interest in improving systems; complexity of the process.  All of the reasons are directly attributable to the lack of available funding to pay for the process.

I didn't hear a single journalist ask what the reasons were.  I heard one expert mention software applications being unavailable for newer versions of Windows, but the journalist failed to recognise the point being made.


Why hadn't the various NHS trusts upgraded from Windows XP where they could, surely the NHS has an Enterprise Licensing agreement with Microsoft?

In 2010 David Cameron's Tory government cancelled the Enterprise Licensing agreement that the NHS had with Microsoft after deciding that there was no business case or budget to renew it.  The decision to scrap the licensing agreement pushed the burden of software licensing onto individual NHS trusts, these Trusts would have been ill placed to manage such agreements.  

Cancelling an Enterprise Agreement required every single license covered by that agreement to be recalculated - every computer desktop, every application, every desktop which connects to a server, all of this involves interpreting individual license types of Byzantine complexity for each use case type.  The cost of recalculating the licensing will have cost the NHS a fortune, and mistakes would have been made, and during this process Microsoft also targeted NHS Trusts with audits.  Individual license agreements made by the NHS Trusts with Microsoft would have been in totality more expensive than the original Enterprise Agreement covering the entire NHS, before the additional cost of managing the agreements.


When Amber Rudd says that the NHS "must learn" from this and upgrade IT systems she is demonstrating her ignorance and being disingenuous.  And to suggest that the NHS hasn't learned from this is outrageous when they have raised the issue of risk repeatedly.  It is clear to see from this however that the Tories have successfully managed to pass the buck for a massive cock up which should lie squarely at their door and instead have blamed the victims.

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