Getting On - Comedy on BBC Four
It’s back for a Second Series, I’ve not laughed so much at a BBC Comedy.
Getting On is a satirical British sitcom based in a present day NHS hospital. It is largely ad-libbed by its cast, who also wrote the series. Jo Brand is one of the writers and actors.
“It’s my perception of the NHS today”, I’m sorry to say, after having first hand experieince of the NHS over the past two years!
Watch it on BBC Four or BBC iPlayer.
Yes, I know it’s from the lyrics’ – Take That’s Patience, but it seems very fitting here …..
I’ve been experimenting with taking photographs of birds for a while, but the problem I’ve always had is how to get close-ups photographs of the subject, without disturbing them whilst they feed on the feeders, I don’t have a bird hide or jacket yet, in the past I’ve used remote control to fire the camera, but the birds were suspicious of the camera when it was too close to the feeders, and they wouldn’t feed. I do have a spotting ‘scope, and with a camera adaptor mounted on a digital SLR, I’ve been experimenting with the camera in manual, and manual focus for many months. I think these are the best shots I’m going to get until I purchase that big Canon Lens!
and before you critique the following photographs, please remember the birds were photographed at 100m, in manual focus, manual exposure, and remotely fired to avoid camera shake on the tripod!
Great Tit on peanuts
Goldfinchs and Sparrows on niger
I’ve got the week off, to do with as I please. (I’ve also got the flu/cold – so it’s also good I’m off-ski) I’ve finished The Company Accounts, and I’ve completed my Self Assessment Tax Return. So I’m really organised for the moment!
So lets go through the Sqaure Window :- a Balloon Chase recorded on my Flip camera!
Music dedicated to Brian Cant (Play Away), and Derek Griffiths (Heads and Tails), hope you like it…
It’s nice to see My first website has been captured on the internet archive on the Wayback Machine. Created in 1996, does that make me one of the first green computer re-cyclers! (yes, my HTML skills were a bit dodgy, – nothing changes!)
my first website
it’s here, if you want to check it out.
http://web.archive.org/web/19991012035710/pcm.users.netlink.co.uk/
I get many people asking me, about upgrading their personal computer with a memory or processor upgrade, because it seems slow.
But none of them are aware they can increase the performance of their computer for free!
Many years ago, at the Microsoft Campus, Reading – I attended a briefing by Microsoft that stated that the ‘new’ NTFS filing system based on the older HPFS filing system did not become defragmented. HPFS or High Performance File System is a file system created specifically for the OS/2 operating system to improve upon the limitations of the FAT file system. The FAT filing system was used in DOS.
The NTFS (New Technology File System) is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.
NTFS supersedes the FAT file system as the preferred file system for Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. NTFS has several improvements over FAT and HPFS (High Performance File System) such as improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions such as security access control lists (ACL) and file system journaling.
Both HPFS and NTFS were supposed to reduce fragmentation of data, but with the increase of disk drive capactity, and the increase of very large partition sizes, based operating system size have increased, Office installations have increased in size considerably over the years, data and file fragmentation has increased considerably, and can adversley affect disk performance of your personal computer.
Disk fragmentation is a where storage space is used inefficiently, reducing storage capacity and in most cases performance, because the files are not stored in contiguous blocks on the disk.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 have their in-built Defragmentation tools scheduled to run automatically, at a scheduled time.
However, Windows XP you have to run the tools manually, to defragment the disk drive. It can take many hours to completely defragment a disk, if you’ve never defragmented it.
C: drive on my computer (before defragmenting)
This laptop has never had it’s disk drive (C:) defragmented, the blue shows contigious files, and the red shows heavily fragmented files, reducing disk performance.
Several hours later ...
About four hours later…
Many hours later ...
many hours later …
and finally …
C: Defragmented
Depending upon the level of degragmentation and the amount of free disk space, defragmentation can take many hours, this laptop took about 9 hours to degragment the hard drive.
You can use Microsoft own in-built degramentation utility which will defrgament you hard drive manually or at a scheduled time for FREE. But I prefer to use Diskeeper , and I’ve been using it for years, it has many options – InteliWrite Fragmentation Prevention – increases system performance by preventing fragmentation before it happens, I-FAAST, and Automatic Defragmentation.
34% Performance by defragmenting
If you are going to purchase one PC application purchase Diskeeper – download the trial and try it out!
Back in the DOS days, a friend of mine, used to defragment his disk, with Nortons Degfrag (NDD.exe), before he started to compile software code, it also gave him the opptunity to grab a quick cigarette on the fire escape! (Hi Si – if you reading this!) – and it did make a difference to compile times!
PLEASE NOTE DO NOT DEGRAG YOU SSD (SOLID STATE DISKS) DISKS, UNLESS YOU ARE USING HYPERFAST aware Defrag utility – I don’t believe that any Microsoft defrag utilties are SSD aware. (or you will wear out your SSD!)
I finally took my car today to the garage today, the vibrations had got the better of me, and I could no longer see out of the rear view mirror, because it was vibrating so much, I’ve had the radio turned-up and could still here the vibrations, and I must have tuned out the noise! Lindsey would complain it gave her a headache, and when ‘Boot Ferrule Man’ visited me at the beginning of the month, he suspected it was the drive shaft or wheel bearing, also confirmed by ‘Bargain Cottage Man‘.
There was some Police, Stop, Action program the other evening, and after the car crashes pictured on the television, and with the darker nights and wet, damp days, I thought it wise to visit the garage and get some items fixed on the car. Back in December last year, I reported my ABS had gone offline, and I should have taken it back to the garage, but never did…..well MOT is due next week, so this stuff had to be fixed.
I dropped my car at the garage this morning, and the Mechanic, dropped me off at my clients site to take back to the garage, he confirmed it was the passenger side front wheel bearing, and was rather worried driving the car, a few miles, in fear the wheel would drop off. He said it was very bad.
Later, after parting with a monkey, the mechanic told me, you must be a mad ****** driving that car, I wouldn’t have driven it four miles, and certainly not at speed.
Driving my car is now like driving a ****ing rocket ship!!!
Fantastic – so there’s a moral here somewhere…..
(oh, and I also had new drive shaft, ABS, springs, and brake calipers), next week it’s MOT and Service! (cannot wait for that!).
Whoops, you may have noticed earlier, no andysworld!
Hosting issues with the server…..it’s back now….
thanks
looks like the last few blog posts, didn’t make it to twitter, it appears the twitter api has changed, to stop spam taking over twitter, it was only a matter of time, before it became more complicated to auto-tweet!
so stick that in you pipe and smoke it Apple haters! So maybe you might be tempted to purchase an iPad now, it might do Flash in the future!
It would appear that Apple have made some changes to its iOS Developer Programs licence.
What the decision broadly means is that developers can use third-party development tools to create apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
What it really means is Flash apps are about to start flooding the App Store. A few are already awaiting approval, according to reports.
Let’s wait and see…..
After another few failed attempts, and some diagnosis, it was the sealed lead acid battery that wasn’t providing enough power (Amps) to fire the rocket cluster. I tried charging the battery with a car battery charger and that went horribly wrong and smelly, and the plastic case melted on the battery, because my special charger for the seal lead acid battery had also failed.
So I purchased a new sealed lead acid battery and here are the results
Quick disclaimer (don’t try this at home kids), you could get seriously hurt!
This test was to check the rocket mounts were secure to hold in the two rocket motors, before further completing the rocket assembly. You can clearly here the warning tone before firing the rocket motors, both rocket motors ignite simultaneously, the rockets both burn at a constant rate, until the ejection charge which would normally deploy the recovery mechanism, e.g. a parachute is heard.
Looking back at the video, I think there is a slight delay between the rocket motors!
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