Category: In The News

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Reading is at a Low Ebb

Seems that 2015 has been a slow year for my reading. I’m still working my way through the Ake Edwardson series featuring Inspector Eric Winter. I am still enjoying the series but time is the factor not enough hours in the day. We need another day between Saturday and Sunday for all the extra weekend things.

I am publishing this form a a unified wordpress.com page where I am able to  post to all of my sites.

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Drug Rehab Serbian Style

I saw an article on BBC world news about a drug rehab program on in Serbia. You can see the original article by clicking here including a video. A man is seen being beaten with a shovel. The article goes on to say that this centre is being run by the Serbian Orthodox church. These religious backed centres never ceases to amaze me. In the name of religion every perversion imaginable is perpetrated. The press has been full of countless stories of excesses committed in the name of any deity you care to think of.

This is however an new take on rug rehab. Do these people think that they can beat drug addiction out of people? It makes almost as much sense as a good exorcism.

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Windows 7 RC 32 Bit

Well this is my first post from a fresh install of Win7 RC 32bit on my laptop which is an ASUS PRO31P. Because I was having problems with Word 2007 that I couldn’t fix I was thinking of reinstalling Vista, but Win7 RC appeared at the same time so I thought what the hell. I did an upgrade install. The process was rather painless but it took several hours. In the end the machine booted without incident all I had to do was reactive my antivirus software Kaspersky 2009 and I was off.

The installer inspected my machine and identified three programs that I needed to uninstall prior to upgrade. One was a virtual CD Rom Magic ISO the other OCR software Finereader, I can’t recall the third but it must have been something that I was not using. After the install all my settings files etc were there including my cheesy background image.

Since I have had the laptop I have never been able to upgrade the graphics drivers (GEFORCE 7300) seems that neither NVIDIA nor ASUS had any particular interest in the graphics chipset for Vista. This has not been an issue as far as I was concerned with the exception trying to run Google Sketch Up. As soon as the machine was running I tried this program and too my amazement it ran without incident. There had been a Google workaround which I had to use to fire this application up on every occasion. This was with the Geforce Go 7300 driver that was in the installation package! There was more and update for the video driver as well. The only other issue was running Pinnacle Studio 12 this did not seem to fire up readily and when it did the GUI seemed screwed up. I was able to run this in Vista SP2 mode (interesting as Vista SP2 isn’t generally available) and seems to be OK but I have not extensively tested it yet.

I have been running Win 7 Beta on A Pentium 4 machine since it arrived and this did increase my confidence to install the release candidate. I have been underwhelmed rather than disappointed with Windows Vista so a move was on the cards. However I do think that my next laptop will be a MacBook as we already own one have had no problems to speak of with it. Then again Win7 may put all that to rest.

 

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This is why Medicine needs to be regulated

Doctor ‘harvested’ insured patients to rort public fundsYet another story of alleged mismangement by a member of the medical profession. This is a good example of the power that medicos wield within the health care sytem. Heaven help anyone individual who tries to stop them.
Who is going to challenge the head of surgery in a trauma centre? Good to see that such people are being brought to task. Ultimately it is patients who suffer putting too much trust in medicos. That said there are many doctors who ply their trade with patients in mind. It has not stopped health becoming a hugh business.

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Teens charged over flamingo bashing – ABC News Australian Broadcasting Corporation

This really takes the biscuit! Assaulting a blind Flamingo in a Zoo the offenders all around 18 years old will no doubt have their names withheld. They are described as “Two 17-year-old boys, an 18-year-old man and a 19-year-old man have been charged.” the 17 y.o. boys will be shielded from the  public because of their age. It would be hard to imagine that they were not fully aware if what they were doing.

I suppose the stupidity and callousness of people never ceases to amaze me

Original artice below

Teens charged over flamingo bashing – ABC News Australian Broadcasting Corporation.