Somewhere to write, discuss, reflect, ponder, muse and mull over life, stuff, things and anything that takes my fancy.
It seems that they’ve slipped back into their old ways, only this time its not ‘cash for honours’ it’s ‘donations for development’ or so it might seems.
Here’s the BBC’s take on it.
I suppose it’s one way of getting your planning permission!!
I wonder which carpet this lot will be swept under this time? They will soon be running out of spare corners! Northern Rock, Child Benefit Records, ‘Donations for Development’ only one corner left!
Working as I do on the technical side of Publishing, I’m still amazed at the increasing speed of technical change and the various predictions about where the direction of publishing is heading.
We’ve all become publishers of some kind, posting our musings and opinions in Blogs, uploading our pictures to image sites, sending in our comments to ‘have your say’ news and media sites.
But where is it all heading? Who will be the dominant companies in 30-40 years time? Here’s an interesting video that I came across when searching for some background information for a client. It paints an interesting picture of the future, with some interesting twists. Have patience, it’s worth watching the whole video – 6 minutes.
After over 254 years (it took its first patient in on 23 October 1753) of treating patients, the old Royal Naval hospital at Haslar in Gosport Hampshire is to close! So says a reply posted on the 10 Downing Street petition site.
This will be a great disappointment not only to the many service people who have used the Haslar facilities over the many years, but also to current local community that have come to depend on the medical services that Haslar provides today.
Here is the reply in full from the Petition web site…
The Government’s priority is to ensure that injured personnel receive the best possible treatment that is available. This requires them to be placed in the most appropriate specialist environment, with associated equipment and trained personnel who have the necessary specialist clinical expertise. For many years Haslar has had nothing like the range of medical facilities and expertise that are found at a major trauma Trust hospital such as Selly Oak. In addition, Selly Oak offers much better links to the military airhead at Brize Norton, and a regional civilian airport that can handle our largest aircraft within easy reach of the receiving hospital. That is why Selly Oak Hospital now serves as the primary receiver of our overseas casualties. This is why the Government sees no need to retain services at the Royal hospital Haslar after planned closure date late 2009.
When the 1994 Defence Costs Study led to the closure of most of the UK’s military hospitals, it was originally intended to retain Haslar, primarily to train military medical personnel for their operational role. But the required number and range of cases did not occur, and in December 1998 the Government announced its decision to phase out Haslar and consolidate training within the NHS, building on the establishment of the Ministry of Defence Hospital Units (MDHUs).
Since then, the hospital has undoubtedly provided services for the local community. The majority of its patients have always been civilian, but the medical needs of the Armed Forces are best served through access to facilities and training in a busy acute care hospital that is managing severe trauma on a daily basis.
Although it ceased to be a military unit on 31 March 2007, Haslar is still owned by the MOD and will continue to function, under the existing partnership arrangement with the Portsmouth NHS Hospitals Trust, until late 2009, when most clinical services, along with both NHS and some military staff, will transfer to the redeveloped Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, Portsmouth. Other military tasks currently retained at Haslar will be transferred to the RCDM and elsewhere. Until the hospital’s closure, military doctors and nurses will continue to serve at Haslar, many of them as part of the Portsmouth MDHU. The MDHU will continue to play a major role for the foreseeable future in providing training for our medical people, as well as providing healthcare for both military and civilian patients.
I was out driving to an appointment this morning listening to that great BBC Radio 4 program Today and heard the lead item about Fish Discards!
I first posted on this back on 26th September 2007, after listening to a BBC Radio 4 Costing the Earth program about the state of the English fishing industry during which is talked about the amount of discards involved in the process of commercial fishing.
I posted again on the 3rd October 2007 about fish discards being discussed in the raised its head again over the weekend in this Sunday Telegraph article.
Now it seems that the whole of the BBC has woken up to the story!
It was interesting to listen to Fisheries minister Jonathan Shaw suggested calls to this unbelievable waste of such an important resource to increase the UK Cod landing quotas to solve the problems of discards! Surely if we are to save/manage fish resources successfully, it is more logical to 
reduce the number of days that fishing boats are allowed out to catch fish, but when they do go out, let them land whatever they catch in their nets and get that to market instead of letting this obscene practice of valuable fish being dumped dead back into the water. It will also allow more fish on to the market to help keep the cost down, that is of course if the Supermarkets pass on those savings to us!
Cod Prices today: ASDA £13.48 per Kg, TESCO: £13:74 per Kg.
What a mess the EU has become, Farmers paid to grow nothing; Fishermen paid to dump fish back into the water, perhaps the EU could pay me not to work!
As another UK Remembrance weekend is upon us, I have been amazed at the dwindling number of Poppy sellers around.
I was in London this week for meetings and the only one’s that I came across were at Paddington mainline railway station.
I was surprised not to see any at London Underground station entrances. Plenty of ‘Free’ newspapers, but no poppies for sale! I wonder if this is affecting the fund raising of the Royal British Legion?
As a reminder and as part of their Never Say Die Remembrance Day series, BBC Two broadcast last night the story of the daughter of a former Far-East prisoner of war who was trying to prove that an anonymous wartime picture was of her father.
It was pretty tough viewing, but in the end Pat Bienkowski was able to prove that the emaciated person in the photo was in-deed her father. Sadly he died after coming back from the Far-East, clearly never fully recovering from his experiences. Anyone who watched the program cannot have been moved by hers and many of the Far-East WW II veterans stories.
Much has been written about the atrocities of war in general and about the horrors of the Holocaust, but I think more needs to be documented about the inhumane suffering that many Allied service people and their families went through during and well after the conflict was over.
Some additional links of interest.
I do hope that you purchased your poppy and gave a reasonable donation.
Ever tried to obtain general information from government departments about what you think should be public knowledge?
I’m still having a battle with the Department of Health about obtaining information for another web site about how much money is spent each year on buying new beds for the NHS!!
Take a look at this very interesting article about lobby group Transport 2000‘s (now re-branded Campaign for Better Transport) attempts to obtain information from the UK’s Department of Transport.
It’s another great example of typical government lip-service, championing the openness of government on the one hand, whilst being obstructive on the other.
Now, how many beds was that!!!
Well certainly not from some of the UK’s Nuclear power stations.
According to recent statements from British Energy they are still unable to restart four of their nuclear creators that were shut down last month.
Apart from a drop in its share value, the UK is still without its full electricity generating capacity. With winter on its way, could we be in for power blackouts as some ‘experts‘ have predicted.
Here’s some links with updates to the latest status reports from British Energy
I’ve just downloaded the latest version of Windows Live Writer. Like many others, I tried a number of different Blog editing software and none, I repeat none, do what Windows Live Writer does… Create and Edit Blog entries easily and without any errors (that I have found yet.).
Well done Microsoft on a very good product – it’s still in Beta, but I’m wondering what they can do to make it even better!
Saw this news story about the State of the Planet on the BBC web site.
The small amount of info quoted in the article makes for interesting reading but is restricted to just a very small number of highlights!
If you want the whole story you will have to download the entire report from here. It’s a 22 MB’s PDF file containing 572 pages long! So it’s best to ‘right click’ and ‘save as’.
Don’t let the size put you off, there are many graphs, images and table that explain just what has been going one and how all of us have to face up to the fact that the worlds resources are finite and in the end they will run out! How soon? That really depends on you and I!!!!!
Found this interesting site keeping track of expenditure for the 2012 Olympics. Good to see that someone is focusing on what I think will be the most expensive Olympics ever.
2012 Watchdog. Part of the Tax Payers Alliance web site.
Beasley's Place 