Early Risers.

[newbryford]

28 Sq M of decking has been stained with a suitable liquid.

Conservatory (otherwise known as new WFH office) radiator has had the final wire brush/power drill to remove the final of many layers of paint (it's only taken 3 weeks with multiple applications of paint stripper to get to this point).

Knees and wrists will let me know about the above tomorrow.

At least Mrs NB provided bacon butties and ham toasties at suitable times.

 

A very productive day - until - just as I was finishing the decking.

 

A phone call at 4.50pm from a customer who had sent in an email at 12.45pm (and received an automatic "it may take longer than usual" reply), followed it up with a post on our FB page, before eventually ringing our phoneline. That takes him through a couple of "is it urgent?" messages.

 

It took a few minutes to find out what problem he was having and I did say that I wouldn't be able to deal with it properly until I WFW on Tuesday. Then he said "it's not urgent, but where do we go from here?"

CUNTCON2 was invoked.

 

Then a phonecall from a close friend to say that his father has the dreaded CV.

 

My mood was cheered up a tiny, weeny bit by a couple of good sales on ebay.

 

Stay SANE folks.

 

Cheers,

Mick

 

 

 

 

Edited April 19, 2020 by newbryford
typo

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. Where did the day go? I've done very little of nothing today. A few thoughts on the idiots protesting against the lockdown in the USA. They appear to be Trump supporters so I wonder if many of them go down with the coronavirus and therefore with many of them possibly dead or on a ventilator could it affect the outcome of the presidential election?

Edited April 19, 2020 by PhilJ W

[Ozexpatriate]

5 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

They appear to be Trump supporters so I wonder if many of them go down with the coronavirus ...

Some will ...

 

5 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

... therefore with many of them possibly dead or on a ventilator ...

Only a small percentage ... (fortunately for their families and loved ones)

 

5 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

... could it affect the outcome of the presidential election?

Numerically, no. Whether the electorate can remember with clarity and objectivity how the administration handled this pandemic, 198 days from now is a fascinating question. There is always an "October surprise" to distract people.

[Barry O]

Goodnight all!

Baz

[JohnDMJ]

 

19 minutes ago, newbryford said:

A phone call at 4.50pm from a customer who had sent in an email at 12.45pm (and received an automatic "it may take longer than usual" reply), followed it up with a post on our FB page, before eventually ringing our phoneline. That takes him through a couple of "is it urgent?" messages.

 

It took a few minutes to find out what problem he was having and I did say that I wouldn't be able to deal with it properly until I WFW on Tuesday. Then he said "it's not urgent, but where do we go from here?"

CUNTCON2 was invoked.

"but my mate down the club..." Sorry, operation to have tongue surgically removed from cheek booked!

[newbryford]

1 minute ago, JohnDMJ said:

 

"but my mate down the club..." Sorry, operation to have tongue surgically removed from cheek booked!

 

From the conversation I had- I believe that he may have asked others as well and received a similar answer to mine.

 

I will reply to his email with my usual good grace.................................

(Although the keyboard may take a few hits)

 

 

[The Stationmaster]

G'night all

[monkeysarefun]

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Australia is doing well. The big moat helps too. I had a nice chat to my brother yesterday. I'm glad for Australians.

 

 

yes, I think we got hit with the lucky stick so far - example 4000 test in Vic over the weekend for one new case, 3500 tests in NSW yesterday for only 6 new cases.  Zero new cases in QLD.

 

Not sure how this will pan out long term though, we should manage to eliminate the virus given the minute numbers who are infected here but we probably would then end up as an overall community with no herd immunity and thus become perhaps  the most vulnerable country to further outbreaks in the years to come.

 

Would have huge rammifications as to when we can restart international travel, immigration etc.

Edited April 19, 2020 by monkeysarefun

[Ozexpatriate]

2 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

... we probably would then end up as an overall community with no herd immunity and thus become perhaps  the most vulnerable country

I personally think any notion of COVID-19 herd immunity anywhere is moot until a vaccine is available. The concept of herd immunity is only relevant when you can guarantee that high 90s percent of the population is immune and the only way to do that is through vaccines. (With the apparent contagiousness of COVID-19, the vaccination rates for herd immunity will be exceptionally high.) With the lethality of COVID-19 for a small percentage of cases, you can't intentionally expose any amount of the population.

 

Measles was essentially eradicated in the US. Due to the anti-vaxxer movement, vaccination rates had dropped and in 2019 the US had a pretty substantial measles outbreak - the largest number of cases since 1992. we had lost herd immunity for measles.

[laurenceb]

Night awl

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[Coombe Barton]

2 hours ago, Barry O said:

The Office for National Statistics give daily updates. Some of the data they produce could be used by John to generate loads of graphs, pie charts etc..

Baz

I do. I'll leave others to do that stuff on coronavirus as I have other priorities

 

My power calculation charts are from material that doesn't reach the ONS site on a daily basis. The material I use is updated every five minutes and looks at both sources and consumption.

 

[EDIT] I also use the ONS guidelines, and the answer to one of my assessment questions currently is the charts I produced last week for the power consumption blog, which massages Excel charts to the nearest ONS needs. I've given them the data and the PNG of the results and say - produce that.

 

Edited April 20, 2020 by Coombe Barton

[J. S. Bach]

Good night owl from the Piedmont.

[chrisf]

Greetings one and all

 

I am still not used to having Sunday lunch at home, for in more normal circumstances I am usually out and about somewhere or else have something less elaborate than a Sunday roast.   Yesterday it was roast pork with roast spuds and roast parsnips.  Not only did I manage to forget to make the apple sauce but it was not till a good two hours after I finished that I remembered the bottle of white wine.  Call me old-fashioned if you like but I believe that Yorkshire pudding belongs with roast beef.  Having said that, if I find myself dining in a carvery I usually have Yorkshire pudding whatever meat I choose and do not worry about whether it was made on the premises or taken from a packet labelled “Aunt Bessie’s”.  The unsmiling countenance of Aunt Bessie does rather put me off.  I know she is not real but that does not stop her looking like a miserable old cow.

 

We have the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and the late Alan “Fluff” Freeman to thank for the association of bagpipes with “Amazing Grace”.  John Newton, the slave trader turned curate of Olney who wrote the words, probably never gave them a thought.  Fluff found the recording by the Scottish Drags on an album and played it to death on his evening Radio 2 show.  Eventually the record company released it as a single which topped the charts for six weeks.  It still sends a shiver down my spine over 40 years later.  As for uilleann pipes, my introduction to them was at the hands of Finbar Furey and what better way could there be to meet them!  The missionary work by Kathryn Tickell for the Northumbrian small pipes has been most effective and her OBE is well deserved.  Some of the East European pipes deserve to be better known too.  Personally I love it when someone rocks up a storm with the Scottish variety.  Check out the version of “I love how you love me” by Paul and Barry Ryan, of all the unlikely people.

 

Rick has reported the sad passing of John Farrow, principal of Hertfordshire Rail Tours and later UK Railtours.  As if treatment for cancer were not enough, it is cruel that he was taken by Covid19.  I salute a thoroughly good bloke.   

 

Best wishes to all

 

Chris

[Gwiwer]

Good morning. Welcome to Moanday. 

[TheQ]

8 hours ago, AndyID said:

 

I'm surprised it didn't fall to bits

Oops that should be per minute , and at Max frequency it was only a short scan. 

Basically it was the full scan up and down till you found the target,  then as you acquired the target the scan range reduced as the scan rate went up. 

It was done with hydraulic motors..  And renown for dripping, sometimes showering oil everywhere. 

[Barry O]

Ey up!

 

Sunny but still very chilly up here in the North West Leeds Highlands. 

 

I am moving into isolation in the dining room as we have a man coming to fix afew problems we have in the house. He is coming today to sort out the items he needs. He may not get them all at once so reckong his visits may go on into next week. Pah!

 

Not a good nights sleep. May be due to some cheese I had last night?

 

Mugatea has arrived so...

Positive thoughts to all ERs.

 

Time to twist Monday into letting me get the best from my time today.

 

Baz

[jamie92208]

In response to Rick's greetin, Good Moaning to all and of course sundry.  Not a lot has happenned overnight but the day will be fairly busy. First off the nurse will arrive shortly to take blood from Beth. There is no truth in the rumour that it's blue. Then I'll set off to get a medical to enable me to keep mi ibuses and 7.5t wagons on my licence. The latter group was very useful to me and I may need it again. Then, as long as I pass, off to The Danglies to post the licence forms back with my actual licence.  St Jean, 40 km away is currently  our nearest post office.  Some shopping will take place whilst I'm there then home.  

Amazing Grace and the Scottish Dragoon Gaurds brings back a memory. At somevpointvwhen itvwas in the charts they were booked to play at half time at Elland Road. My post was at the entrance to the players tunnel.  As the players came off on they marched and played. The groundman's comments were unprintable. Anyway 10 minutes later back came thd players and officials but the band played on. No one had told them that half time was only 10 minutes and they had a 15 minute set with Amazing Grace as the finale. They carried on and thd pkayers strolled around on the pitch.  At one point the ref showed them a red card which brought a huge roar from the crowd. Eventually Amazing Grace came to an end and they marched off to another huge roar. Quite an amusing episode at the time.  I've no idea how the match went, my only interest was the time and a half.

 

Regards to all.

 

Jamie

 

 

[TheQ]

11 hours ago, pH said:

 

Was that intentional? Because, from what you've said about where you grew up, I think you may know the meaning of 'mow' in Scots:

 

https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/mow_v1_n1

 

 

No it wasn't,  but given the age of the family involved it's probably correct.. 

[leopardml2341]

Morning all.

 

Another day at the (home) office; best get to it....

 

@MickNB,

 

It's very subtle, but it gives me great satisfaction; my sign off for work emails varies based on the level of f**kwittery the originator had demonstrated. So a perfectly reasonable email will get a 'Regards' exceptionally pleasant ones a sign off greeting and 'Best Regards'; through Thanks, Thank You and absolutely nothing before my name and corporate details.

 

Best part is, AFAIK no-one has put together a pattern yet; well they wouldn't would they - that would amount to a recognition of the previously demonstrated f**kwittery

Edited April 20, 2020 by leopardml2341

[TheQ]

Mooring awl,  inner Temple Hare, 

 5 hours + 2 hours a pretty good sleep. 

 

Porridge flavour today... Whisky,  I'm not driving and have no intention of using power tools.. 

 

To go with the whisky I may plant some Heather..  2mm scale. 

 

Having used the flappy wheel thing two days running, my fingers and hand are really complaining. So today will be long board sanding,  actually not to long a board as the keel is only 4 ft long. 

Other than the keel, I'm begining to have thoughts of restarting work on the boat itself, as its getting warm enough.. 

 

Ben the alarm clock Collie switched it on this morning and dead on 06:00 stirred from his bed to give me the stare.. 

A chilly wind, north easterly , at 9C cloudless sky.  Partridges just outside the back door today,  But Ben got the scent of something else, I suspect deer came up to the house overnight. 

With the rain we have bluebells,  they obviously needed some water.. 

 

Time to do not a lot for an hour or so.. 

 

 

 

[AndyID]

1 hour ago, TheQ said:

Oops that should be per minute

 

I suspected that was the case but the vision of that lot oscillating at 60Hz was much too entertaining.

 

The great thing about ERs is the huge range expertise that it covers. Things that don't seem quite right tend to get stunned PDQ.

[iL Dottore]

7 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

Here we have tested 2% of the population, probably the largest percentage anywhere in the world and have 71 deaths out of 6600 cases, giving a rate of just on 1%. Still a lot more than the flu, but a lot less than Italy, UK US  and other countries without a decent testing regime are showing,

That’s the problem, without a standardised testing regimen, applied equally across countries, we won’t get a good picture of infection rates and resulting mortality (defining cause of death is another can of worms: every country, if not municipality, has its own criteria. e.g. Mr Smith has Stage IV lung cancer and contracts COVID-19 and in a week he is dead. So what killed him? Malignancy or virus?)

6 hours ago, Barry O said:

...Currently, less people have died than those due to Cancer. As my family has been badly affected by this "illness" I hope people alao note the problems this pandemic is causing in our hospice movement in the UK...

You’ve just highlighted something that gets overlooked in the present (hysterical???) climate: there are other diseases and illnesses out there equally, if not more, lethal but somehow haven’t caused governments (and the media) to push the panic button.

I suspect that the reason COVID-19 is of so much concern is that it is highly contagious, rapid in onset and highly lethal in vulnerable populations which taken all together create the “perfect storm” that can (and has) overwhelmed the health services of any country.

6 hours ago, BSW01 said:

On the subject of figures, death rates etc, I’m with Mark Twain when it comes to this, as he said “there’s lies, damned lies and statistics”. Personally, I think the only way to get any sort of idea of how deadly this virus is, is to take a snapshot of the deaths for the first 3-4 months of 2019. Then a snapshot of the deaths for the same period this year and compare the 2. If there is a huge difference (which undoubtedly there will be) between the 2 sets of figures it can only mean one thing, this bl00dy awful virus.... 

Sadly, Mark Twain’s comment on statistics - which IIRC referred to how politicos manipulate the numbers to their own advantage - has been twisted into a popular distrust of statistics. As a branch of mathematics, statistical analysis is a rigorous and demanding methodology, but sloppy application and a general lack of numeracy has given stats a bad reputation (correctly applied, you actually can’t “prove anything” with statistics) not helped by politicos and pundits.

Your comment about comparing all-cause mortality for Q1 2020 to all-cause mortality for Q1 2019 is an interesting one. I’ve read that preliminary comparisons (we obviously don’t have all the Q1 2020 data yet) suggest that although the Q1 2020 are higher, as would be expected, they are not so much higher than Q1 2019 (but as I said data for this year is incomplete).

5 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

...Measles was essentially eradicated in the US. Due to the anti-vaxxer movement, vaccination rates had dropped and in 2019 the US had a pretty substantial measles outbreak - the largest number of cases since 1992. we had lost herd immunity for measles.

I really get annoyed by the “non-science/anti-science advocates” with a special deep loathing reserved for the anti-vaxxers. Clearly these people are both unable and unwilling to learn even a minimum about the science and history behind vaccinations. Have they even the remotest idea about the lethality of measles, mumps or diphtheria? Before widespread vaccinations, mortality due to infectious diseases was at COVID-19 levels, if not higher, and on a yearly basis!

When they do come up with a vaccine (it’s merely a question of time - although vaccine development can be lengthy) I wonder how many of the anti-vaxxers will refuse a coronavirus vaccine and which clueless “celeb” will campaign against immunisation?

[jamie92208]

There is a phrase somewhere that goes along the lines of "you can never underestimate  how thick some people are".  In the UK they have a clueless airehead called Holmes who apparently supported thd theory that 5G masts cause Covid, on air on national TV.   Then that loon Icke was given publicity. Words fail me.

 

Jamie

 

 

 

Edited April 20, 2020 by jamie92208

[AndyID]

9 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

That’s the problem, without a standardised testing regimen, applied equally across countries, we won’t get a good picture of infection rates and resulting mortality (defining cause of death is another can of worms: every country, if not municipality, has its own criteria. e.g. Mr Smith has Stage IV lung cancer and contracts COVID-19 and in a week he is dead. So what killed him? Malignancy or virus?)

You’ve just highlighted something that gets overlooked in the present (hysterical???) climate: there are other diseases and illnesses out there equally, if not more, lethal but somehow haven’t caused governments (and the media) to push the panic button.

I suspect that the reason COVID-19 is of so much concern is that it is highly contagious, rapid in onset and highly lethal in vulnerable populations which taken all together create the “perfect storm” that can (and has) overwhelmed the health services of any country.

Sadly, Mark Twain’s comment on statistics - which IIRC referred to how politicos manipulate the numbers to their own advantage - has been twisted into a popular distrust of statistics. As a branch of mathematics, statistical analysis is a rigorous and demanding methodology, but sloppy application and a general lack of numeracy has given stats a bad reputation (correctly applied, you actually can’t “prove anything” with statistics) not helped by politicos and pundits.

Your comment about comparing all-cause mortality for Q1 2020 to all-cause mortality for Q1 2019 is an interesting one. I’ve read that preliminary comparisons (we obviously don’t have all the Q1 2020 data yet) suggest that although the Q1 2020 are higher, as would be expected, they are not so much higher than Q1 2019 (but as I said data for this year is incomplete).

I really get annoyed by the “non-science/anti-science advocates” with a special deep loathing reserved for the anti-vaxxers. Clearly these people are both unable and unwilling to learn even a minimum about the science and history behind vaccinations. Have they even the remotest idea about the lethality of measles, mumps or diphtheria? Before widespread vaccinations, mortality due to infectious diseases was at COVID-19 levels, if not higher, and on a yearly basis!

When they do come up with a vaccine (it’s merely a question of time - although vaccine development can be lengthy) I wonder how many of the anti-vaxxers will refuse a coronavirus vaccine and which clueless “celeb” will campaign against immunisation?

 

Yup! 100% correct IMHO for what it's worth, which ain't much around here.