Isomatic UK Weblog

We have now had a good opportunity to compare a National Health Service hospital with the adjoining private hospital. Conclusions:
1) The senior doctors and surgeons are the same because they all work in both.
2) The furnishings, floor covering and general ambience are far superior in the private hospital.
3) The electronic equipment is very similar but there are specialist machines in the NHS hospital that are unavailable in the private hospital.
4) The food in the NHS hospital has improved enormously in the last 18 months so that it is almost as good as in the private hospital.
5) Senior nursing staff in the private hospital are more inclined to 'hands-on' work than in the NHS, where they just supervise.
6) The NHS is less officious about infringements of the rules, e.g. use of mobile 'phones, most important when one is trying to run a business while visiting one's wife in hospital every day.

We gave DHL-Danzas-Securicor-OmegaExpress another chance after the disastrous performance throughout November 2003. Delivery is late, supposedly arriving today. We have to have someone sitting at our stock-holding location on a Saturday to wait for delivery. It had better be early !

We are about to try TNT for trans-european shipments of 3 phase converters now. For UK transport TNT has proved to be quick and cheap but with a tendency to damage the goods. We have arranged for full insurance but this does not cover the cost of failure to deliver working goods when they have been damaged.

Labels: Transport

I was hasty in blaming food poisoning for my wife's hospitalisation. This has been ruled out by the microbiology department. We hope to find the cause today, prime suspect being the Noral virus that is sweeping continental Europe. If so, then my wife and I have just imported it to the UK :-(
I recovered fully in 48 hours without hospital treatment although with 6 kg weight loss.

We often receive requests for brochures for custom designed transformers. I wonder how one can produce a brochure for a product for which every customer has a different design.

The Bulgarian visa saga continues. The two engineers we intended to work 2 weeks in the UK, 2 weeks in Bulgaria, for 9 months have been refused visas on the grounds that this requires a work permit.

From where originates the current misuse of the word accessibility ? My dictionary defines accessible as meaning 'within reach' or 'approachable', therefore accessibility means the degree to which something is within reach or approachable. If one wishes to limit the word to mean within reach of those with a disability then clearly it is necessary to make that distinction otherwise one is almost certain to be misunderstood. The Watchfire / Bobby web site on accessibility makes no mention of disability until deep into the detail, yet that seems to be the intention. Others are following this bad example.

I suppose the plan is to 'hijack' the word so it can no longer be used in its true meaning, like gay, bandwidth, wicked, etc. This is so irritating to people of my age group that I for one refuse to buy services or products from those that misuse the English language.

We have received two E-mails asking why we sell splitters and microfilters for SDSL when this does not provide an analogue channel. My answer is, customers buy them !

Are the writers confusing SDSL and SHDSL ?

I have just visited the finest and most memorable web site I have ever seen.

A young woman rides her Kawasaki Ninja through the restricted area around Chernobyl. This is what can happen when engineers become careless !

It is a very popular site on a small server so best to view early in the day. I had no problems at 07:00. Click on:
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed

Last night we saw Goff Dubber's Dixieland Band at The Epsom Playhouse Tuesday jazz club. Great evening !

This will be the last post for a few days as we will be spending an extended Easter weekend in Paris. We will be staying just off the Boulevard St. Michel on the Sorbonne side. On return I will provide a link to the hotel if it is any good.

Saturday and Sunday I revamped the following web pages:
3 phase convertors
Rotary phase convertors
Rotary phase converters
3 phase convertor understanding and selection

Malcolm Reeves at Full Circuit read my blog about Nigerian scams. He recommends reading Beating 419 scams. His favourites are:

I LIKE TO WORRY SHEEP
and
A STUNT TOO FAR

(starring Klench Mychiques - Stuntman Extraordinaire)

But they are all pretty good.

The cessation of visa issue at the consular services section of The British Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria is a serious problem for genuine businesses. We have two engineers due to come to the UK in April who cannot renew their visas at present, despite the fact that they have proved from previous trips that they always return to Bulgaria.

The UK government is guilty of using a sledgehammer to crack a nutshell. This is not to decry the fantastic performance of our government in acheiving a stable growing economy for no fewer than 7 years. This is a far better record than ever achieved in the lifetime of my 90 year old mother !