In 1918 global travel wasn't as available as today. Let's say we take an ultra-fearful approach and shut down the entire nation until the end of 2020. Never mind the economic apocalypse. Never mind the beaten spouses, abused children, disrupted education, increase in depression and substance abuse and all the other social costs - it's all about safety, right? So we get to the end of 2020 and.... now what? Maybe we should continue to play it safe and lock down for another year..... maybe two years..... or, well, how long should we lock down for? Sooner or later people have to go out again, assuming they didn't starve along the way. What happens when the first aircraft from abroad lands? The simple reality is that we live in a free and open society. That means a degree of risk. People don't stop to think about the risk they take when they get in their car and drive. They don't worry that the fast food they just ordered might be less than perfectly hygienically prepared. They don't stop to think that someone might shoot up the store they are visiting. They don't worry that the person walking towards them on the sidewalk might push them into the traffic or stab them. They don't assume every other person on the road is a drunk driver or fleeing the cops and willing to do whatever it takes to escape. But because the media is relentlessly pushing the "risking lives" agenda people start to think that everyone around them is a source of a lethal virus.
1 gbps is only possible over Optical Fiber cables. I guess in your area connections are over copper cables only. DSL connection offered over copper cables wouldn't give you more speed than 10-20 mbps. One other technology is wireless broadband which gives up to 40 mbps. I don't know where and how much it is implemented though.
More Travel, More Risk, Don't you agree. My point is don't indulge in conspiracy theories, Mindless Protests, Cooperate with authorities. Don't treat this as a hoax. The threat is REAL. People are protesting for silly things, Some time deprived of saloons, restaurants, Cinema and many silly things is not end of the world. People are being obstinate enough to even refuse to practice social distancing & use masks and all. I understand that we can't lockdown for forever. Nobody is proposing it forever. But, Whatever lockdown measures being implemented are failed by people themselves. If we could have a solid lockdown of 3 weeks, we could stop the cycle. Then we can gradually open. Lockdown also helps us reduce fatalities till we are able to evolve effective treatment protocols. We need to be cautious and recognize the danger & practice safety till we have vaccine/treatment available. But, I see people refusing to see the danger. They don't want to give up few silly things for a few days to survive and have them for rest of their days. They are not ready to suffer some inconvenience even.
Yeah, I suppose, but to be fair, Virgin Media. Every other provider would give me single-digit speed and claim 'super fast high-speed broad band'.
I've heard good stuff about Virgin Internet more recently, although by the time I got rid of their TV service I was glad to see the back of it. Often times I'd get problems trying to watch the programming with dropouts and jitter which curiously never affected the ad breaks. The best one I had was when I'd been away for a week, got home to find nothing worked at all and the "help" desk tried to tell me there wasn't a problem at all. Where I lived I got a service that was "up to" 20MB but was actually more like 4. Not bad for the suburbs of the capital. Because it was with a third-party provider they blamed BT and BT blamed them, and neither would budge. BT were kind enough to offer to send an engineer out but said they'd charge some inordinate amount of money if they didn't find a fault. I don't trust BT at all, especially given I'd have no way of knowing if they actually did find a fault in their equipment, so decided to just put up with glacial internet.
You're missing the point of the objections completely. I'm not treating it as a hoax, but it's hard to take "authority" seriously when it tells me it's far too dangerous to be one of three people in a store buying shoes but apparently it's perfectly safe to go to Walmart to buy shoes. When it's safe for me to cut my lawn but deadly for someone else to cut my lawn. A protest isn't mindless when what you want is the right to continue to earn a living. What do you propose people do when they have been told they aren't allowed to earn a paycheck, they've gone with no income for several weeks, they have nothing left but still have to eat? When they can't run their business but the unemployment system is so overwhelmed that they can't get that either. What are people supposed to do? It's not a protest to point out that you still have to eat, whatever the governor may think is necessary. It's not a mindless conspiracy to wonder why one county is allowed to open while another with objectively better statistics is told to stay closed. It's not going to kill me if I can't go to a restaurant for a couple of weeks but it might kill the restaurant if nobody is allowed to go for a couple of months or more. Because, you know, there are still bills to be paid there as well. Never mind, the restaurants can go bust, right? It would be a brave soul indeed to even try to open a new restaurant now, given that state governors across the nation have set a precedent that they might just shut everything down with no more than a couple of hours' notice. Lockdown helps reduce one set of fatalities while increasing another. By the same argument we should ban motor transport because we'd save so many lives. We'd suffer all sorts of other consequences but, you know, it reduces fatalities so must be good, right? But let's say we had a solid lockdown of three weeks. Nobody is allowed out of their house, even to go out into their own yard. Nobody is allowed to go food shopping, designated people wearing hazmat suits will deliver your government-approved rations to your door. What happens after three weeks? Has the virus gone away? What happens when the first plane lands at an airport bringing people from other countries with different rules? Or will you just close the borders forever? Silly people, not willing to give up silly things for a few days. How selfish of them. Except the things they are being told to give up is their income and "a few days" is currently two months and counting. Silly people, with their silly ideas that they might like to eat and pay their bills and all those other selfish things. If you seriously think that being unable to buy food for your family for an unknown amount of time is nothing more than "some inconvenience" I really don't know what to say, other than to point out that you are free to hide under the bed if you really think it's that dangerous but don't get to demand that other people starve because you are afraid.
School partially reopens this week. Although I'm doing better being unemployed than working (at least for a little while longer). Also, I think BF has actually broken. "Server busy" error for the last three days.
Spent some time yesterday tinkering with code for the church web site. I'd done battle with assorted bits of code that read lists of files and present them, and suddenly had the idea I could load them all into an array that I can slice and dice any way I want, meaning I can create one nice generic function and use it in a few places. It's been a while since I worked with PHP arrays so I fumbled around a little but now it all works, so I can give some thought to how to turn a test page that is functional into a live page that is not only functional but also at least reasonably nice to look at. Hopefully my new cable company comes to visit later this week. I've got a roll of coax cable from an electrician friend as well as a tool to put the ends on. It's a pretty easy arrangement - he just needs me to let him know how much cable and how many ends I used so I can pay the company for them.
Really struggled with motivation this week but finally getting some progress on the room I"m working in. So far I've got six of the eight power sockets wired and tested. The remaining two are currently placeholders that are little more than cable ends joined together with wire nuts. It works, it's just not ideal. Today I got three sockets along one wall seen to. I'd trimmed the board such that it was about 1/16" too long to fit into the space. Rather than fiddle trying to shave such a small amount off with a jigsaw and risk ruining the board, I decided to bite the bullet and carry my miter saw up to the room. It meant I could trim a whisker off the edge of the board very fast, and get the board in place. It turned out the holes I'd cut in the drywall behind the board were ever so slightly off - the worst by about 1/8" - so I cut those a little bigger so the back boxes would fit through. It's really fiddly trying to wire sockets into back boxes that low down, especially since I don't have much space behind to compress the surplus cable. But they are wired and tested, and all looks good. Next up was the adjacent wall. The two pieces of board I had for that wall added up to about 7" longer than I needed, so I tried to figure out the best way to cut and join so the join wasn't too noticeable. There's a good chance the join will be behind a dresser anyway, but I'd like it to be as inconspicuous as possible in case it isn't. The annoying thing with those boards is that I forgot to cut the hole for the back box before staining and lacquering, so I had to carefully mark and cut a hole with the finest jigsaw blade I could find. Thankfully I didn't cause any damage to the finish, and now that socket is also wired. What's left is to cut one piece of board to fill in the gap in one corner (no sockets required), and other boards to cover the last wall. This wall will also be a pain to work with because I need to cut through the drywall, then cut a hole in the sound deadening vinyl behind the drywall, then cut away the insulating panels, all through a hole in the drywall. It's an exercise in patience, but thankfully I have the tools that turn it from an impossible job into a merely irritating job.
The really frustrating part is dealing with cables and trying to comply with as much of the electrical code as is practical, given 100% compliance simply isn't possible without work major enough to render it unviable. Of course trying to work on something less than six inches off the floor comes with its own challenges.... Still, at least that part is nearly done. I'm not sure what lacquering the floor is going to be like, although once the power sockets are in place I'll be able to put a window fan into both windows and suck a lot of air out of the room. That should help with the smell of the lacquer.
When I was growing up my dad turned the attic into 2 bedrooms, a half bath and LOTS of storage space. I had to help him with some of it. Know he hired a plumber for that part. Don't know if he did the electrical but know he did everything else.
The guy who did a lot of the work on our old house before we moved was a registered gas engineer and did gas work, plumbing, carpentry - just about everything except electrics. I found it curious that he was fine working with gas pipes but not with electrical cables. I wouldn't touch gas pipes, just because getting anything wrong could lead to such spectacular self-immolation. The first aspect of home improvement I learned to do was electrics and, since I've been working on this house, I've been doing more of just about everything. Except gas - we don't have gas in the house and I'm fine with that.
I get to do some renovation this week. New toilet, but it means I'll do the floor as well since the lino has been stained by leaks from the old toilet. Not exactly tango-level renos though.
You guys are awesome, you can do these things yourselves. I know about electrical, but not that good with physical work. I can't do any plumbing, carpentry etc.
Today I got the last of the baseboards cut to size, holes for the back boxes cut and the boards edged and sanded smooth. Holes are cut in the drywall, insulating vinyl and insulating foam to take the back boxes. Cables are pulled through the newly cut holes, and the baseboards are now sitting in the room with the stain drying. Tomorrow I can lacquer them. Annoyingly I'm going to need to add trim because the walls aren't quite straight and neither is the floor, so I'll need something thin to cover over a few minor issues there. It's doable, just a bit annoying to have to do it. Of course with the old lath-and-plaster the people who did that work could just pin laths to the studs and then plaster to a smooth surface.
Poverty is a great educator, as is trouble finding people who can do the job properly within three months of being asked. Round here good people are booked up well in advance, so it's really hard to get people scheduled in the right sequence. Then there are the ones who do a shoddy job, and I'd rather do a reasonable job myself than pay someone to do a shoddy job.