A safe public health system?

On Friday last week, I took an ambulance ride to hospital with a suspected MI. When I got to the emergency dept, every single bed was occupied, so it was obviously a busy day for them. Also obvious was the fact that there were insufficient staff on hand to deal with that many patients. This is a system that is very clearly overstretched.....dangerously so in fact. After I'd been there for a short time, I suffered another episode of severe chest pain, followed by my blood pressure dropping through the floor and my pulse dropping from 70+ to ~30bpm. Fortunately, my partner Michelle and a friend of hers who works at the hospital just happened to be there at the time. Her friend managed to attract the attention of someone to come and render assistance before I passed out. Good thing I wasn't there alone!
Now, despite the obvious pressure that these people are working under, they all did an absolutely fantastic job. Everyone, from the paramedics who collected me and took me to hospital, to the doctors and staff who looked after me until I was transferred to the private hospital (which is a story for another time), did an absolutely wonderful job.
But honestly, anyone who thinks that the public health system can suffer funding cuts and forced redundancies and *still* continue to offer the level of service necessary to save peoples' lives is seriously deluded. The people making these decisions need to spend a few hours in emergency, shitting themselves that whatever happened to land them there will happen again, and there won't be anyone there to help when it does. Maybe then they'd see just how thinly spread this service has become!

Guild Wars 2

Yeah baby ;)

Mac OS X Lion on VMware 8?

Considering the difficulty I've had with trying to get Mac OSX Lion installed and running in a VM, I thought I might record the steps I had to take here, in case it saves someone else from having to go through the same frustrations.  The main issue was an error message telling me that the host operating system had disabled the CPU, every time I tried to boot the VM.  Turns out, Mac OS is very picky about hardware and didn't like my new i7 3770K CPU.

So, first things first.  You need to get yourself a copy of Mac OS X Lion.  Google and uTorrent are obviously your friends here :) The one I'm using is actually a bootable .vmdk called 'Mac OS X Bootable .vmdk (For VMware).  It's big (about 4.3GB), but it's the easiest way I found to get this going.  Then you need to get yourself a copy of VMware Workstation 8.  The version I've got is 'VMware-workstation-full-8.0.0-471780'.

Next step is to get the unlocker files for VMware, which adds the Mac OS version to the list of operating systems that you can install.  The unlocker I used came from http://www.souldevteam.net/blog/downloads/ but there are others that work just as well.

So, once you have your VMware unlocked, you need to create your VM. You can use the wizard, or do a custom one....it doesn't really matter, as long as you give it enough memory and hard drive space.  I set mine up with 4GB of RAM and a 40GB SCSI hard drive.  Next step is to attach the bootable .vmdk hard drive as an additional drive.

Once you have the VM set up and the bootable drive added, you should be able to boot the VM to BIOS and select the bootable .vmdk drive as the boot drive.  At this point, you may encounter the CPU disabled error that I did.  If you do, you need to add a line to your VM config file.  The line you need is:
cpuid.1.eax = "0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0101"
That should solve the problem.  That information came from HERE. If it works for you too, register and give the guys some credit where due!

After that, all you have to do is set up your primary drive using the drive utilities and then install Lion on it :)

Exciting scientific discoveries

Bundaberg particle physicists made an exciting discovery this week when they uncovered the Hicks Bogan particle, which has been widely thought to be the particle that gives bogans their unique properties. They were even more surprised to find that the Hicks Bogan particle is comprised of even smaller component parts, most notably a mullet, 3 teeth and a pair of thongs. Research is continuing.

I hate your children

Is it so much to ask to be able to go into a public space and not have to be subjected to someone's irritating, whining, crying or just piss poorly behaved brats?? FFS. I went to the Mummy exhibition at the museum yesterday. Fantastic display, apart from having to view it while surrounded by whinging, smelling like they've just shit themselves children. Honestly, wtf are children of that age going to get out of being dragged to an event like that?? Apart from pissing everyone else off by crying or loudly and continuously complaining about how bored they are. Now I'm in a shopping centre, surrounded by people dragging their noise generators around again. I just want to be able to go somewhere and not have to endure this crap, but apparently that's just no longer possible :(

Children should be seen and not heard.

If I was to turn up at my local Woolworths grocery store and start screaming at the top of my lungs and throwing grocery items all over the floor, the police would be called and I'd be whisked away to the lock-up quicker than you can say 'Crazy old man with no pants'.  With that in mind, here's a question for those of you out there who have poorly behaved children.  Why, then, is it apparently acceptable for your children to do it?  I'll answer the question for you.....IT ISN'T!  It also begs another question.  If you're so hopelessly useless at controlling the unruly behaviour of your kids, what possesses you to drag them to the grocery store in the first place?  And don't try telling me it's because you have no choice....that's crap.  Even this bogan filled backwater that I live in has online grocery shopping now, delivered directly to your door!  So why drag them around with you and inflict them on the rest of us?  Is it simply because you have to put up with them, so you feel the need to make everyone else suffer as well?  Or do you really not understand how offensive it is?

I'm so convinced that I'm not the only one who feels this way that, if I had the money, I'd start a chain of adults only grocery stores where children are banned.  We'd have some light jazz playing on the overhead speakers and there would be a barista on staff at every checkout to hand you your latte as you wait for your purchases to be totalled.  No screaming kids....no mothers screaming at their screaming kids to apparently stop them from screaming.....no whining, tantrum throwing children clogging up the aisles and begging to be run down by my trolley.  Surely I'm not the only one who'd be prepared to pay extra for service like that?  It would certainly beat the shit out of my grocery shopping experience this afternoon.....

Pure class

Nice. I just spotted a guy picking up discarded cigarette butts out of the gutter and the planter boxes on the footpath, then smoking them. This place just gets better and better.