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16 Mar 12:57

Bone Tired. Underpaid. Performing Surgery. What Could Go Wrong?

by Nathan Kohrman

When I visited my cousin Beija in Munich last summer, her boyfriend, Julius, told me he was in his second year of surgery residency, and I was surprised by how well rested he looked. He and Beija had just returned from a boozy wedding over a long weekend, and as we watched soccer, ate schnitzel at a biergarten, and met family for lunch downtown, I kept expecting him to get a text and have to leave. But the weekend kept on rolling. It was a stark contrast to medical training in America, where residents refer to two days off in a row as a “golden weekend,” and spend three to seven years working 80 hours a week. As I start my last year of medical school this year, it makes me think about American medical training in a new light.

Designed by an influential 19th-century doctor with a cocaine addiction, residency in America has had extreme hours and low compensation for more than a hundred years. Today, though most residents have nearly a decade of postsecondary education—four years college, four years medical school—most make less than $70,000 a year, and work so many hours it amounts to near-minimum wage. After decades of resident-led advocacy, in 2003 the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which oversees residency programs, capped resident hours at 80 hours a week, averaged over four weeks. In 2011, it placed a 16-hour cap on how many consecutive hours first-year residents can work, a response to research showing that a less-punishing schedule reduces serious medical errors. In 2017, the ACGME eliminated the cap on first-year resident shifts, which a recent paper found may reduce the risk of serious medical errors by 32 percent.

In an emailed statement, an ACGME spokesperson defended the removal of the working hour cap by citing research showing that shorter shifts actually lead to an increase in errors. They also pointed to the many committees, initiatives, and memoranda that have constituted their response to resident burnout. “No one aspect of well-being is more relevant than any other,” said the spokesperson. “A system-based problem requires a system-based collaborative approach.” 

But the ACGME’s own reforms don’t meet this standard. Take the paper showing that shorter shifts can lead to increased errors. The paper’s authors conclude that their findings may be misleading because “contrary to National Academy of Medicine recommendations, the ACGME 2011 work-hour limits were not accompanied by firm workload limits or funding to support increased staffing.” The NAM proposed a “system-based collaborative approach,” and the ACGME ignored it, letting residents work the same punishing schedules but in shorter increments. 

There are stronger structural forces in Europe that keep the conditions of residency more livable. While medical training varies from country to country, all residents work far fewer hours than their American counterparts. Starting in 1998, the European Union capped working hours at 48 per week, and no more than 13 consecutive hours. Julius told me that while his contract limits him to 42 hours a week, residents sometimes work as many as 60 hours when things are particularly busy. American residents, meanwhile, often work more than 100 hours for three weeks in a row without violating regulations. A 2021 study found that more than half of North American residents suffer from burnout—a workplace malady defined by the feelings of exhaustion, cynicism, and futility—compared to 30 percent of their European counterparts.

Why are the demands of American residency so much greater? Part of it is Europe’s robust labor movement. European residents are well organized and willing to strike for better working conditions. In 2016, 37,000 residents in the UK (then part of the EU) went on strike when the government proposed they work longer weekend hours without additional pay. To be sure, there are some encouraging signs in America. At LA County+USC hospital, where I’m in training, residents threatened to strike after years of making subminimum wage. The county health department, which had been stonewalling them, agreed to give them a 15 percent pay raise and a $3,000 housing stipend increase.

But only 15 percent of American residents are in a union. Many believe they have less solidarity with nurses—stalwarts of the American labor movement—than with attending physicians. Residents see themselves not as labor but as management-to-be. Senior doctors benefit from this arrangement, often delegating their most grueling work to residents, and reducing their own incentive to help reform a system that lets them sleep longer and see their family more. Hospitals, health systems, and insurance companies also benefit from the cheap, plentiful, and often excellent care that residents provide.

The ratio of doctors to sick people is also more forgiving in Europe. European countries have nearly twice as many doctors per capita as the United States does—4.9 vs. 2.6—and by most metrics, Americans are much, much sicker than Europeans. As the global health scholar Elizabeth Bradley shows, spending on social services improves health outcomes. Europeans are likely healthier because they spend more on preventive care, have a more robust safety net, and have more infrastructure for public health. Fewer Europeans end up in the hospital in the first place.

The reason there are fewer doctors per capita in the US is also straightforward. The federal government funds most residency programs, and in 1997, the number of residency spots funded by Medicare was capped at 100,000. It’s increased by only 40,000 since then, even as the country’s population has increased by 62 million people. Even if there were more funding, organizations like the ACGME have strict processes for granting accreditation to new residency programs. According to the sociologist Paul Starr, professional organizations have used accreditation both as a tool for improving the quality of American medical education and as a gatekeeping mechanism. It’s simple labor economics: The scarcer a profession is, the higher its wages.

And Americans do earn more than European doctors. An Irish primary care physician makes on average $172,000 a year, while an American makes $220,000. But European doctors are stretched less thin. At most American teaching hospitals, residents and attending physicians have the virtually impossible task of treating patients who have fallen through our tattered safety net, all the while understaffed. Though the country faces a shortage of as many as 124,000 doctors, the American Medical Association advocates adding only 14,000 residency spots.

So what can individual residents do? In the short term, form unions. Residents are low in the pecking order but numerous and essential. Unions are their best bet to counter the powerful political forces—like hospitals and health systems—that profit from every hour of their labor. Unions would also allow residents to advocate for longer-term policy reform more effectively. Since training new doctors takes a decade at least, unions could push for more nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and clinical pharmacists to help reduce residents’ workload by managing patients’ chronic diseases, like diabetes. (The AMA has lobbied to prevent states from allowing non-physician providers to perform this type of care, even under supervision of a doctor.) Unions could also pressure lawmakers to get rid of the cap on Medicare-funded residency spots, and to fund social programs that keep patients out of the hospital.

But some of the barriers to reform are psychological. There’s a perceived valor to medical training. We feel special yet selfless, and it makes us easy to exploit, and even makes us defend the conditions of our own exploitation. In Europe, residents understand on a deeper level that the time they spend relaxing in a biergarten can be as important to their education—and providing good-quality care—as the time they spend learning to suture in the OR.

This piece has been updated. 

19 Jan 22:09

Three more music Spectrum Analysers. All that glitters...

by Techmoan

Demonstrating more flashy trashy music spectrum analysers.

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31:30 Item 3
40:29 Summary
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24 Jul 18:45

Slumlord Millionaires

by David Dayen
Jeanette, a single mother with four children, rented a house in South Los Angeles with a rotting fence. When she finally asked her landlord to fix it, she was informed that the fence’s poor condition was actually her dog’s fault, and that she needed to pay $500 within two days or face eviction.
19 Apr 00:31

Why Don’t People Cook?

by Dave Schuler

Last night my wife had an early dog-training class, so I threw together a quick early dinner for us. I poached a chicken breast, cooked some pasta, and made a sauce of caramelized onions, mushrooms, chicken breast, olive oil, garlic, a splash of sherry, a little parsley, freshly-ground black pepper, and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese. From turning on the burner to serving the dinner took just under a half hour. I opened no cans, took no prepared food out of boxes to put them into the microwave, and had complete control over the fat, sodium, nutritional content, and flavor of what we ate.

As I put the pot of water on to boil for my pasta, I thought “I’m sure it will come in handy for something.” That’s a reference to one of my favorite little cookbooks, Edouard de Pomiane’s French Cooking in Ten Minutes. It’s one of the handful of cookbooks (along with The Joy of Cooking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking) that I think every serious cook should have.

It’s a charming little book. Here are the first few paragraphs:

First of all, let me tell you that this is a beautiful book. I can say that because this is its first page. I just sat down to write it, and I feel happy, the way I feel whenever I start a new project.

My pen is full of ink, and there’s a stack of paper in front of me. I love this book because I’m writing it for you. It’s nice to imagine that I’ll be able to let my pen go and you’ll understand everything it writes down. My ideas run on faster and faster—I’ll be able to say everything in less than ten minutes.

My book won’t even be ten pages long…It’s going to be ridiculous…Worse than that, it will be incomprehensible.

A more scientific approach will make things clearer, so I’ll start by telling you everything you should know before you start ten-minute cooking, even if all you’re going to do is boil an egg.

The first thing you must do when you get home, before you take off your coat, is go to the kitchen and light the stove. It will have to be a gas stove, because otherwise you’ll never be able to cook in ten minutes.

Next, fill a pot large enough to hold a quart of water. Put it on the fire, cover it, and bring it to a boil. What’s the water for? I don’t know, but it’s bound to be good for something, whether in preparing your meal or just making coffee…

You see?

Pomiane is dated now. Today’s electric stoves are much better than they were in France in 1930 when the book was written. And today there are an enormous variety of frozen vegetables and any number of other time-saving gadgets.

I still find Pomiane inspirational. It’s full of ideas and for harried working people ideas for tasty, nutritious things to eat that can be prepared in ten minutes are always handy.

15 Apr 01:11

Wisconsin Republicans To Vote On The Right To Secede From The Union

by Doug Mataconis

At its convention next month, the Wisconsin Republican Party will vote on a resolution supporting the right of states to secede from the United States:

To secede or not to secede.

That will be the question for Wisconsin Republicans at next month’s convention.

Earlier this month, the party’s Resolutions Committee voted in favor of a proposal that says the state party “supports legislation that upholds Wisconsin’s right, under extreme circumstances, to secede.”

A version of the so-called “state sovereignty” resolution was first OK’d last month by one of the state GOP’s eight regional caucuses as an assertion of the state’s 10th Amendment rights. The measure also calls for ending all mandates that go “beyond the scope of the constitutionally delegated powers of the federal government.”

Top Republican officials hoped to kill the fringe proposal during a meeting of the resolutions panel at the Hyatt Hotel in Milwaukee on April 5. Instead, the committee made a few edits to the resolution and adopted it on a split vote.

Now, the matter will go for final approval to the delegates attending the state Republican Party’s convention in Milwaukee on May 2-4.

Gov. Scott Walker, the leader of the state party, distanced himself from the resolution last week.

“I don’t think that one aligns with where most Republican officials are in the state of Wisconsin — certainly not with me,” Walker said at a press event on Friday.

Leaving aside the historical irony of a state Republican Party potentially endorsing the idea of secession or the fact this is happening north of the Mason-Dixon line, things like this are just another example of how extremist elements within a political organization can end up doing things that embarrass the organization. I anticipate that the state party will ensure that the resolution fails at the convention next month, but the fact that they even will be voting on it means that the media is going to be paying unwanted attention to stupid things, that can’t help the image of the party as a whole. At some point, one thinks, Republicans will start to learn this lesson.

15 Jan 16:51

The Privilege To Shut Up

by Ken White

One of the most consistent messages I offer here is about interactions with law enforcement, and can be expressed in two words — shut up — although "oh you dumb son of a bitch will you for the love of God shut up" might capture the flavor better.

In brief, the reasons to shut up are these: cops are not looking out for your best interests. Cops are looking to make, or close, a case, which they seek to do according to their cultural preconceptions. If you answer their questions, cops' evaluation of your words will be colored by their habitual assumption that you are lying. That assumption may be premised on their culture, their simmering mood disorders, their pathological tendency to associate you (whoever you are) with the very worst people they encounter on the job, and their evaluation of evidence they may or may not have understood. If you talk to them, it is somewhere between possible and likely that you will incriminate yourself, whether or not you have done anything. If you talk to them, it is possible that some types of cops will turn around and have you charged with a crime based on the talking itself, upon a thoroughly transparent theory that you "obstructed" them. Your instinct is to talk your way out of the situation, but that is an instinct born of prior interactions with reasonable people of good faith, and inapplicable to this interaction with people (1) who have mostly unchecked power over your and (2) who are, at the most optimistic, indifferent to how the interaction will turn out for you, and (3) who are perfectly capable of lying about what you said (or getting it wrong because they didn't understand it) and having their word presumed true by the criminal justice system.

So, I say, don't talk to the cops. Ask to speak with an attorney, and get competent advice before you answer the cops' questions. Are there mundane situations in which you might rationally decide to talk to the cops — say, if a neighbor's house is burglarized, and they come to ask if you saw anything? Sure. But you should view each interaction with the cops with an extreme caution bordering on paranoia, as you would handle a dangerous wild animal. When you talk to a cop, you are talking to someone who is often privileged to kill you with complete impunity, someone whose claims about what you said during your interaction — however fantastical — will likely be accepted uncritically by the system even if the particular cop is a proven serial liar. Even the most mundane interaction carries the potential for life-altering disaster.

People ask commonly ask if this advice might lead police to suspect them of wrongdoing, or if it might even lead to their detention or arrest. Yes, it might. Life carries difficult choices and risk assessments. One of those risk assessments is whether, in an interaction with police, it is more dangerous to talk, or more dangerous to shut up. My point, in advocating shutting up, is to suggest that people's risk assessment is often misguided: distorted by the cultural message that cops are the thin blue line of heroes we should trust, colored by our misplaced faith in our ability to talk our way out of situations, and incorrectly premised on the belief that cops asking questions will react fairly or in good faith to the answers. People substantially underestimate the negative risks of interactions with law enforcement, and substantially overestimate the upside of such interactions. Moreover, people underestimate not only the amount of risk of bad consequences, but the extremity of those consequences if they occur. That's why I suggest that the risks of shutting up and asking to talk to a lawyer (which might include increased law enforcement suspicion of you, temporary detention, arrest, or even violence) are often outweighed by the downside risk of incriminating yourself or making a statement that cops will lie about or otherwise use against you.

Today I wanted to note that I recognize that my weighing of risks is colored by privilege.

"Privilege" is a term that's overused and misused in modern political discourse. Too often it's used like a crass "shut up, I win" button in an argument. But "privilege" is sometimes an apt descriptive term of a human phenomenon: a person's evaluation of a situation (like interaction with law enforcement) is colored by his or her own experiences, and those experiences are usually circumscribed by that person's cultural identity and wealth. Any criminal defense attorney who has served affluent clients is familiar with this: such clients often conclude that they are a victim of a conspiracy, or of a "rogue cop" or "loose cannon prosecutor," because their life experiences lead them to assume that the system can't possibly treat all people the way they are being treated. By contrast, clients who have lived in poverty (or clients who are African-American or Latino) tend to recognize outrageous conduct in their case as the system working the way the system typically works — business as usual. In my post about the prosecution and death of Aaron Swartz, I argued that Swartz' community showed such privilege in its reaction to his prosecution, seeing some sort of singular conspiracy where others saw the banal grinding of the system's unfeeling wheels.

My advice to shut up is colored, in part, by privilege. I was reminded of this yesterday when Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies searched Justin Bieber's house. I praised Bieber for shutting up and declining to talk to the cops, and joked that criminal defense attorneys could shame clients into better practices by asking why they aren't smarter than Justin Bieber.

But Justin Bieber and I — and many of my clients — share a crucial quality: we're affluent and fortunate. This privilege makes us better able to endure the potential downside risks of shutting up. If we get arrested on a petty or bogus charge by a pissed-off cop, we can make bail. We won't spend weeks or months in custody on that bogus charge because we can't scrape together a few thousand dollars. Maybe we'll spend the weekend in jail, because cops love to arrest you Friday afternoon, but we'll get out in a few days at most, and in the meantime we won't lose our jobs. Because we have families and support systems, if we do get thrown in jail on a bogus job by an angry cop, the Department of Child and Family Services won't take away our children, plunging us into another broken system we have neither the money nor the knowledge to navigate. If the cops tow or impound our car, we can afford to pay the few hundred to few thousand dollars to get it out, and we won't lose our jobs for lack of transportation. Even if we do lose our jobs because of a bogus and retaliatory arrest, we have savings, and families with savings, and we won't swiftly lose our homes. If the police choose to retaliate against our silence with petty tickets and infractions and fines rather than arrest, we can fight them or absorb them.

That's a privilege. Poor people don't have it. Poor people live on the razor's edge, and a bogus retaliatory arrest can destroy them. Retaliatory and capricious enforcement of petty crimes and infractions can destroy them financially. Police wield disproportionate power over them, and the criminal justice system and its agendas (like the War on Drugs) disproportionately impacts them. Police are more likely to use force against poor people and for the most part can do so without any significant risk of discipline.

When you and I weigh the downside risks of shutting up against the downside risks of talking, our downside risks are milder, and can be endured. People without our resources face a must starker choice: talk, and incriminate themselves, or shut up, and face an array of consequences they may not be equipped to survive.

I maintain my advice to shut up. But I acknowledge it's easier and safer for me — and for most of the people reading this blog — than it is for the people who most frequently encounter the police.

The Privilege To Shut Up © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

03 Sep 23:50

Jedi: A completion library for Python

by mickey
Arancox

rockin

If you’re using Python with Emacs (using one of several competing, incompatible, and slightly different modes) you are used to a pretty… bare-bones experience: no completion; semi-functional dynamic docstring support; and little in the way of two-way communication between Python and Emacs.

Enter Jedi, a completion library. Yes, Jedi, an editor-agnostic library that publishes auto completion, docstring support, and more. Excellent.

I’ve experimented with Pymacs — an interesting science project that adds “Python-like” support Emacs, so you can avoid interacting with Elisp, except not really — rope, and ropemacs and they were… disappointing. Slow, crash-prone, obtuse and impossible to extend. So I never really used them, and lived without completion or, well, much of anything beyond the REPL and my own handcrafted modifications.

The other alternative is the 600 lbs gorilla, CEDET, and its incomplete Python support, but that’s no good either.

Imagine my surprise, after fidgeting with the dependencies for both Jedi and Jedi.el, the Emacs library for Jedi, that it… works! And it’s good! It’s up-and-coming, I should say, but perfectly usable; it doesn’t get in my way, it’s got some crazy deferreds library it depends on for asynchronous, non-blocking querying of Jedi, but that bit works great — no input lag at all.

It seems to resolve, simplistically (which is good), as many assignments and method calls as one can reasonably expect from a non-evaluating, statically analyzing Python completion library.

Functioning Auto Complete in a Python buffer

The Jedi.el module also Just Works with the excellent auto-complete library, as you can see in the picture above.

Aside from completion, it also offers “find symbol definition at point” (a la TAGS, but not crap) and Jedi.el sensibly binds it to C-. by default. It also has a “related names” functionality, tracking down same-named identifiers in other modules; it uses Anything (now Helm) to display the results, and it is bound to C-c r. And finally, it can show the documentation for the identifier at point (be it a class or function) with C-c d. Useful.

I haven’t used Jedi and Jedi.el long enough to really get to know it, but I’m probably going to extend Jedi.el so it uses eldoc-mode for displaying the function parameters; it’s also a bit rough around the edges, and I may want to tweak certain things to my liking, but overall: huge success!

I highly recommend you give Jedi and Jedi.el a try!

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05 Jun 14:04

A tuneup for the Amiga 500

by coronax
Arancox

Amiga forever! Or at least a while longer.

Fully operational and playing Questron II - but it took a lot of work to get there.

Fully operational and playing Questron II – but it took a lot of work to get there.

When I bid for that copy of Questron II for the Commodore Amiga on eBay a few weeks ago, I knew I was getting myself into trouble. You see, the sad fact is that I haven’t had a fully functional Amiga since before 2006.

My Amiga 500P was my primary computer through my undergrad college years. At first, I used it – along with my trusty SupraModem 2400 – to discover the BBS scene. Towards the end, I rigged up some kind of IP-over-serial hack to access the Net from my dorm room. I added a GVP HD-8+ sidecar with a massive 50 megabyte hard drive (SCSI, of course) and 2 megs of RAM. At considerable expense and with the help of a good friend I finally got an AmigaOS 2.04 update ROM kit for it. It was a trustworthy machine that remained capable long past Commodore’s corporate demise and its own technological obsolescence.

Eventually, though, I had to move on, and by 1998 or so I was a dedicated Linux snob. I never got rid of the A500 but, as the Rush song goes, “Time if nothing else will do its worst.” When I finally hooked it up again, a few years ago, all was not well. It booted up, with a few transient read errors on the disk, but the keyboard didn’t respond.

With a PC, a broken keyboard is a trivial problem – you just replace it. The Amiga 500 is from that style of 80s home computers where the keyboard was integral with the case, and connected directly to the motherboard. And for all I knew, the motherboard itself might have been the problem.

I wasn’t as hardware-savvy then as I am now; or at least I was more chicken about poking around in the guts of a computer. Instead, I decided to try to recover the information from the hard drive and a few important floppy disks – I figured I could use them with the WinUAE Amiga emulator.

That turned into a major project. I used the Amiga Explorer software that came with Cloanto’s AmigaForever to connect the A500 to a PC using a pair of serial cables, a null modem adapter, and a USB-to-serial port adapter. There’s a piece of the Amiga Explorer software that you’re supposed to install on the Amiga; and in theory you can do that by redirecting the serial port to a file by entering a single command in the Amiga shell. The theory would’ve worked really well if it hadn’t been for the broken keyboard.

Eventually, I figured out a workaround: using a text editor and a folder of old email messages, I was able to copy and paste a script file together, one character at a time, using only the mouse. After that we were in business, and I was able to copy the entire hard drive image, the system ROM image, and every Amiga floppy disk I had sitting around that wasn’t copy-protected. Since then, I’ve had the entire system available virtually on my desktop.

Replacement keyboard - I'm glad that I didn't have to live with that funky UK layout.

Replacement keyboard – I’m glad that I didn’t have to live with that funky UK layout.

Fast forward to 2013, when I decided it was time to try again to fix the hardware. It took me a while to find a replacement keyboard; they only show up on eBay occasionally, and even then they’re usually not American keyboards. Eventually, I settled for a cheap keyboard shipped from the UK; I figured if it worked I could swap individual keys from the broken board to recreate a US keyboard layout.

In the meantime, I did some other preparations. We’re talking about a computer that’s more than two decades old, so caution is good. Before I fired the Amiga up, I tested the power supply with a voltmeter. It’s supposed to have +5V, +12V, and -12V signals. I measured +5.57V, +12.65V, and -11.17V (under no load), which I expected would be close enough.

I did a quick power-on test to see if the system was still working like I remembered. While it came up immediately, I noticed that it was short half a meg of RAM. I had some hunches about that, but first things first.

That RF shielding's seen better days, but at least it's not soldered in place...

That RF shielding’s seen better days, but at least it’s not soldered in place…

Getting the computer open was easier than it used to be – only three of the original screws are still in place. I stripped a couple of them back in the days before I had a decent set of Torx screwdrivers, and left them out for good.

Before I swapped out the keyboard, there was something I wanted to try. The A500 uses a pair of 8520 CIAs (Complex Interface Adapters), which are pretty much the same as the 6526 CIAs in the Commodore 64 and serve most of the same functions – they interface with the serial and parallel ports, joystick ports, and the keyboard. The 8520s have a reputation for being failure-prone, so I tried swapping them. If one was good and the other bad, I’d be trading my keyboard failure for some other problem. At least I’d know what was going on.

Swapping the CIAs had no effect, so I resigned myself to using the (fairly grungy and yellowed) UK keyboard. It wasn’t pretty, but it did work! I was still looking at a lot of cleaning and replacement of keycaps, but there was one last thing to try. The A500 keyboard has a small circuit board attached to it that holds the power and disk LEDs, some 7400-series logic, and a Commodore Semiconductor Group 6570-036, which I took to be some kind of bespoke keyboard controller IC.

The keyboard's controller circuit board turned out to be the real culprit.

The keyboard’s controller circuit board turned out to be the real culprit.

I didn’t see anything wrong with the circuit board on the original US keyboard, but I decided to swap the controller from the UK keyboard onto the US keyboard to see what would happen. And it worked! Apparently the US keyboard was mechanically sound, and the problems were in the controller electronics. Personally, I’m just happy to have as much of the original machine in working condition as possible – for sentimental reasons, if nothing else.

By the way, according to this web site, the 6570 is actually a microcontroller with a 6502 CPU core. I guess the Amiga and C64 have more in common than I thought!

With the keyboard working again, I turned my attention to the missing memory. The A500 has a “trapdoor” expansion in the bottom, which usually contains a 512 KB RAM expansion and a battery-backed clock. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about those old batteries leaking and corroding the traces on the expansion card. I didn’t know how bad it was or if it would be salvageable. Before I could find out, though, I had to deal with the metal RF shielding which completely encased the expansion card and was actually soldered shut!

The A501 RAM expansion and real-time clock.  They sure didn't want anyone poking around inside this thing!

The A501 RAM expansion and real-time clock. They sure didn’t want anyone poking around inside this thing!

Let me tell you, dealing with that was a pain! I spent more than half an hour with a soldering iron and a spool of desoldering braid, trying to clear enough solder away to get any of the three tabs loose. I was just about to give up and open it up with a pair of aviation snips when I finally got one side loose, and was able to bend the top half of the shielding out of the way.

Ironically, after all that, there was very little sign of any damage. Even more ironically, when I put it back together and tried it again, it worked (and yes, I did try reseating the board before spending all that time opening it up).

Once I got inside, things didn't look to bad - but note the slight discoloration near the battery.

Once I got inside, things didn’t look to bad – but note the slight discoloration near the battery.

So now I once again have a fully operational Amiga, though it’s not perfect. There’s a buzzing noise coming from the old Commodore 1084s monitor which might indicate a bad transformer or a loose solder weld or something, and I’m not about to go poking around in the back of a CRT. The SCSI hard drive is also making a noise like a jet engine, which is a little worrying, and I don’t know how much longer it might last. It may be time to look at what kind of replacement technology is available for it.

On the upside, I am happy to report that the Questron II game disk works just fine, and the game even has some graphical upgrades over the C64 version. I may be a little rusty with old-school CRPGs, though, because my character got attacked and killed by wandering monsters when I was less than 20 steps away from the first town!


18 Mar 22:03

Comedian charged with pitch encroachment at Manchester City game

by Matt Trueman
Arancox

That's a real crime?

Simon Brodkin joined pre-match warm-up dressed as his footballer character Jason Bent, before being handed over to police

The comedian Simon Brodkin has been charged with pitch encroachment after joining in with Manchester City's pre-game warm-up on Saturday.

Brodkin, best known for his character Lee Nelson, took to the pitch at Goodison Park on Saturday before Manchester City's away match against Everton in the guise of his fictional footballer Jason Bent, one of many roles he plays in his BBC3 series Lee Nelson's Well Funny People.

Dressed in a maroon City strip and fluorescent yellow boots, he managed to take part in the team's warm-up for around five minutes before being spotted and escorted off the pitch by match stewards. According to Chortle, he was heard to say, "Come on, let me play. I've got 50 grand on me to score first."

The comic was handed over to police and is due to appear before the Liverpool Community Justice Centre on 3 April, where he will be charged with pitch encroachment under the Football Offences Act.

A BBC spokesperson told Digital Spy that, as far as they knew, the stunt was not part of Brodkin's sketch show.

It marks Brodkin's second arrest in six months, after he was apprehended in November, this time as Lee Nelson, after pretending to steal a copy of his own DVD at an HMV store in London.

Police have said that the stunt did not delay the match, which Everton went on to win 2-0.

Matt Trueman
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