Posts by Angela Hart
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Access: Here's to them, in reply to Sacha,
I want to see in my lifetime a support system that assumes people aren't trying to defraud it.
me too
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Hard News: The other kind of phone tapping, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
That's probably a collector's item Ian. Many of the tertiary institutions have displays of treasured artefacts like that.
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Hard News: The other kind of phone tapping, in reply to Steve Barnes,
yup, your bad line was often a poor connection in the exchange caused by dirt or wear on the switching equipment. If you hung up and tried again, unless it was a very quiet time with no other calls being made, you stood a good chance of getting a different piece of switching equipment and avoiding the problem.
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Hard News: The other kind of phone tapping, in reply to Ross Mason,
So that's where they all went :-)
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Several people who used to work in telephone exchanges have popped up on this thread, and here's another. Tapped calls were distinctive because the pulses you could hear were so much slower than dialled ones. I was a technician and worked in both rotary and step by step electromagnetic exchanges (at Mount Eden) . There were two types of rotary equipment at Mount Eden and we had to "dope" the drives on the older type with sticky stuff because they relied on friction to operate. They needed work to retain that friction but were pretty reliable otherwise. The newer step by step exchange in its own separate building at Mount Eden had different problems, mainly down to the "wipers" which swept across metal contacts until they detected an available circuit being so delicate that they needed frequent replacement.
Each generational change in switching technology reduced the amount of maintenance and the number of people needed to keep the equipment running, and the complexity of fault finding may actually have reduced. These days my impression is that you just have to know computers!
I'm always amused when I see file footage on TV because they use pics of an old MDF (median distribution frame) which is the place where the external cables connecting the exchange to subscribers and to other exhanges are terminated. The individual wires are soldered to a framework which allows "jumpers" to be run to connect subscribers' lines to their equipment inside the exchange. These terminations are fused and the file footage is from an old MDF with distinctive large old fuses. They don't make 'em like that any more.
It's also amusing because this file footage is taken to represent telephone exchanges, and it does in the sense that they all have an MDF, but the MDF does not perform the switching/connecting function of the exchange. -
Hi Alastair,
is there room for supporters to donate small regular amounts direct to Scoop? -
WOW! Thanks so much for sharing this rare beauty.
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Access: Changing Shape, in reply to Chelle Hope,
Go Chelle! In a way you're a new person with new opportunities now. You're bound to be a bit self conscious. But now you can think about what else you really want to do and set about doing it. We've (my daughter and I) really enjoyed being involved with wheelchair rugby for the past 18 months or so, that might not be your thing, but I've yet to meet any wheelchair user who's tried it and not had fun.
http://www.iwrf.com/static_content/videoplayer.php?site=youtube&id=O46Ukn9sXKM&videoid=165&videoname=meet_wheelchair_rugby_athlete_-_jessica_kruger -
Lecretia Seales could have lost a lot of good living time if assisted suicide had been available to her when she was diagnosed in 2011 and given weeks to live. She would have met the criteria, and no-one would ever have known how wrong the doctors were or how much she missed out on.
Sacha's link to her story: http://www.listener.co.nz/?p=148725I would much rather see a law that allows self-determination for terminally ill people in how and when they die and leave people with disabilities, and everyone else for that matter, out of it.
Yes, I think that's a sensible course. The terminally ill and not long left bit needs to be beyond doubt though.
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Any reduction in the unspoken grey areas would have to be legislated. At the moment these sit firmly in the "Doctor's professional judgement" category- not usually open for discussion with or challenge by the persons affected.