Tell Microsoft about it

Those dudes at Microsoft want us to tell them when anything unexpectedly goes wrong with their software. They have improved over the years. When they and I were younger, they used to put up a message box with a scary red cross in it and declare "An illegal operation has been performed and the program will shut down." When one clicked on OK, the program would indeed shut down. Initially I used to be bewildered since I had been doing nothing other than typing a chapter of my book in Word. I would also worry if they would somehow find out my location and send federal police to investigate the illegal operation. One day a techie explained it to me. "The illegal operation is performed by the software, not you" he said. I was relieved. I also wondered why they would not frankly admit they had goofed up. Perhaps they were afraid of litigation and of losing the case out of hand if they admitted their mistakes. Now they have changed. Now they invite us to tell them about it. It also gives the impression that they are keen to improve their software. I sometimes allow the computer to inform Microsoft about it, sometimes I don't. That day I clicked on OK to allow Microsoft to be informed. But I was working on a machine which was not connected to the web, both physically and through wireless connection. "You have to be connected to the net first" snapped Microsoft program. "Why did you ask me to inform Microsoft without first checking if I was connected or not?" I wanted to snap back. After all they wanted to be informed, I did not primarily want to inform them. They had not changed much. They had got just a little bit polished. I did not snap back, because I cannot have bad manners when someone else has bad manners, and also because I knew they would not hear me. From that day, whenever the computer urges me to tell Microsoft about it on that particular machine, I say "I am not connected to the net, you axxxxxe" and cancel the request. Can they not write software that checks for connectivity and then advice accordingly, like "Please connect to the net and tell Microsoft about this problem" if they detect one is not connected? Piece of cake, that bit of programming should be.

Microsoft Genuine Advantage?

Software should always be licensed. Piracy is a curse and should be abolished. I have made these statements so that the readers understand my Windows XP, Vista, and 7 on different systems are licensed. Microsoft has software checks to confirm that the software is genuine. I had allowed the checks online, and got the genuine status confirmed on all systems. Then one day I installed Microsoft Security Essentials as a protection for the systems. There were two reasons. One was that my son, a computer wizard told me it was good. The second was that it was from Microsoft, so that it should integrate better with Microsoft Windows. That it was free was coincidental. I would have paid for it if it was not free. It was running fine, and taking updates too. One of my systems is not connected to net, because I use it only for desktop jobs. I update the antivirus on it using downloaded files from company websites. I have also switched off automatic updates on that system, because it just slows it down, and I do not need updates there. One day Security Essentials declared Windows XP on it was not genuine, stopped giving protection to the system and asked me to connect to net to confirm if it was genuine. So I put a long cable to the machine from the jack, and connected it. I followed all online instructions, but it would not recognize my Windows as genuine. In the meantime, My Windows continued to recognize itself as genuine and kept downloading updates like mad. Finally I solved the problem by uninstalling Security Essentials, reinstalling it, and leaving the automatic update on. Now it is functioning well, and since there is a bit of uninstalled update in the system, it keeps reminding me to install it, which convinces Security Essentials that my XP is genuine.

The Download Manager Trick

Downloading is sometimes, essential, sometimes a passion, and sometimes a compulsion. If one relies on the download capabilities of the web browser, the results leave much to be desired. The speed is slow, multiple tracks cannot be downloaded at a time to be joined later, and resume is not possible should the download be interrupted at any time. These problems are overcome by download managers. There are a number of them e.g. free download manager, Internet download manager, and download accelerator plus. But they have a unique problem of their own. They launch automatically whenever a download is started. If the website does not permit download manager, that download does not take place, and the manager does not let one use the web browser for downloading. There are methods of preventing such behavior of these managers, such as by pressing on some predetermined keys when one clicks on the download links. But these sites do not like key-press clicks too. So I found a solution to this problem. I copied the download manager's installation folder to the desktop, uninstalled the manager, and then launched it by double clicking on its executable file in that copied folder. It worked. Now I launch it only when I want it. At other times, I use just the browser, and the manager does not launch by itself then, because it is not installed on the system.

Fastest Need for Repair

We had moved out of the first floor OT 2 years ago, after it had been closed for 6 months for massive leakage of water from the OT above. They kept us away for 1.5 years so that they could repair it properly. Now we have been back in that OT for 2 weeks. I thought all should remain OK for at least 10 years. But it was not to be. I entered the OT today to find that the air handling unit (AHU) was pouring out water into the sterilizer room, almost over the autoclave. The contractors arrived peacefully two hours later, shut down the AHU, and spent all day trying to repair the fault. I hope they manage to fix it. In the meantime, the OT on the ground floor has developed troubles too. The paint has come off from the ceiling and I think I can see some fungus on the ceiling. I hope it is not leaking inside. They want us to hand over the OT for repairs too. I had not seen repairs coming up even before they complete the job and give us complete possession of the renovated building.

PDF Woes

I was in the process of bringing out a new edition of my book. As it so happened, the typesetter for the previous edition had done all work using Adobe Pagemaker. It would be tough to convert all files to MS Word (each page manually), I learned Pagemaker, and revised all 9 files. One chapter required a radical change. So I did that part in MS Word. The publisher got them printed on paper. I checked them, made a few minor corrections and gave the files back. Then the guy who makes the negatives for offset printing told him that he wanted a single PDF file. That was no problem. I used a light-weight PDF printer driver to make 9 PDF files, joined them with a PDF joiner, and gave him a single PDF file. That should have been the end of it, but it was actually the beginning of all troubles. He got another set of all pages printed on paper, and found that it had shrunken to 70% of the original page size. He told me about it. So I took a printouts using PDFXchange viewer as PDF reader, and they were OK. I took a few with Adobe Acrobat Reader, and they were shrunken. Then I selected 'none' as option in shrink page box, and got an OK print. So I told him about it. But it would not work on his computer. Then I created PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Pro (thank God I used the 1 month trial version rather than buy the Pro version), joined them as before and sent him that file. This time the printer cut off the top 20% or right 20% of the page on his computer. I tried it on my computer and it made some fonts smaller. Actually the PDF file is supposed to be unchangeable. I googled this and found others who had had some problems, but none like mine. Now I am in the process of manual conversion of the entire work into MS Word. Then I will print it with Acrobat Pro and if it does not work, I cannot think of any other solution to it. Any suggestions from my readers is welcome.

Inappropriate Touch

"Sir, I have a request" a new woman recruit told me. "What is it?" "I request you not to place me in Dr XXX's unit. Any other unit will do, but not that one." "Is there any reason for that?" I asked. "That unit head had held my neck once" the recruit said. "As for strangling?" I asked incredulously. "No, Sir ..." "Inappropriately?" I asked. I had a strong feeling it would be so. "Yes, Sir." "OK" I said. "I myself have noticed a lot of such occurrences involving this person and women of all ages. But I cannot initiate any action against this person until someone complains, not just verbally but in writing. We have a sexual harassment cell in the institute to deal with these problems." "No, Sir. I don't want to complain." I wondered why these self respecting women did not want to complain. Perhaps they wanted to avoid a scandal. A complaint would put a stop to this activity. But then I recalled there had been such a complaint about this same person in the past, which had reached departmental inquiry and human rights people too. The whole thing was apparently settled amicably apparently. The said offender did not seem to have learnt any lesson from that episode.

PCPNDT Wisdom

“Sir, I am going to apply for PCPNDT registration. But I have a problem” one of my past lecturers told me. “What is it?” I asked. “I have my own place to perform ultrasonography. I am qualified to do it. But I don't have an ultrasound machine. I am planning to buy a second-hand machine to practice on. When I am good, I will buy a new machine.” This sounded like buying a second-hand car when one learns driving. Once one is good, one sells it off and buys a new car. But it is understandable in the case of a car. If you drive a new car and get into a vehicular accident, the financial loss is much more than when the car is a used one. There are no accidents with an ultrasound machine except wrong diagnosis. “So what is the problem?” I asked. “The person who will sell me the machine does not have any invoice for the machine. He has lost all papers of purchase of the machine.” “But you don't need any papers. You can register first. Then you can buy a machine. In fact, you cannot buy a machine without a registration as per the PCPNDT act.” “The MOH wants an invoice for the proposed purchase of a machine, or he won't accept my application for registration.” MOH was the short form of Medical Officer Health. I wonder if there can be medical officers not related to healthcare. “Tell him the chairman of the advisory committee is your friend, and that he said it is not necessary to have an invoice.” “Sir, I don't want any trouble with the MOH” he said. “He will trouble me with other things then. It is best not to antagonize the civic body.” “But the MOH has to act under my advice for implementation of the PCPNDT act. He cannot be doing a wrong thing” I said. “ .......” “OK. I will give you a solution. An invoice is something like a bill given by the seller to the buyer. Ask the seller to write an invoice on his official stationery, addressing it to you, giving machine name and serial number, and quoting a price.” He liked that idea. His application was scheduled to reach our last meeting of the PCPNDT advisory committee. Unfortunately the concerned MOH did not make it. So I don't know how the invoice was finally managed. I will know a couple of months later, during our next meeting. I am looking forward to meeting that MOH, but he might send his assistant, as they often do. Then I shall miss out on the pleasure of sorting out this issue with him.

Just Ask

We have this trust in the institute that handles a lot of funds received as grants, donations, and fees for conferences. It cuts 10% as processing fee, though it is a bit difficult to understand why 10% amount is required for that purpose. This difficulty is justified by the fact that they keep sending letters to a number of departments, offering grants of a few thousand INR every year for purchasing anything that the administration does not or cannot or will not provide. This year they sent us a letter of offer, but stated that some money was available, instead of specifying how much money was actually offered. They wanted us to send a list in the order of our priority, with justification for each item. It would be a lot of work to work out the cost of all the things we required. That work would be wasted if the amount offered was not adequate. So I wrote back, asking how much money was likely to be offered. They wrote back, saying there was no actual limit on the amount to be offered. We were to give a comprehensive list. So I called a meeting, brainstormed with all of our staff members, decided the items we needed and their priority order. Then we all spent a few days finding out the cost of the things in our wish list. Finally I informed the trust that we needed a MRI/USG guided focused ultrasonic myolysis unit, three pulse oximeters, assisted reproduction set up (500000), a CO2 incubator, 2 colposcopes, a laminar flow unit, an ELISA reader, a unit and reagents for HPV testing, and an LCD projector, the net cost being about 90000000 INR. It would drop to 30000000 INR if they gave USG guided unit instead of MRI guided unit. A month passed. Then I received a letter from the trust that they would give us 30000 INR for the purchase of an LCD projector. If the cost exceeded this amount, we had to bear the extra expense ourselves. “When we worked hard and generated a list of items and their cost of about Rs. 90000000 INR, the trust has offered us 30000 INR only” I informed the staff members in our next meeting. “If the cost exceeds that amount, we have to pay that extra expense ourselves.” They all laughed. “Could they not tell us in advance how much they would offer? It would have saved so much time and effort” one Professor said. “They are like a government, run by bureaucrats with an attitude” said another Professor. “They want us to slog to prove our worthiness to receive this princely grant” offered an Associate Professor. “We had the option of ignoring their first letter” I pointed out. “We were fools to fall for the trick they played. Fools get what they deserve.” I could read in their faces that they knew we were not fools except in the eyes of the trustees.

Changing Godfathers

I had a resident in my department, who was low profile, until I realized that it was a pseudo-low profile. This resident was posted in rotation to work at an affiliated institute, where the work was so little, that she wanted to come back to our institute at any cost. So the resident's influential father called our that time chief and the chief rang me up and asked me to see if the request could be met. The rotation was such that the said resident was scheduled to come back to us anyway. So I informed the chief that it would be done. A few days later the father called the chief again and requested placement of the said resident with a particular Professor, who was the teacher of the resident too. By that time the schedule had been put up on the notice board. So I advised the chief that it would be inadvisable to change anything at that stage without sound reason, and the father's request was not sound enough a reason. The chief agreed and that was that. After the resident qualified and came to me for clearance certificate, I signed it and then asked her why she used parental influence to achieve personal goals. She said she was sorry, that she had not known her father had done that, and that she would not do such a thing again. I thought I had changed one person for better. I was naive, as many people have said time and again but I had not believed to be true. She appeared for Senior Resident's job in Insurance Hospital, with a pay scale that would make our Associate Professors long for that job. Her father got the same chief to tell the expert conducting the interview to select her. I met that expert in another selection interview, where this resident turned up as an aspiring candidate. He mentioned this casually. Though I was upset, I did not let that interfere with our selection, and allowed her to be selected. After she joined duty, I asked her why she did that. “I did not exert any influence this time” she said, “or I would have topped the list instead of being near the bottom.” “No. It was not this interview. It was the insurance hospital interview” I said. She remained silent. I left it at that. Six months later there was another interview, where this person turned up again. I was not wondering how she would manage it this time, because she had not been able to manage the civic body interview in the past. I had underestimated her parents. This time she had brought about the influence of one time civic body chief or at least so were the interviewers told. When I narrated this story to my wife, my final line was “I am glad our son achieved what he wanted on merit, and did not make me do what this girl's parents have to do. I would have failed miserably, and if I had succeeded, I would have died of remorse and shame a thousand deaths.”

Verb, not noun!

One of the jobs assigned to the interns in the gynec outpatient clinic is to obtain clinical history of patients, before they proceed to be examined by senior doctors. Some interns are quite good and elicit all possible relevant history. Some of them are not so good. We ask all history again anyway to confirm that whatever is written on the case record form is correct, and if any information has been missed. 'Patient complaints of urinary incontinence' one of my interns had recorded in one such case. “Do you lose urine involuntarily?” I asked the patient. “No. I can pass urine voluntarily to begin with every time I want to pass urine. But then the stream stops and I have to make digital pressure in there to start passing it again.” I called for the said intern. He arrived in due course looking mildly curious. “Is this history written by you?” I asked. He looked at the paper and said “Yes” noncommittally. “Please tell me if 'complaint' is a verb or a noun” I said, holding the paper in front of him and stressing on the 'T'. “Verb” he said promptly. “In the sentence 'Patient complaints of urinary incontinence' that you have written, is the word 'complaints' a verb or a noun?” I asked. “Verb” he maintained. I was discouraged by that answer. I did not think it would be worthwhile to discuss why he wrote that the patient had urinary incontinence when she had difficulty in passing urine. “All right. I don't think there is anything further that we have to discuss. You are doing wonderful work. Please go back and continue to do the good work.” He went back, probably quite happily that in the Boss' opinion he was doing wonderful work.

Bliss on duty

I was taking the morning round of the wards. It was 9:30 A.M. when I reached the labor ward. The duty room for women resident doctors is situated in the labor ward – waiting ward complex. I wanted to see if the room was OK and if the residents were maintaining it neat and tidy. The room was in a passable condition. Someone was fast asleep on one of the beds, a bed sheet drawn over the head. It had to be a woman resident, since it was the duty room for women residents. "Please go in and see who it is. Perhaps the girl is unwell" I said. So one resident went in, checked the sleeper and told us that it was a first post resident doctor from one particular unit, fast asleep. I finished the round, went back to my office, and started work. I had some work with the head of the same unit, so I called her. After finishing that work, I asked "Is any resident doctor missing from your unit?" "Yes. We are quite worried about her. She disappeared from 3:00 A.M. Her mobile is not reachable. How did you hear about her, Sir?" "I have found her" I said. "Found her? Where?" "She is sleeping in the women resident doctors' duty room" I said. "I will send someone there right away." The poor resident who had joined the department just three days ago must have liked the bed in the air conditioned ward and gone to sleep, perhaps thinking of the comforts of home. Perhaps it was her routine to sleep that late or even later.

Makeshift Public Address System

We had a reasonably good public address system in our seminar hall. They stripped it down and lost it. They refuse to find it, and also to install a new one, because it is not a part of their contract. I processed for a new one, but the civic machinery takes some time to get results. The quoted price was also a bit high, if 4700 INR can be called high. In the meantime, the meetings are not very productive, because about five rows from the speaker at the front of the seminar hall, only lip movements are seen. Unless one is good at lip reading, the meeting becomes meaningless. So I went to the market and bought an amplifier for 600 INR. We had a mic. I got out two speakers from our VCD/DVD player, connected them to this amplifier, inserted the mic into its socket on the amplifier, and we had a new public address system for just 600 INR (not counting the parts we already had, which were good but useless as far as our need was concerned). It worked very well.