My Obituary to the iPod Classic

It was with great sadness that I learnt about the passing of the iPod Classic. This amazing product was quietly removed from sale at Apple and other retailers last month, shortly after the Apple October Event.

They have now become collectors items and are retailing on Ebay and Amazon from private sellers for £300-£400.

I for one will mourn its passing. The iPod classic has had good life, its been with us for about thirteen years, and it has revolutionised the way we listen to and even purchase music. Over this time the design has stayed much the same, the circular clicker being an iconic feature. Over the last couple of years, nothing much has changed with this iconic device, maybe the amount of memory has increased  and a colour screen has been added, but not much else. I wonder why bluetooth connectivity wasn't added, many sound docks allow connection in this way. To me it seems Apple have treated this device as a forgotten and embarrassing relative, and have now retired it.

Now for my little rant, I have  rather large music collection, and I've collected music since my early teens. I'm forty five now, so that's a lot of albums. The new generation devices produced by Apple don't really have enough storage for me, take my iPhone 8 GB storage, my music collection is 40GB, not really enough is it! Apparently there is an iPod touch with 64GB storage that may keep me going for a while but where then?

Personally I prefer a dedicated music player, I don't need the other features of an iPod touch, my iPad and phone cover those requirements, but thats me. Hopefully one day the ipod classic or stand alone music player will return.

So hopefully my current classic will keep going for a while and I won't have to ponder this scenario!

Snow arrives in the UK again

So I suppose it should be expected, in the middle of winter we can expect some snow. During the second week of January the Met Office gave warnings of snow coming to the UK. Plenty of advice was given and on the Friday, snow arrived overnight and during daytime. Exeter sat right on the cusp of the snow zone, wet snow fell in the city but didn't stick, about 10 miles from the city, fairly significant amounts of snow were seen. Over the next few days, snow fell across the country and once again travel disruption occurred, many flights were cancelled at London Heathrow and the road networks were disrupted. Just a little moan why is it in the UK with plenty of advance warning, snowfall causes chaos? Surely we can cope with a few inches of snow without our transport infrastructure falling apart! The rest of Northern Europe manages it, why can't we. These countries must be laughing at us.

One other thing, as the skies cleared on 22nd January, you may have been able to see this, a rare conjuction between Jupiter and the Moon. I got a very rough picture on my phone but I managed to find some better photographs on the web.

Here's a better view.

QR codes. What's the point?

Apparently these are now the latest thing in marketing and providing links to your web content. I'm not normally a tech phobic person but I don't see the point of these codes. See below for what I'm talking about. (This is the QR code linking to this blog)

So to make these work you need the following:

1.  A smartphone, be it of the Apple or Android variety.
2.  An app that can translate the QR code to something meaningful.

So for me I need to start an app on my iPhone, photograph the code and wait and see if something happens. If it works it eventually directs me to a bit of web content related to the advert the code is on. On my iPhone this takes a couple of minutes (maybe the software and hardware are slow) but why not just put the URL on the advert instead. Its a lot quicker to copy this down into your browser.

Maybe I'm wrong, who knows?

Back to the realities of work.

Just reached the end of a pretty busy week in work. Dentistry has been enjoyable, it has been great repairing, restoring and building new smiles for my patients. I've managed to fit some high quality laboratory work and I've been pleased with the results I've achieved.


My biggest gripe is the end of year chase for UDA's. Three years ago a new contract was introduced into NHS dentistry, we agreed to provide a certain number of UDAs each year for twelve equal payments from our NHS masters. Working with this contract for three years now I can see that it is pretty much unworkable, with all the advantages being given to the government, fortunately we tend to see only children under the NHS but the impact of the contract is still significant. Unfortunately due to various factors that have occurred over the year it appears that I will fall short on my performance target again. Its not that I have done anything different in terms of treatment planning, I possibly have missed more work-time this year due to the cancellations of my operation, I think in all this has equated to 3.5 weeks. Also the turn of the year was affected by adverse weather and we probably had a higher number of cancellations and failures due to the weather. My shortfall is equivalent to just under a month of work, I wonder when our annual review occurs whether our local PCT will make any allowances for these factors. To be honest probably not.


On a more positive note, I have several interesting cases  in the pipeline, I will try to document these both in words and pictures and if the patients are willing, to display the results here.


So roll on the weekend, hopefully the weather will improve.