Farm Forum: Yet another game of ‘tag’ I must not say “I told you so” because it is very bad form. However you may remember my reference a month ago to the old saying about casting a cloot till May is oot! Dear Tech Support, Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend to Husband and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewellery applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend. In addition, Husband uninstalled many other valuable programmes, such as Romance and Personal Attention and then installed undesirable programs such as Rugby, Football, Sailing and Continuous TV. Conversation no longer runs and Housecleaning simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging to fix these problems but to no avail. What can I do? ‘Desperate’ Dear ‘Desperate’, First keep in mind, Boyfriend is an Entertainment Package, while Husband is an Operating System. Please visit: http://www.IThoughtYouLovedMe.html and try to download Tears. Don’t forget to install the Guilt update. If that application works as designed, Husband should then automatically run the applications Jewellery and Flowers, but remember overuse of the above application can cause Husband to default to Grumpy Silence, Garden Shed or Beer. Beer is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta. Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-Law (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources). Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband. In summary, Husband is a great system, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. It also tends to work better running one task at a time. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Food and Hot Lingerie. Good Luck! Tech Support
Why is it that the agricultural industry seems to jump from crisis to crisis not of its own making but normally instigated by bureaucrats in Brussels for sometimes no sound reason? The most recent problem involves the electronic identification of sheep which I have referred to in this column before. All sheep born after a certain date now have to be electronically tagged. Although they do not have to be individually identified at home they are electronically recorded at a market or slaughterhouse. Many tests have been done and the accuracy of the electronic reading equipment is not 100%. For example if you send 100 sheep to the market, after they are sold they run down a passage and their tags are read by an electronic tag reader, but in most cases only around 95 of them will be recorded. Brussels officials have witnessed this process and have accepted the situation – up to now. However they are now reported to be requiring 100% accuracy which is simply not achievable with current technology and there is nothing farmers can do about that. Quite apart from that, the tags that are tested are new tags and no one has yet had the opportunity of checking an old ewe that has been running about the hill with her tag for about six years, if indeed she still has her tag and hasn’t abandoned
Ha re’s loo kin g at Ew e, Kid it on some hazard on the hill and probably forgotten where she left it! Taking into account the draconian penalties applied nowadays for “non compliance” this could sound the death knell for sheep farming in many high ground areas. At the same time that all this is happening Mr Paice, the Environmental Secretary in Westminster, has promised that work will begin on cutting red tape in response to the report by an independent task force. It has just reported to him with 214 recommendations to reduce the administrative burden on farmers and food producers. Whilst Mr Paice said that the Government could not promise to act on all 214 recommendations made, he said that the battle to reduce paperwork had already begun. I only hope he realises that he is going to have to work at speed to reduce unnecessary legislation faster than the EEC creates it. Agricola
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