Brexit Brick Wall. Undermining Obamacare. Relative Hyperlinks.

Brickwork at Windsor Castle 

The most recent EU-UK Brexit round of talks came to an end today with different perspectives  on both sides. Today's allegory would be the discussions viewed as a debate over a brick wall. Michel Barnier gloomily notes that we still have a wall, that it hasn't moved, and that it is worrysome that dismantling it has not yet started. We don't know how much it's going to cost and who's going to pay for it.

David Davis, on the other hand is a lot more positive. We've made a lot of progress. We've measured the bricks, determined their sizes and have been able to agree on the colour of some of them, but we don't want to actually talk costs until we've seen what is on the other side.

There was one definite outcome - the pound plunged to Euro 1.11 after Barnier said the talks were in deadlock. however it recovered and stood higher at the end of trading than at the beginning, reaching the dizzy heights of Euro 1.12!

President Trump has lost patience with his recalcitrant Republican partners over their inability to remove Obamacare. Today he signed a presidential order expanding the access to cheaper and less comprehensive health insurance. “This will cost the United States government virtually nothing and people will have great, great healthcare,” he said. “And when I say people, I mean by the millions and millions."

Critics worry that with less comprehensive insurance, when illness strikes, or goes on for a prolonged period, patients will find they are not covered or bills rise dramatically.

According to the Guardian, there have been other steps by the Trump administration to derail the ACA. These include cutting the sign-up period for insurance by half; shutting down for maintenance the website people use to sign up for health insurance; slashing funding for outreach; and repeatedly threatening to end subsidies to insurance companies who cover the poor.

We were finalising the Votive Treasures catalogue today. One of the last minute touches was to link some of the key images within the document to the actual image files in a separate folder. Hyperlinking is the obvious solution, but we had to get our head around how to do it properly. we needed the final PDF to use 'relative' hyperlinks.

Relative hyperlinks will work as long as the file from which you are linking and the linked-to file are transferred to the same location on a different computer/DVD/memory stick. Having created the files and burning them to DVD, the disk was tested on a variety of computers and laptops just to be sure. It worked.