Month: February 2009

Categories
Engineer engineering

How can you make exams exciting?!

I never thought I would get excited by the prospect of an exam. I am at the moment though but I have to confess it is not me taking the exams. When my 16 year old took his GCSEs last summer I think I was more nervous than he was.

This time my nerves are rock steady as 12 Timico engineers are lining up to sit their Cisco Certified Networking Associate (CCNAs) exams. It is exciting because I can see the guys’ knowledge and skillset  improving almost daily as they put in the effort to prepare for the exams.

At the end of it all I’m hoping that we will end up with 12 more members of staff with their foot on the first rung of the professional engineering career ladder. I’m determined to be able to take regular afternoons off to play golf and this is all part of the process of getting  me there. I don’t expect these engineers to have time to play any golf though.

PS congratulations to Mark Chennell of Timico subsidiary KeConnect who passed his CCNA last week. He is a good guy.

PPS good luck to the others.

Categories
Business media

Appearing on BBC Radio Tomorrow Morning

For anyone interested I am appearing as the sofa guest on Rod Whiting’s breakfast show tomorrow morning which should be fun since I enjoy his show. I’ve no idea what we will be talking about – life the universe and Trefor Davies. And probably the weather.

All this assumes the BBC doesn’t devote the whole programme to school closures which is what happened today, much to my children’s delight.

You can catch his show on http://www.bbc.co.uk/lincolnshire/ and I am down to be there from 8.20 am until 9.30.

Categories
broadband Business voip

Working From Home Today

Had a day working from home today.  Nothing to do with the snow actually but my car is in being fixed after failing its MOT. Nothing major so don’t worry – just time consuming 🙂 .

I had a hugely productive day. Interestingly, whilst I spent much of the time on the phone, of the 26 calls my log tells me I made half of them were to people not in their office but working from home because of the snow. Only a few calls were made that actually cost any money, those to suppliers.

Most people I spoke with would not have known that I was at home were it not for the conversations on the subject of the weather, a peculiarly British phenomenon I think.

What is also interesting is how the house rules work. I long since lost the use of my study to the dreaded TV. I thought I could control it! Because of this if I’m working from home, which is actually only occasionally because I like being in the office,  I work in the kitchen or the conservatory. Both have Cat5 cabling for the VoIP phone.

Today the whole family was off school (my wife is a teacher) and celebrating but it meant that working in the kitchen didn’t make sense due to the human traffic. Also the conservatory was not the warmest place in the house. So I ended up working in the living room in front of the log fire – the living room also has Cat5 – doesn’t everyone’s.

The living room therefore became the no go area that was exclusively mine and everyone obeyed the rules. My pointreally is that the issue concerning homeworking is no longer whether you can do a proper days job. VoIP and broadband now makes this easy, at least when working for Timico. The issues now relate to whether you have a suitable working environment at home that allows you to be productive. Not everyone has suitable space.

I thought I’d share this picture with you – the open fire in the living room. Very pleasant when it is snowing outside – even though it was the MOT that kept me at home. By the way the kitchen also has a number of Cat5 points – doesn’t everyone’s?

fire1

Categories
Business voip

Workforce Adapts To Icy Weather

As snowstorms hit the UK the hardy workforce at Timico HQ in Newark shrugged off the hardships to keep services going. That isn’t to say we aren’t enjoying the weather.

Snowball fights abound in the carpark as they did, I’m told, with many of the people who stayed at home to work. This picture below shows one of the homeworkers who had overdone the snowballing with his (or her) kids who were also at home due to a school closure.

The hardy individual has asked to remain anonymous, which isn’t difficult as you can see. Clearly he came off worse than the kids in the fight.

snowman

A reliable homeworking solution clearly adds to a business’ productivity. Drop me a line if you want to know more.

Categories
End User social networking

Friday the 13th February 2009 – an unique time in history

Unix Time reaches a milestone in history next week as it hits 1,234,567,890. For those millions of readers of this blog who don’t know what I am talking about (ie most of them I’m sure) Unix Time started at midnight on January 1st 1970 and represents the number of seconds since then.

Unix Time is a way of storing time information on a computer. It isn’t without its issues. For example back in 1970 the boffins chose 32bits as a size of number to represent Unix time in machine code. Unfortunately this means that Unix Time hits the ceiling, ie runs out, in 2038.

This could well lead to another bout of hysteria akin to Y2K with many Unix computers expected to run into problems.

Anyway the point of this blog post is not to worry you too much about what will happen 29 years hence but to celebrate the number. Party animals can join in the fun at the Event on Facebook . Pseudo geeks amongst us can read more here.  Real geeks will already know all they need to know. 

I was originally going to post this on Friday 13th but I figured some of you would want to know in advance.

Categories
End User H/W

Never Look a Gift Laptop in the Mouth??!!

I’m mixing my proverbs up a bit here but the Broadband Genie comparison website has been talking about ADSL deals that include free laptops. The message basically is that these are not usually good deals and tie you in for two years during which time you are likely to be  saddled with a not very good spec laptop.

Typically there is only a choice of one or  two machines in the deal. This compares with hundreds to chose from in the marketplace with prices starting from £175.

The ISPs offering these deals will argue that it is a good way for people to get a laptop without having to stump up the cash up front – good in times of credit crunch!  In my experience you get what you pay for and people don’t realise what they are letting themselves in for.

For example two Christmases ago Santa brought a new PC for my then 10 year old. Santa thought he’d got a great deal but the PC was very slow running and clearly needed a memory upgrade (Vista!).  When I then looked into it (Santa having gone back to the North Pole to feed the reindeer)  there was only a limited scope for adding additional memory.

So remember it is sometimes worth  looking a gift horse in the memory, or hard drive, or battery life or whatever other bits you use to tell whether you are really getting a good deal 🙂

Categories
Business internet

Ethernet Competition Warming Up Globally In 2009

Traditionally high speed fibre links have been expensive because often the fibre had to be physically run for long distances, normally back to a connection in one of the dense metropolitan areas, and often all the way to London. The need for repeater stations adds to this cost.

In the UK the model has changed. Now network providers are rolling out Points Of Presence locally around the country with a preinstalled backhaul to London. It normally has to be London because typically this is where connections to other carriers and the internet are located.

This means that now, instead of long connections with high installation costs businesses can install lower cost local fibre connections, provided they are within 25km of an enabled POP.

From my perspective there are two main players in this game.

BT Openreach will, by April, have 600 Ethernet enabled 21CN exchanges and notionally 1,100 by the end of the year. BT is however playing catchup with NTL which owns most of the UK’s cable TV infrastructure. NTL some time ago woke up to the fact that it wasn’t using this existing fibre in the ground to best effect and is now selling leased line connectivity at much lower costs than was available even last summer. 

If you don’t understand the relevance of this, fibre connections are far more reliable than ADSL and come with better Service Level Assurances. As companies rely more and more on web based hosted services and applications they need better service uptimes.

The competition is great and is very much to the benefit of UK business. I am now quite often seeing zero up front cost quotations go out the door which is likely to prove a great help to businesses struggling to find capex in the recession.

PS the Global Warming bits in the post title was purely an attention getter 🙂 . Actually I don’t really mean “globally”, I mean in the UK and although there are some countries ahead of us in this game in Europe and the Far East there are others, notably the USA that lag behind.

We are still a long way from getting fibre to the home but the environment for businesses is definately improving.

Categories
Business voip

Heavy snow stops staff coming to work – business unaffected

The Timico car park is emptier than usual this morning as heavy overnight snow has prevented some  staff making it in. In fact most of the country seems to have ground to a halt. In London the buses aren’t running, some airports are closed and the train service is limited. We are just not used to snow in the UK and the official advice is not to travel.

Of course the newpapers have the usual dramatic headlines. “UK business loses £600m a day due to weather.”  The weather, I must say, has not made a blind bit of difference to Timico as most of our staff are already geared up for flexible working.

They can work from home just as easily as from the office (in some cases more effectively !!) because the business is fully IP enabled. Access to telephony (VoIP), intranet – CRM, billing and support platforms. In fact this infrastructure also makes it easy to offer a 24 x 7 round the clock support service.

It also means, and excuse me here I’m on a bit of a roll,  we have lower absence due to sickness and with a high number of female staff can be much more flexible in our approach to maternity leave.  So I don’t think the snow will have affected us at all.

My kids on the other hand are extremely disaffected. They had tuned in to the local radio station at the crack of dawn to listen out for school closure announcements. It seemed that practically every school in Lincolnshire was shut except for those of the Davies offspring!  Bummer.

Timico car park this morning
Timico car park this morning