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Author: Trefor Davies
Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com
Picture of a rib joint of beef before it went into the oven. Today we are having the works: beef (medium to rare), roast spuds and parsnips, carrots & swede, cheesy leaks and I might pop out to get some French beans cos kid4 likes them. I also have some nice beef stock for gravy and a new jar of Dijon mustard. No horseradish sauce – I don’t do it. As a starter we are having smoked salmon then a lemon torte for pud though we might have that after the cheese as I’ve bought a nice cabernet sauvignon and I like to finish the bottle with some cheese, a la mode Francais.
I have of course rung my own mam for a chat. We had our Mother’s Day conversation last weekend. I sent her a card a week early – got the weekend wrong. It was ok. She also got the weekend wrong and had just opened the card before I called her. Now you know where I get it from:)
Nom nom…
Last week we reported the building of a terrific new woodstore as an amenity for the Davies household in Lincoln. Check out the amazing video here.
Well not all the wood is going to be allowed into the wood store. The smaller branches and rotting bits of old furniture ain’t gonna make it. Nosiree Bob1. Having bought a shiny new gas bbq last summer we no longer use our fire pit to cook food. In fact we haven’t used the gas job since last summer either but that is somewhat of a digression. What better use for a fire pit than to light fires? Eh?
This morning I rubbed two sticks together and got a blaze on the go. Been piling the condemned bits of wood on to the the point that the firepit is now full of ash and I’ll need to wait until another day to finish off the job. Will get some good potash for the plants out of it.
Just in case you ar wondering, and I know that statistically some of you will be woosses of a nervous disposition, it is all perfectly safe. I am on the committee of the local boys scout group and have watched how they light fires. At no point in time was the fire brigade likely to have been called for. After all it is Mother’s Day and firemen have mothers too you know. The last think they need is to be called out to a fire started by some idiot when they were supposed to be doing the roast potatoes.
That’s all for now. Got to take a shower to rid me of woodsmoke. Ciao amigos.
Other fire based posts:
Plough pub fires chef just before Christmas
Fireworks on bonfire night
Chromebooks, backups and crackling open fires
1Wossgoin on? Yesterday it was Franglais and today it’s Americun!
Yes folks it’s here. Le weekend. Don’t ask me why it is in French. I’m not aware of any particular French theme to this weekend. Not the 14th of July or anything like that and I don’t think this is one of the weekends the baggage handlers go on strike.
Nevertheless, French it is. Not the whole post. Some of you would have to refer to Google Translate to understand it (si ce n’est pas vous ignorez cette dernière phrase). Also my French is frozen in time in 1978 with a B at O’Level so I doubt I’d do the subject of le weekend any justice were it written in that language. Think of the problems Google Translate would have understanding it.
In fact the whole opening section of this post is misleading. Yes the post has been written
I’ve mentioned this before but I hate Facebook. Their ads really irk me.
Just now I’ve been reminded that my next birthday is my 53rd. I don’t mind that it is my 53rd birthday. I quite like being me. What annoys me is that Facebook have shoved an ad in my face asking “Are you 53 next birthday”. They know damn well how old I am.
They also know that I would have been two years old in 1963 so there is no way I could have been working in a noisy environment since then.
And then there is the American Express ad. It costs a lot of money to get an American Express card. It’s all very well it being usable everywhere in the US of A (buy Americun stoopid) but there are loads of places in the UK that don’t take it because AMEX demand much higher commission than Visa and Mastercard.
Badly targeted ads from Facebook. They should use Google Ads. At least Google knows I’m thinking of buying a metal shed:).
Gotta go. Picking up a daughter from university. End of Term and she has run out of clean clothes.
Other posts that mention Facebook:
Annoying Facebook ads
Facebook privacy intrusion continues
Where Facebook used to tread – the spare plinth
I bought the Acer C720 Chromebook for use at home and the Samsung XE303, which up until now was my only laptop is to be designated as my business machine. It is somewhat misleading to suggest that their respective uses are solely for personal and business. Reality is that in the modern always on world it is difficult to separate work and play but at least I would get a feel for the user issues in respect of each environment.
Switching between work and personal accounts is a fairly straightforward matter. You click on your image in the top right hand corner of the screen and can choose the relevant account you want to access. This seems to be true across all Google Applications, at least as far as I’ve been able to see. So for example I can easily switch between Drive, Gmail and Calendar for each of my Google accounts.
There is added complexity here because I actually have multiple Google Apps accounts for different businesses but to keep it simple I’m just going to talk about trefor.net.
One of the purposes of having a separate business identity is to
Bought an Osprey laptop bag last night. From a new GO Outdoors camping superstore in Lincoln. Officially opening next weekend but I was passing…
My old laptop bag is over ten years old. It has airbags – bought during my globe trotting days when laptops had hard drives. Good laptop bags had airbags inside them to protect the contents from the buffeting in overhead lockers and other places where bags are tossed carelessly during the scramble to find your seat and the comfort of that first glass of champagne.
Nowadays breakable hard drives feature less and less in our lives. Certainly neither my new Acer C720 and not so old Samsung XE303 Chromebooks have one. Hard drives are rapidly heading for that huge pile of junk waiting to be recycled though not before you’ve smashed it with a hammer.
The old laptop bag is not only over ten years old but bits are breaking and it is desperate for a clean. The other problem with it was that the airbags took up a lot of space and didn’t leave all that much room for clothes in the event of an overnighter.
The new Osprey Quasar has 30 litres of space. I did have my eye on a Vango 60+20 but the sales guy who was very knowledgeable told me that was for expeditions and was the one one he used to do his Duke of Edinburgh Award. I may yet buy the Vango but in the meantime I walked away with the Osprey and will be using it in anger tomorrow when I head to London for the ITSPA Council meeting.
I’ll let you know how it goes 🙂
That’s all folks. You know it makes sense…
Other bag stories:
When I was a kid I used to read 3 books a week. The deal was when I finished one my dad would buy me another.
I read a lot. Now I read that Facebook have gone shopping again and are buying a virtual reality company called Oculus VR.
In one sense this dismays me. A signal that we are going to be sucked even more into a cyber life that bears little relation to the real world. Some might say that this is a good thing. We only ever hear bad things in the news for example. At least it feels that way. Whats wrong with a bit of escapism?
Escapism is after all what I was am up to when deep into my books. I don’t hear or see anything going on around me (much to the annoyance of my wife). So just a different form of virtual reality really.
Sometimes I think we are losing touch with real life. We need to hold on to reality. Reality might have lots of bad things associated with it: lost planes, mudslides, war and the threat of war. Reality however has lots of great things. Great things the sum of which easily compensate for the bad.
It’s spring in the northern hemisphere. Best time of year. Feel the sun on your face, hear the birds, smell the grass. Get that barbecue out. Get reality.
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Can’t uninstall Flipboard
Bit odd. I never use Flipboard but appear to have it installed on my droid and it occasionally attracts my attention somehow. I decided to uninstall the app but it doesn’t seem to want to let me. It offers me the opportunity to stop updating or disable it but not uninstall. Doesn’t seem right. Is it a core android feature or have Flipboard done z deal with Samsung?
Screenshot below:
I have a shiny new Acer C720 Chromebook (in Granite Gray1) at home. I also have a shiny not so old Samsung XE303C12 Chromebook that I have been using as my main office laptop since last Autumn.
I decided I needed two devices because I want to separate my business and personal life and having both sets of credentials on my one and only laptop means that the line between the two is somewhat blurred.
Due diligence was cursory in nature. There aren’t many useful reviews out there and no useful comparison of the differences between the two. Unless I’m not doing a good job of looking this seems to be the case whichever Chromebooks you might want to compare. In general hardware reviews often boil down to a comparison of specifications. Intel vs Arm hardware, screen size, battery life etc etc. This seems to be true regardless of the type of hardware – mobiles, tablets, laptops, TVs etc etc etc.
In the absence of what I considered to be useful guidance I decided that battery life was the most important feature and all other things considered I might as well go for the cheapest. I got a result here in that I ended up paying £20 less than the advertised price of £199.99. Check out how here.
The Acer C720 I went home with turned out to be just as good as the Samsung I paid £230 for (it’s now £199.99) and in some respects even better. The screen sizes are the same but the battery life is notionally better in the Acer than the Samsung.
Being at work I just unplugged the Samsung from its power supply and am told there are 4hrs 43 minutes of battery left. It varies depending on how much power the Chromebook is taking from its battery at any given time.
The screenshot on the right shows the Acer, unplugged after fully charged for the first time, with a whopping battery life of 11. hours 41 minutes. Once the Chromebook properly realised what was going on this settled down very quickly to 7 hours 40 mins (pic here) – still more than respectable. Clearly also better than the Samsung although lets remember that the Samsung is a few months old now. A quick Google suggests the Samsung battery life spec is around 6.5 hours cf 8.5 hours for the Acer.
My test was far from scientific but the Acer does certainly seem to have a longer lasting battery. I’ve had the Acer now for 4 days and only charged it up twice.
Weight is also a concern. The longer battery life needs to be accompanied by something that is not so heavy to cart around. The Samsung Chromebook is great for this at 1.1Kg. I don’t really notice it is there, certainly compared with the Dell Microsoft Dinosaurusbook I used to use. Also the Samsung is only 17.5mm thick.
The Acer is much heavier than the Samsung. Only kidding. It’s 1.25Kg and 19mm. Nothing in it really. The two photos below show one on top of the other. With the Acer on top it looks quite a bit thicker than the Samsung. However when you stick the Samsung on top there doesn’t seem anything in it.
The other views also show very little difference. Front on or side by side they are pretty much the same.
The Samsung has slightly more sophisticated looks but on balance I prefer the Acer. The touchpad on the Samsung has occasionally locked up on me and with the Acer I don’t sense this is going to happen. It is somehow more clickable.
The final point for this first Acer C720 comparison with the Samsung X303 Chromebook is about power supply connections.
It is such a shame that the two use different connectors. This is presumably down to different Voltage specs – I’ve not bothered looking. Life would make so much more sense if everyone used the same one. Then I’d have a backup if one ever broke on me. As it is if that happens it will be a faff buying another. Hasn’t happened yet but I don’t think I’ve had a laptop where the power supply hasn’t died on me at some stage. Maybe the better battery life signals less strain on the power supply and longer component mtbf.
Remaining reviews this week are going to focus on the practical experience of using two different Chromebooks for personal and business use. The software is the same for both. I have already made my mind up on a favourite and that is the Acer. The feel of it, the better battery life and the fact that the touchpad seems better has clinched it. I also managed to get the Acer at a lower price than advertised though both Chromebooks are notionally the same price. Not sure I’d bother going for any more expensive alternative.
Until tomorrow…
More good Chromebook reads:
Samsung Chromebook XE303 first impressions
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles
1 fwiw and sorry about the poor spelin – copied straight off the box
This post, by Wilhelm Boeddinghaus of BCIX is a short and sweet summary of Internet Peering in Berlin together with an invitation to their next shindig on May 8th.
Berlin is the Capital of Germany and has about 3.400.000 inhabitants, many datacenters and many interesting startups. The Berlin Commercial Internet Exchange (BCIX) runs switches in the six most important datacenters. Our members can connect from any datacenter to peers in any other datacenter in Berlin. All DCs are carrier neutral and have several fiber providers to choose from.
The BCIX today has 59 members and offers ports from 100Mbit to multiple 10 GBit. Smaller and larger ISPs connect and peer in Berlin. The traffic is as high as 55 GBit/s in the daily peek.
Three to four times a year the BCIX invites the Berlin peering community to our community meetings. We always try to find new interesting places to gather. Nearly 100 mostly technical people show up and enjoy technical presentations and beer and food. Join us on May 8th!
Check out the BCIX website here.
Auf wiedersehen,
Categories
Chromebook week on trefor.net
Look out for a series of posts on the Chromebook this week. You may recall I bought an Acer Chromebook last week to complement my Samsung. The idea was that I’d have one in the office where the main sign-on is the trefor.net Google Apps for business account and one at home where I used my personal account to log in.
I’d then not need to carry a bag into town when I walk to work. Freeeedom. Friday was the first day in which this was put into operation. This was a specially useful day for the freedom to kick in as I met some mates for beers after work and then headed to the Lincoln Drill hall where Kid3’s band was headlining the bill in the special Drill Hall tenth anniversary concert. The last thing I needed was to have to cart a bag around.
Today I find that the bagless society has not completely arrived as I have to carry the carrier bag with the packup so lovingly prepared for me by Mrs Davies. I’ve also found that due to circumstances totally within my control I’ve ended up with the logons arse about tit1. The Acer machine, which is at home has the business logon and the Samsung at work has the personal one. Will sort that out later.
It has been an interesting experience getting to grip with the fact that the machine logged on to the business accounts has had services denied to it that are easily accessible by the personal machine. This is a good demo of the strength of the Google Apps service where a business is concerned.
More on all this later after I’ve climbed on Shanks’ Pony and hit the road to the office.
Hasta la vista amigos.
Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles
PS It’s a beautiful sunny day. Yu need to be walking to work on a day like this.
1 That’s trefor.net now blocked by all the consumer ISP porn fiters.
Le wood store est fini, as they say in Cannes. It’s the sort of thing they drop into dinner table conversation at A List get-togethers on the Riviera. It’s a while since I’ve been. What with not owning a villa in the South of France and all.
In Cannes they would be talking about the fact that Jean Claude1 has finished the job. He is a treasure. You didn’t think they did it themselves do you? Plays havoc with your hands. Anyway it’s about having the time to do it, and the inclination.
Here in Lincoln it’s a different game. We build wood stores ourselves in Lincoln. It’s a matter of pride. Mind you no point in rushing it. It’s a job that has been needing doing for years. These things need careful consideration. Planning is all important. My mate Terry has been doing his bathroom for the last 25 years. Rush a job and do it twice, as the old saying goes.
The wood store is now finished, though the wood has not all been moved into the protection of its confines. That could be
Spotted these speakers in Currys audio department yesterday. They had “do not count” written on a label on top of each one. I therefore counted them. Don’t think anyone spotted me. The moment was captured on video and is now on YouTube for all to see. I’m a rebel, me.
Other weekend reads:
I was sat one Friday night in the packed snug of the Victoria pub1 on Union Road and the conversation somehow came to the subject of allotments. Turned out pretty much everyone in the room had an allotment! It may be that real ale pubs attract a certain type. I doubt the same would have been true for Walkabout or any of the other trendy pubs in town.
We gave up our allotment a few years ago. It was handily placed just over our back fence but it at 60m x 10m it was too big and with four kids could never find the time to work it. The plot has now been spit in two and is properly tended to as it rightfully deserves.
This morning I was up early to set kid4 off on his travels to Sutton Bridge for a hockey tournament (90mins drive away) followed by a football match this pm in Burgh Le Marsh (also a long distance). At 7.30 am the scene outside the landing window was almost autumnal. There had been a lot of rain overnight but with the deciduous trees overhanging the garden not yet in leaf one sensed an absence of spring freshness that makes this the best of seasons.
Over in the allotments a couple of people were already up and at it. Wow. That is commitment. They will reap the benefit later in the year. All credit to them2. I took a photo. You can just about make out one of the men – clicking on the pic brings up the full size version.
This morning I’m finishing the building of my woodstore. A rudimentary construction but hopefully one that will do the job. Fotos will be phurnished.
Other agriculture related posts:
50 mighty quadtracs all in a row
Lincolnshire pea crop – feeding the nation
Tom Wood beer and wooden biros
1 Everyone moved from the Victoria to the Strugglers when one Friday evening they put the price of a pint of bitter up by 30 pence in between rounds!!!
2 I don’t like sprouts anyway!
This sign, on the pedestrian crossing near my house, is on red. Red means do not cross. It could be unsafe as there might be traffic coming that could hurt you. Badly.
When the sign turns green it is safe to proceed as any cars should have stopped to let you cross. Usually there is a beeping noise when the sign is green which makes you want to hurry across.
Sometimes if they think there are no cars coming people are tempted to cross when the sign is on red. This is a personal decision. No responsibility is accepted here if you are run over.
Occasionally people press the button and cross before the sign has changed to green. This tends to annoy drivers who may find themselves sat there waiting when there do not appear to be any pedestrians wanting to cross. Most of us will be guilty of this. Ah well.
Categories
Green shoots
Green shoots, hope, optimism, anticipation, certainty, confidence, elation, enthusiasm, expectation, happiness, idealism, trust, assurance, brightness, buoyancy, calmness, cheer, cheerfulness, easiness, encouragement, exhilaration, positivism, sureness, good cheer, looking on bright side
More good reads:
Lunberjack weekend special & trailer maintenance tips
Should badgers get the vote and other jolly wheezes
Latest photo in the series #plaques passed on the way to work. This one is to be found at the bottom of Steep Hill in Lincoln.
Photographed in train loo between Manchester Piccadilly and Sheffield en route home from 4G panel at Convergence Summit North. Not in perfect focus as train wouldn’t stop shaking:)
More bog tales:
Peering Week has been a great week for content on trefor.net. The subject is deeply technical with its fair share of acronyms and buzzwords which might leave the layman baffled.
Although posts on this blog are often written to make the technology that powers the internet easier for the casual passer by to understand sometimes trying to explain something would involve the publishing of whole text books online. We therefore try and mix up the content with technical posts that assume the reader already has a reasonable knowledge of the subject combined with some lighter content.
During Peering Week we have had 18 excellent contributions from some of the people who run the internet in Europe. This might sound dramatic especially considering that the internet is made up of sixty or seventy thousand Autonomous Networks. The contributors this week run Internet Exchanges where a greats many of these networks connect to each other.
Internet traffic is growing rapidly and everyone in the business is tremendously busy. I am therefore hugely grateful to everyone who has taken the time and effort to put together a great set of blog posts that really do include something for everyone.
In reading #peeringweek posts you will get an understanding of what is going on “under the bonnet (hood)” of the internet including technology, commercial and political issues. There have been contributions from the biggest and smallest Internet Exchanges, from the oldest and the newest kids on the block.
I can say that we will definitely be having another #peeringweek. We will also be having weeks that focus on other areas of interest. Broadband, mobile, VoIP and cloud immediately spring to mind.
Thanks again to both readers and contributors and have a great weekend 🙂
Picked up my Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook. Granite Gray not Ash as foretold in this previous post but hey. Might never know what colour ash was 🙂 Also it’s a shame that international language seems to have dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of Americun English. Ah well.
Back at the office I thought I’d bang out some words of wisdom for you before user testing the product. I bought the Chromebook from PC World Business. One does this ostensibly when one requires a VAT receipt from PC World, dont ya know.
Whilst hanging around waiting for the PC World Business system to boot up I got into conversation and casually asked whether there were any discount codes available. The “sales advisor” (I imagine that’s how it’s speld) tapped his keyboard and hey presto a £20 discount appeared.
So my Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook Granite Gray was not £199.99. It was £149.99 plus VAT which I’m sure your quick thinking minds will have totted up to £179.99 give or take a bit of rounding. Result eh? 🙂
I took a look at other Chromebooks on sale whilst hanging around. They were pretty much identical to the Acer. Small differences in build quality perhaps but these are all commodity items. It’s like buying bags of cement, or tins of baked beans.
Now what is interesting is I happen to know the discounts are not available from PC World’s Retail arm. This is because PC World Retail buys its stuff from Dixons Retail who in turn get it from a UK Distributor who buys his from the European Disti who gets it from the manufacturer. I also happen to know (it’s spring – a little bird told me) the manufacturer’s price is £90 so there is plenty of margin in there if you can buy direct from the manufacturer but sod all if you have to slice it 4 ways.
Apparently most of the Samsung products bring good margins – it’s only Apple who are greedy. What do I care? I got an Acer C720 Chromebook for £179.99.
More on this as it happens.
Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles
Just bought an Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook Ash. I assume that ash is the colour:) I have to go and collect it from PC World on Tritton Road in Lincoln in an hour. It’s OK – it’s only a short walk from the office in case you’re wondering.
I already have a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook – pictured here lying on top of my old Dell laptop (bless). I’ve decided to buy a second so that I don’t need to bother taking a bag to the office. I’ll just leave one in the office and one at home. All the content is in the cloud so no messing about transferring stuff.
The other reason for buying a second Chromebook is because I want to force a separation between my business gmail account – trefor.net and my personal one. I will still be able to access both from either machine but I want to build up the business profile on Google and other social media platforms and it can get confusing having two live accounts on the same machine.
Before buying I went online to look at reviews. Tbh they are all rubbish. You get side by side lists of specification features plus a bland analysis concluding in why you should by one nearly identical mass produced consumer commodity product over and above another.
I cogitated over thickness, battery life, screen size and price and ended up buying one of the cheapest which also seems to be amongst the best on battery life and thickness. Battery life is increasingly important – if you can get a day out of your machine when out and about then that is a result. I’m sure the Acer 720 WiFi Chromebook Ash will do the job. You can be sure I’ll also let you know if the colour doesn’t turn out to be ash, which will get us all thinking:)
I did think about just buying another Samsung Chromebook but figured it would be just as well to do a comparison between the two. Also there don’t appear to be many reviews out there that offer real user experience of the machines.
To finish off it is worth noting that when I last tried to buy a Chromebook from PC World they didn’t have any in stock. Shows how the Chromebook stock has risen innit?
Ciao amigo.
Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles
PS I did ponder buying a chromebox but it only seems worth doing if you need more horsepower.
Following on from my post on FreeAgent yesterday I got home to find the details of the online banking for trefor.net. Time to get the accounts sorted out.
All of the set up costs for the business have come out of my personal account. This includes a chunky legal bill as well as ad hoc events such as champagne celebrations in the Savoy a few pints of half and half in the British Legion. Now that the bank account is accessible and money is starting to come in it is time to square things up.
At lunchtime today I fired up FreeAgent.
Forewords: The Italian Landscape
Basic facts about Italy and its Internet Landscape:
a. Italy has a strong incumbent, one of the strongest in Europe. It has been amongst the first in splitting domestic and global/foreign business into two separate branches, where the international one is Sparkle, one of the Renesys baker’s dozen, if not a Tier-1.
b. most of the business is concentrated around Milano as this city is the sixth european telecommunication services market according to Telegeography. Nearly all internet traffic is backhauled there in a ‘Docklands-like’ location known as Via Caldera, a business campus located on the west side of the city close to the highway ring.
c. following Telecom Italia approach, nearly all the big national players (carriers and ISPs) have been always trying to attack adjacent markets, like colo, system integration and so on. As a result of this carrier neutral co-locators have always found an extremely hostile environment there, and are almost unknown. Even in Milano there is just one of them. Basically anybody which has a national network have developed his own data centre.
d. Italy is not a language or cultural hub for the neighboring countries, but
Things are fairly hectic here on the trefor.net startup front. We are trying to set the business up so that everything is automated. This hasn’t been a total walk in the park due to the time it seems to have taken to do some basic things such as set up a business bank account, get online banking, VAT number registration etc etc etc.
Customer accounts have now been set up on FreeAgent, invoices sent out and the first cash is in the bank – yay. We chose FreeAgent partly because it is being used by people in other offices near ours and party because in theory it has all the APIs we need to automate processes.
Also when you search online it is very difficult to see the wood from the trees when it comes to accounting packages. The big ones get the SEO rankings but products such as Sage come with the baggage of being early runners in the game.
FreeAgent really has been a piece of cake to set up. Importing contacts is easy, generating invoices a dream. We haven’t yet got to the reconciling bank balances bit yet as we are still waiting for internet banking to be set up but it won’t be long now.
Stay tuned…
Use this 10% off discount referral code for FreeAgent 43ls3wr5 – check it out via this link . We can both save cash
Tomova Yoshida from JPNAP is a globe trotting musician cum IXP engineer. He entertained us all in Helsinki with impromptu Beatles renditions on the grand piano at the 23rd Euro-IX Forum social night. At the 24th Forum he stepped up a gear.
OK he accompanied the Euro-IX drunks choir on the piano. But he did a lot more than that. Leeds Town Hall, the venue for this week’s social, has one humongous organ. “It is the most magnificent organ I’ve ever seen” one attendee was heard to say. Well I have to agree with her.
The images below are of the choir in action around Tomo, sat at the piano, the view of the hall and dinner from a seat in front of the organ pipes, the view of the organ itself from the back of the hall and of me in my standard issue Yorkshire flat cap with John Souter of LINX and Melanie Kempf of DE-CIX.
Finally at the end of this post is a short video of Tomo playing the organ so that you can appreciate the sound. Magnificent it was 🙂
Other peering week posts you might like to read include:
UK internet history – The Early Days of LONAP by Raza Rizvi
INEX’s IXP Manager – Tools to help manage an Internet Exchange by Barry O’Donovan
Regional Peering in the UK by James Blessing
Co-operation makes internet exchanges future proof by Pauline Hartsuiker
Experience of launching an IXP in North America by Ben Hedges
The evolution of an IXP network engineer by Rob Lister
Why does Scotland need an Internet Exchange? by Charlie Boisseau
May your networks be stable and free from DDOS attacks. Always wear a white hat and be nice to others. 24th Euro-IX Forum, Salem church, AQL, Leeds.
Other Peering Week posts on trefor.net include:
UK internet history – The Early Days of LONAP by Raza Rizvi
INEX’s IXP Manager – Tools to help manage an Internet Exchange by Barry O’Donovan
Regional Peering in the UK by James Blessing
Co-operation makes internet exchanges future proof by Pauline Hartsuiker
Experience of launching an IXP in North America by Ben Hedges
The Golden Cone. Sometimes you come across something quite by accident that lights up your life. It’s similar to finding a ten pound note in a pair of trousers you haven’t worn since last summer, but different.
This morning we were on our way to the 24th Euro-IX Forum in Leeds and Rob Lister decided we would take a different route to the one we had been using. This took us past the ASDA offices which was where we discovered pure treasure. Traffic cones of bright gold lined the parking spaces nearest to the front door. Position A.
The second photo shows you why they were there. Rewards for good behaviour/good attendance/top performance/name drawn in a raffle1. One wonders whether there is the obverse incentive at the point at the end of the car park farthest away from the door. Or maybe naughty employees aren’t actually allowed to park and are made to get the bus in to work (nothing wrong with taking the bus – I don’t know what they were thinking!).
Of course this HR morale booster could also work the other way. Staff might actively seek not to win to avoid approbation by jealous peers. Still, it was a good idea, I suppose…
Other Peering Week posts on trefor.net include:
UK internet history – The Early Days of LONAP by Raza Rizvi
INEX’s IXP Manager – Tools to help manage an Internet Exchange by Barry O’Donovan
Regional Peering in the UK by James Blessing
Co-operation makes internet exchanges future proof by Pauline Hartsuiker
Experience of launching an IXP in North America by Ben Hedges
1 delete as you see fit – I don’t actually know the answer.