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Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com
This is simply a public record of a bet between
two guys. Wayne, pictured right has bet Stuart (bearded guy obv) fifty quid that he won’t get his CCIE before he is 40 in two and a half years time.
My money is on Stuart but Wayne has plenty of time to start saving.
It’s good to have a culture of self improvement and also to be able to make some money out of it as well 🙂
Couple of videos here for your delectation and delight. We had a Dell film crew come and visit a few weeks ago. They were very professional, all three of them, and had flown over from gay Paree the night before. Their one mistake was flying into Manchester where they stayed the night and then took a 2 1/2 hour taxi ride to Newark the next day. Next time they come they said they will try East Midlands airport – less than an hour away. Very sensible I’d say.
Anyway here are the vids:
http://www.dellinnovation.com/en/timico-trefor-davies-2/
http://www.dellinnovation.com/en/timico-trefor-davies-3/
There were three of them. I don’t know what happened to the first. I must have said something.
Just sat in one of our ongoing planning sessions to calculate our bandwidth 
needs during the London 2012 Olympics. It’s a complicated call and we will be telling all nearer the time.
One of the data sources we are using is the BBC’s own estimates of iPlayer traffic growth. The inset photo shows when the BBC is expecting heavy iPlayer traffic loads and is based on the sport/competitor mix for any given session.
The colour coding scheme doesn’t tell us how much traffic is expected for each event but the Beeb is planning for a peak of 1Terabit per second.
The capacity planning and quality management for the Olympics is not totally straightforward because there are factors involved outside the control of any individual ISP. Load on the iPlayer servers is one and the traffic at individual exchanges is another. As an industry we are going to have to be nimble to make sure that our customers’ experience is a good one.
More as I get it…
The UK telecommunications community, including all major Timico network partners, has put in a huge amount of preparation in readiness for the London 2012 Olympics.
This includes additional capacity, network security and the ability to cope with and recover from major network incidents.
Capacity
As a lead sponsor BT is responsible for all the communications services provided during the Olympics. BT has been active with its customer groups, including Communications Providers such as Timico, to understand capacity demands for core communications services during the games.
These include
Just took a call from a mobile number on my mobile. It was an Indian sounding lady representing the Consumer Advice Bureau. She wasn’t trying to take money off me or sell me anything or any scam like that which is a nice change. So many of these cold calls are from dodgy sources.
Anyway she was calling to advise me that I could save 70% on any payments I made on unsecured loans thanks to new government legislation. Yay.
We are all back and, I assume suitably refreshed from our Easter break – that’s Spring break for readers in the USA. We can now start the official countdown to what is likely to be the most intensive summer of activities that we have seen in the UK, at least as far as I can remember and I’m old. If you haven’t already noticed from previous posts I am very very excited about the Olympics and from now until the games intend to write as many posts as I can manage on the subject.
To set the scene it is worth talking about key dates for the diary. This summer is not just all about the Olympics. There is a lot more going on.
Did you know1 that LTE was launched in the USA in December 2010 where a most aggressive competition between operators has been taking place, led by Verizon? In the USA LTE has high penetration across all devices, comes at no premium over 3G data services and LTE users typically use around 50% more data than 3G users.
LTE was also launched in Germany in December 2010 but has had a slow adoption rate with the initial focus being on fixed/mobile substitution. This I understand is in part due to regulations ensuring that owners of LTE bandwidth have to service “the final third” as part of their licensing arrangements. There isn’t much of a choice of devices on LTE in Germany.
South Korea was relatively late to the game here. They launched in July 2011 but had nationwide coverage by mid 2012 and has the highest penetration rate, focussed mainly on selling to consumers. LTE has brought innovative new services to the South Koreans eg richer high quality interactive maps.
Norralorrapeople know this. Brings the scheduling of 4G in the UK into perspective doesn’t it?
1 source Ericsson & GSA (Oct 12th 2011)
I have to be careful here because whilst I am a Samsung fan I have no desire to be labelled a fanboi in the manner of Apple afficionados. Samsung has announced a media event at Earls Court on Thursday 3rd May and the speculation is that this will be the Galaxy S3 launch. This might be exciting.
I use a Galaxy S2 which is as far as I am concerned still a great phone. There has to be a lot of new functionality for me to want to upgrade – certainly more than appears to have been the case with the various flavours of iPhone churned out over the last 12 months.
What might these improvements be?
Holidays are greatly helped by nice weather. 
This has been a typical week in April in the British Isles. Sunshine and showers. Bathed in sunshine Peel is a lovely place to stroll around. I have been up at around 6am every day to go down to my favourite spot on Fenella Beach. It’s rare to see anyone else around at that time of day, except maybe the odd fisherman.
Although I have a rule to stay away from the likes of Twitter the holiday has not been without connectivity. There is wifi at mam and dads. 11.8Megs down despite the exchange being
just around the corner. 0.47Megs up.
Mam and dad don’t really care – as long as the Guardian loads up in a timely manner. I have principally been using it to catch up on the local weather forecast. Also gmail – I’m speaking at a meeting at the LSE next Thursday so kept in touch with the organisation of that. Olympic news emails are also welcome – we have tickets for the kayaking. Work email has been left alone. My phone has been left mostly in the car. I don’t like to use it due to the cost of data roaming.
We had to reboot the router one day. Pretty much all the Davies complained to my Dad that they couldn’t pick up the wifi/internet. His laptop still worked fine so he didn’t care 🙂 Neither did I. Internet! Who needs it 🙂
The main story of the week in respect of connectivity is my discovery in the ships chandlery at Peel of a laminated map showing the line of the undersea telecommunications cable between the UK and Ireland – near Blackpool to near Dublin.
It was free so I took a copy – you never know when these things are going to come in handy.
The chandlery is down on the quayside near the museum if you happen to be in Peel and need some spares for your seagoing vessel. You don’t have to be a sailor to appreciate it. I was sorely tempted to buy some block and tackle gear. Only problem is I don’t have a use for it other than it is really cool gear to have. I doubt that Mrs Davies would entertain having it on the wall above the fireplace.
You will otherwise be pleased to know that we ate well and slept well and fully recharged the batteries in the fresh Manx sea air. Hooray for holidays. The short amateur video below is of Fenella Beach – one of my favourite places.
This chart is a few months old now but I haven’t had it all that long and is still interesting to take a look at (click either pic to enlarge).
It shows the growth in O2 3G data traffic between 2008 and 2011. See the spike when the iPad was introduced combined with the football world cup traffic (dunno why anyone bothers!).
I don’t have an up to date one which would probably be even more interesting but I suspect that is too close for commercial comfort.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be covering two main themes. These are the Olympics Games and 4G. They are different though to some extent the technical aspects are very similar. Both subjects are going to be in our consciousness quite considerably from here on.
I’m not going to be blogging or tweeting over the Easter Holidays so see you all back on the 16th April, thoroughly refreshed and ready for the sensory onslaught that will be the run-in to London2012.
PS Thanks to O2 for the chart – keep the info coming guys – everyone is interested 🙂
Get on board – we are looking for staff for our Newark based Network Operations Centre. Vacancies include a 24×7 NOC position, 1st and 2nd line engineers and a “Helpdesk to Helpdesk” person to interface with IT Staff of our larger customers.
We are also after a senior network engineer Cisco, Juniper, MPLS, BGP,VPLS, TCP/IP (both IPv4 and IPv6), GRE, IPSec, PPP (including Radius), HSRP and SNMP.
Check out the vacancies here.
Never before in the field of trefor.net blogging have I devoted such a large header photo to a post. According to Scott, my style guru and graphic designer the header is meant to be quite thin giving a tantalising glimpse of what lies within and tempting people to either click to see a bigger image or read the post below.
This one is almost three times the normal size!!! The subject merits the attention for on my way to an ITSPA meeting in a taxi this morning I saw a vision. In this vision Vodafone loomed large and loud and in my face. Well at my elbow actually because sat in that London taxi my eyes fell upon a mobile phone charging point compatible with multiple phone types.
Wow! Cool! So good I could envisage people asking the taxi driver to drive round the block a couple of times to give their phone more time to charge.
The taxi driver gets a few quid a month for hosting the “service”. Vodafone gets great publicity and feelgood factor. They made me think what a great bit of PR. Whoever thought of this in Vodafone’s marketing department deserves a bonus.I will seek them out
Well done Vodafone.
Just heard that apparently the government is considering pulling the “snooping” bit of the Queen’s speech. Been told it is on the Times website which I can’t access. I’ll pass on more as I get it but it will also be on all the major news sites. Others feel the need to verify but I think this one is worth taking a punt on.
BBC is currently trying to validate this but if it is true then it is a major victory for common sense.
If what I say is all boloney then I’ll delete this post – I have the power 🙂
19.00 hrs – latest news from the Beeb suggests they aren’t pulling it but taking the foot off the gas a bit. Prepare for political wheezle words.
One of yesterday’s posts had a song title from the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, one of my favourites and probably the greatest rock masterpiece of all time. This one is also from the same album.
My daughter is off to London today with a pal. It’s an 18th birthday trip. Night out on the town taking in Legally Blonde, stay in the hotel at County Hall followed by a day’s retail therapy in Oxford Street with her birthday money.
All she needs, apart from overnight clothes are her cashpoint card and her HTC Desire HD. Her train ticket reference was on the phone, hotel booking details – on the phone, tube map – on the phone. Get the drift? She is a child of her time. It won’t be long before she doesn’t even need her bank card. It will all be on the phone.
My only contribution to the trip, apart from an element of funding and a lift to the station was to remind her to make sure she took her phone charger with her.
I know she hasn’t left home yet really and even when she has gone I know she will still be coming back occasionally, when she needs something. Hey – that’s why I’m here 🙂
Anyone seen Legally Blonde? Also note the absence of a prefix to the word phone – “smart” is so yesterday.
PS oh and if anyone has a favourite song that they would like a technology oriented post written about let me know – keep it clean. I think I’ll be working my way through Sgt Pepper, somehow.
It might interest you to see my monthly ADSL usage over the last four years or so, reported in GigaBytes per month. There is a very clear upward trend – over 500% growth from the low point in April 09 to Jan 12.
There would have been a technology upgrade from ADSLMax to ADSL2+ – quite possibly around mid 09 which would explain the jump but I can’t remember exactly.
The average household usage is around 17GB a month so us Davies’ are clearly heavy users. Our oldest, Tom went to University in October 2010 but this doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. In fact there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why one month his heavier than another. it’s just the general trend that tells us that I should expect to be using 150GB a month by sometime in 2015.
My broadband connection by 2015 is likely to be at least 100Mbps so I will have bandwidth available that would sustain large amount of data transfer. I suspect that reality will be higher than this. We as a family will begin to use even more services so I am going to predict 200GigaBytes a month. I’d also like to bet that my mobile data usage will be in the tens of GigaBytes compared with the very low single digit GigaBytes at the moment.
Any insights happily discussed.
It’s been another busy day in the internet game. It’s a modern day great game really, full of intrigue, suspicion and plot. Cat and mouse, combatants fighting it out for world domination etc etc you know what I mean.
In the days of the actual great game it would take a long time, weeks maybe for news to filter back from the frontier. These days it is mostly virtual and we hear about it in real time, or mostly so. The battle field is also virtual though people can still get hurt.
I spent much of the day talking about the modern great game, had I but realised. This is
The fuss in the media today regarding the government’s plan to make Internet Service Providers capture personal communications data is nothing new. It was brought up under the last Labour government as the “Intercept Modernisation Programme” and received heavy criticism from the Tory party in opposition.
Now with the responsibility of government the conservatives seem to have seen things differently and the word is that the forthcoming Queen’s speech will contain measures to enable the collection of personal information that includes who you have telephoned and emailed or have received emails from and which websites you have visited. The details of what is being sent in the emails isn’t being asked for at this time.
Apart from the obvious privacy issues
In a dramatic statement made after hours1 last night Apple announced a complete re-branding exercise under the new name “Kumquat”.
“The Apple brand has served us well and has made us the unbelievably big global giant we are today” says CEO Tim Cook. However with Steve Jobs no longer around, the share price at over $600 and the Market cap approaching $600Bn this can’t go on forever.
“There is a limit to how many iPods, iPads and Macs our fans are willing to buy so to sustain the growth we need to give them something else.”
That something is the Kumquat. The Kumquat is everything that Apple was but as a more upmarket and exotic fruit we expect consumers to be willing to pay even more for their addiction. Existing sub brands (iPod, iPad etc) will remain unaffected though replacement stickers will be available online and at Apple Kumquat stores and greengrocers in your locality.
The announcement has been greeted with some surprise
Actually that post title was a bit misleading. It should have read “frustrated of Lincoln”. The FTTC broadband availability checker has been saying 31st March for FTTC at my house for a good six months now.
For a long time I considered this to be a reasonable target date – 2 out of 4 Lincoln exchanges have already been upgraded. Moreover I’ve seen teams out laying fibre up Lindum Hill (down the road from me in Lincoln) and when asked they confirmed this was for FTTC broadband.
As we got nearer the deadline I noted that they still hadn’t upgraded my cabinet – it is easy to find out which is your cab – you just follow the telephone wire back from your house. Last weekend I noticed that the availability date for my line had totally disappeared from the checker.
I get so many enquiries re cabinet availability that it isn’t feasible to ask Openreach for information on every one but on this occasion I pulled rank on myself and decided to use my contacts to find out what is going on. All I can find out is that my exchange is not due to be upgraded until the end of June. This potentially means that my own FTTC broadband connection could be months after that date. The checker data base is knackered because this info is not in it.
BT of course say that the dates they give are “only indicative”. TBH I wouldn’t plan anything around availability of FTTC. It will come when it comes. Openreach does have a difficult job to do but the company doesn’t do itself any favours with what can only be described as terrible expectation management. Also it can’t be so difficult to provide their engineers and planners with some mechanism for properly reporting progress with network roll outs.
4G is like lightning, it’s an eye opener and seriously enhances the mobile data experience. This post talks about the truly exciting O2 4G trials in London and thinks about how the technology is going to change the mobile game.
Mobile data is already an important feature in the business communication landscape. As an ISP we see demand for it in the area of machine to machine, rapid site deployment, backup solutions for Disaster Recovery scenarios and of course straightforward internet browsing and email access from mobile devices.
The strategic importance of mobile data has even led Timico to invest in an Ethernet connection direct into the O2 network. We can now offer mobile MPLS solutions that sit within the same environment as existing fixed line MPLS networks – ideal for businesses that need security in both fixed and mobile networks.
Over the last year or two in the UK the focus in fixed line broadband has been on Fibre To The Cabinet, or in marketing jargon Fibre Broadband. With downlink speeds of “up to”40Mbps (to be upgraded to 80Mbps this coming April) the technology is revolutionising how people use their broadband connection. Add in the growth in high quality streaming video and gaming services and it is easy to see how the additional available bandwidth will be consumed.
Until very recently the mobile world, in the UK at least, has remained firmly in the domain of 3G – a technology that now seems relatively stone aged compared with Fibre Broadband. HSDPA makes the experience more bearable but it is still many Mega-bits apart from its fixed line counterpart.
The mobile companies are poised to change all this with LTE (Long Term Evolution) otherwise known as 4G. Trials are being conducted in a small number of locations in the UK. Timico is the first O2 Service Provider partner to be invited onto their London trials I am pleased to be able to report on my experiences.
This service is like lightning. It’s fast, speedy, call it what you like it’s a life changer. It’s been one of those projects that has been a pleasure to be involved in.
With only 25 masts around central London coverage is nowhere near what you would describe as ubiquitous but this is only a trial. When in a coverage area the speeds are great.
I started off in McDonalds at Kings Cross with a dongle fresh out of the box. After installation of the software, which was easy, the dongle performed an automatic firmware upgrade, also easy, using its own 4G connection.
At McDonalds I was getting over 13Mbps down 
and 540Kbps up which in my mind was a bit disappointing though I’m not sure it should have been. I have experimented with O2s 4G at their offices in Slough and seen much faster speeds both up and down than this. In fact this speed at McDonalds is faster than I get from my home ADSL2+ connection so I couldn’t grumble.
I knew I could do better than this. Roaming around town on the top deck of a number 25 bus I got 15.5Megs down
and amazingly 25Megs up – near Wardour Street. The ping times for all these measurements were impressive.
In torrential rain I moved around on foot dipping into various places to check out the speeds and moving generally towards known good hotspots.
In the end I took shelter in a pub called the Devonshire Arms on Duke Street, just off Oxford Street. Sat in the window and sipping a cup of tea I hit the jackpot with
40Megs down and 23 Megs up. I did various tests including varying the browser – Chrome was much better than IE. I also did video calls with both Timico’s own VoIP service and Skype.
The screenshot on the right is of four iPlayer daytime TV streams. The things you have to do to get a blog post written!
The highest I have seen recorded is 97Megs in the O2 Arena
itself. The 2,600 MHz LTE itself will go to 150Megs but the dongle tech doesn’t currently support this. We do have to remember this is very much a test rather than a production rollout so it isn’t going to be perfect but even considering this the experience has been great.
There were a few observations to be made out of this trial. The
raw speed I saw with O2s 4G was terrific when in good coverage areas. The amount of data you can download in a very small amount of time is going to change the game. In upgrading the dongle firmware for example I used 50MB in around a minute. If you consider that until recently a typical “fair use” policy for an “unlimited” data package was 500MB then you can see that the model is going to have to change. The backhaul capacity that mobile operators are going to have to build in to their networks is going to have to see growth measured in orders of magnitude.
Spectrum allocation for 4G rollout is going to be very important. At 2,600MHz the bandwidth you can get is much higher than at 800MHz, say. However the in-building penetration at the higher speed is not as good so the overall network design represents an interesting (though not insurmountable I’m sure) challenge for engineers. This makes the forthcoming Ofcom spectrum auction important – there is a mix of spectra that is going to be optimum for commercial success.
As a side note it is going to be interesting to see how much the operators are prepared to pay for spectrum – they all think they overpaid for 3G but the demand has not been there for most of the time that 3G has been around. It is different this time and people are starting to get used to paying for the bandwidth they use.
From an end user perspective the ability to have genuinely fast internet access on your laptop, tablet or mobile phone is going to change their experience. Whilst WiFi is becoming more common, at least in pubs, coffee shops and other public places the need to authenticate is still a nuisance. Also not having to wait whilst a screen loads up on your mobile phone needs to become a human right!
It is certainly going to drive more business into the mobile environment. Timico, for example, gives all its salesforce an iPad so that they can demonstrate Timico applications and our customer portal on the fly at a customer’s premises. An iPad with 40Megs of bandwidth all of a sudden becomes a low cost endpoint for a telepresence HD conferencing system.
The gaming experience is going to be great1. Who knows what mobility combined with high speed internet will do for that industry, freed from the shackles of the lounge or the bedroom. City wide action games? Orienteering for the 21st century?
The use of mobile technology for backup purposes will also extend into many more areas of businesses. Typically 3G is used where only low bandwidth is required or where any bandwidth is better than no bandwidth. 4G becomes a viable solution for offices – even company HQs.
Of course with many more people on a production 4G network the average speeds available may well come down but LTE really is a game changer.
Footnote
It’s nice to to be in a position of being able to play with these new toys but there is a very serious business side to this. As those of you who have met me recently will probably know I’ve been testing the technology for a few weeks now – Timico is the first O2 service Provider partner to be given access to their 4G network. It forms part of the long term mobile data strategy of our business and follows nicely on from the direct connection into the O2 network I referred to at the start of the post.
I should finish off with a big thank you to O2 for including me in the trials. It’s good to be able to work with such a progressive partner.
1 I’m not a gamer but one of my kids would spend his entire live tethered to the Xbox. I have heard the tinny VoIP it emits.
The FTTC broadband 80Meg trials are now more or less over with production launch of the faster service currently due on 12th april. FTTC80 was the version of the 40Meg FTTC but using a different baseband frequency that results in a doubling of its overall speed performance.
You can see from the small pic inset that this user saw an impressive 75Megs down though he didn’t see much change in the uplink. The ping time at 14milliseconds is also pretty good. it’s just the way ahead. Waiting for an onscreen response when using the internet is just not acceptable. It needs to be instantaneous.
It doesn’t matter that no application has an use for this kind of speed. Now that we have built it the applications will come.
The smartphone
revolution continues. Probably the biggest single game changer has been the incorporation of the digital camera. We all have memories of photos taken during major world events, the Arab spring, the London riots and no doubt the coming London Olympics.
Photos of the mundane can be just as interesting and unexpected. I offer here some shots from an average week at the Timico coal face. I’ve omitted some of the more exciting pics because wanted to give you a real feel for day to day work at a business ISP.
I’ve left out any shot containing the datacentre or the 24×7 NOC because these have so much coverage of late that I have a feeling people want to see other aspects of the job.
Also there is no point here in mentioning the fact that we won an ITSPA Award because I did that in this post and Vint Cerf is covered here.
So there you go. It isn’t a glamorous life but somebody has to tread that mill. The hotel, Stapleford Park, might want to get an expert in to sort out the damp that is clearly visible on that drum.
I don’t always get to stay at this type of hotel – sometimes they are fully booked and I end up staying at the Kings Cross Travelodge as I did last night. There is a story behind that which I will share with you next week1but you can picture the scene – living like a duke one day and being woken up by incessant noise of tube trains and the beep of reversing lorries the next. I’ll also be posting about some of the content of the #Timico2012 customer conference. V interesting stuff from Cisco, and O2 in particular.
That’s all folks.
1 I know, I know I’m such a tease.
I am an unashamed fan of Vint Cerf, inventor of the internet and Chief Internet Evangelist
of Google. Imagine my surprise when he came up to me at the Nominet Internet Policy Forum and asked if I minded being photographed with him!
Of course I was more than happy to oblige though the photographer was so excited he couldn’t stop shaking.:)
I am of course only joking. There are some times in life when you have to abandon any shyness, walk up to a man and ask him if you can have your photo taken with him. Vint must be used to this and we had a nice chat about SIP – Henry Sinnreich and Alan Jonston are friends of mine and used to work for Vint at MCI – look ’em up.
That’s all.
Last night at the House of Commons Timico was
presented with the ITSPA Award for best ITSP serving the Enterprise market.
This is very exciting. Not only was the HoC a fantastic backdrop for the event but the winning of the Award is a great reward for all the hard work the Timico team has put in over a sustained period of time.
The category we entered was Enterprise. In order to serve customers in this market you can’t just sell them a VoIP service. It requires a whole service wrap that can include broadband, Ethernet, hosting and mobile services. This market also requires a certain scale of operation – for example running an effective 24×7 Network Operations Centre needs a certain size of tech support team.
So the Award for best ITSP is also an award for an overall service set. I’m not going to say anything else other than if you want to know more about our VoIP services check them out here.
PS I know the fashion conscious amongst you will be wondering about my t shirt – it’s the Commons And Lords Rugby Club tour to South Africa for the 2009 British Lions.
Sometimes you just need a bit of downtime. 
Ever wondered what I do for downtime? Eh? No? I’m going to tell you anyway. I like to chill on the terrace of Stapleford Park Hotel. Club sandwich maybe and perhaps a bottle of Hildon lightly sparkling mineral water. I like to sit out face up to that stranger the new spring sun and soak up its warmth.
There is no rush. Occasionally I take in a frame of snooker and then saunter down to the pool for a wallow – nothing too strenuous. The heat in the steam room acts like a deep massage and
relaxing on the lounger afterwards I drop in and out of a gentle sleep.
Back in my room I pick out my outfit for the evening and head to the bar to join some other guests for a pre- dinner glass of champagne. The meal that follows in the Grinling Gibbons restaurant is superb, the wines fine and the brandy in the bar afterwards, nursed whilst sunk into a deep armchair, the perfect ending to a wonderful day.
What’s it all about? Follow #Timico2012 tomorrow.
I sent my mum a mother’s day card. Posted it Thursday and she got it today. Actually I didn’t really send it, my wife did so I don’t know if a second class stamp is to blame for it not getting there for the weekend.
Last night I bought a book from Amazon.co.uk. I had the choice of delivery by 1pm on Tuesday for a fiver or 5 day delivery included in the price of the book. The book itself was only £9 so I went for the free option. It will be here by the end of the week I imagine. If I wanted to fork out a one year subscription for Amazon Prime (£49) I could get all my purchases delivered free of charge next day.
I also ordered a new part for my car on Friday. They have promised it will be here on Wednesday. The part was
My daughter is in her last year at school. She is a clever hard working girl1 and will do well for herself. She has had 4 good offers from top universities but hasn’t yet made up her mind which one to accept. She is off on her last “site visit” this week. An “overnighter”.
Students from two of the universities have now rung her to “see if there is anything they can help her with, any questions etc?”
This is remarkable and just shows how competitive it is out there, at least for good candidates. It is also mirrors life in the big bad world outside. This is a world where you can’t afford to leave things to chance. Every aspect of your business has to work for you. If you sit back and wait for that customer to place (or renew) his contract you can kiss goodbye to that customer. It means you aren’t giving him enough attention.
I am comfortable that an university that applies business process to its recruitment campaigns will also produce graduates well equipped to face that big bad world. The decision now is all hers. I have done everything I can to help when asked but now for the first time she is on her own. I can’t make that decision for her. Exciting times!
I don’t know about you but the fact that my kids are now at university age makes me wan to step on the accelerator when it comes to progress. It only seems like yesterday that I was there and the time has whizzed by. So much to do, so little time. Lets get on with it 🙂
1 gets it from her mother
Seeing as it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve had a hard day’s filming (which for the first time ever included makeup btw) and it’s my blog so I can write what I like I thought I’d share this link with you. It’s my son Tom who is at Warwick University1 appearing on the Scott Mills Show on Radio 1. Apparently goonpigs is a bit of a catchphrase of Scott Mills – I’ll leave the rest for you to listen to. It won’t take long. Have a good weekend and lets hope Wales win the grand slam eh?
1 Doing History and Politics – I know I know but I couldn’t persuade him to do sciences. You can bookmark his own website here
Just had yet another film crew in. You know what it’s like. 
Early start, breakfast provided by the outside catering company. Shoot a few scenes followed by bacon sandwich. Bit more then 3 course sit down lunch – it’s hungry work this location based filming1.
This one was from Dell. They had flown into Manchester from Paris and took a 2 1/2 hour taxi ride from the airport. Should have flown into
Just had a communication through from BT re planning for the Olympics. This year the good citizens of the United Kingdom are divided into two camps – those that are looking forward to the Olympics, think it is a great thing and are really excited, and those who think it is a huge waste of money that would be better spent on hospitals and schools and have been whinging about it ever since it was announced.
I am excited. What’s more I have tickets for me and the kids to see the kayaking slalom finals aaaand we have some great friends in Windsor who have kindly agreed to put up the whole noisy lot of us (and before anyone chips in we aren’t kipping at Windsor castle – they already had too many people staying). That for those of you who know the Davies’ (6 of us) is a big ask.
I’ve already posted about the expected growth in traffic on ISP networks during the Olympics. Interesting research just in is a look at the lessons learnt from the Vancouver Olympics.
One in four organisations suffered broadband network capacity issues