Author: Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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Cloud datacentre Engineer

Data centre finishing touches featuring Tim and Neil

Timico Marketing Director Neil Armstrong savours a duck kebab in food tasting - prep for Timico Data Centre opening partyracks in the new Timico data centreIt won’t be long inside an empty rack in the Timico data centre now before we actually move in to the new data centre and start kitting it out. The racks are going in as I write and the header photo shows Marketing Director Neil Armstrong working his way through a full sample buffet in preparation for the big opening night in January. His attention to detail means that he has to taste every dish.  Hollow legs that man and not an inch of excess weight on him!

Pictured below is Timico chairman Tim Radford trying to find his way out of the maze of racks.

Tim Radford inspects a row of racks in the Timico data centre

Categories
Engineer internet

GigaOm roadmap conference looks great

It has always been the case that all the action in the tech industry has been in the USA. Today in the screaming plasma1 suspended between Silicon Valley and San Fransisco this is more than ever the case.

Next month GigaOm has organised a conference in San Francisco that illustrates my point.  Take a look at the schedule. The breadth of the content squeezed into one day is mind blowing. Am I alone in wondering how the brain can keep up with it all?  There is a live stream which in my mind will be well worth tuning in to if you can though nothing can replace actually being there.

It dismays me somewhat that you can’t get this quality of event in the UK. Even if we tried we wouldn’t get the same speakers.

I’ve pasted the schedule below. Not particularly original of me but lets you have a quick glance at what’s going on.

1 white heat doesn’t adequately describe it.

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competitions End User

Caption competition – demise of the Bb Trumpet

tarmac being laid on the carpark of the new Timico data centre in NewarkAs we approach the final days of the Timico data centre build the lads are putting down the tarmac in the car park. This is quite convenient as I happened to be in need of a steam roller – assuming that’s what they still call them despite the absence of steam. If you can’t get the video below to work then there’s a link here to the original YouTube location.

Here are a few other photos mapping the before and after. There’s a prize of the best caption for the “after” shot – entries left as comments please 🙂

site manager Nigel has a word with the driver of the roller Site manager Nigel has a word with the driver of the roller. In case you were wondering my 14 year old plays the trumpet.  He found this in a skip at his school and decided it would go well on his bedroom wall in a slightly altered stateBb Trumpet on my desk at the Timico offices

Bb Trumpet after a tussle with the rollerJust to finish off an artistic view of the air conditioning fans outside the data centre:)

fans line up outside the Timico Newark Data centre

Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Newsbin2 court ruling means BT has to ask permission to perform maintenance on network

The High Court this morning ruled that BT would have to block Newzbin2 within 14 days and pay its own costs.  The ruling can be read here.

It’s an interesting read and seems to run roughshod over BT – there seem to be no guarantees that the same order would be made against other ISPs which puts BT at a competitive disadvantage.

Seems crazy, but BT also now needs to seek authorisation from the movie studios when it wants to perform maintenance on their Cleanfeed filtering system, if the studios don’t reply quickly, then BT can apply to the courts to be allowed to do this – extract from the ruling below:

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End User mobile connectivity phones

Lumia is light – a new dawn for Nokia?

Nokia World in London October 2011Nokia CEO Stephen Elop launches Lumia smart phones at Nokia World Just finished watching the NokiaWorld webcast.  I don’t watch many of these but last week I also happened to dip into the RIM event and it must be said that there is a world of difference between the two. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop appears to be one of the better front men of the big mobile and platform providers though the language he used was very carefully chosen and was filled with sentences that seemed to me to be the product of long days in the marketing department meeting room.

Nokia today launched the Lumia range of smart phones. In Elop’s words “Lumia is light – a new dawn for Nokia”. This is the “big one”. The one that has to work and which has several shirts and a house riding on it.

Based on the Windows Phone OS the Lumia has 6 times more marketing budget

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Categories
Apps Cloud End User xaas

Computing As A Service – family bundle #CAAS #Tesco #Acer #Microsoft

I know I said I might well have bought my last laptop for the family but my wife’s 10 year old PC is spinning the last few thousand rotations of its hard drive and software is starting to malfunction.  So she is getting our daughter’s 7 year old perfectly good machine and we are buying the final year 6th form girl a laptop.

The Tesco website has an Acer 5742 for £399. It has an Intel Core i3, a 750gig hard drive and 4 gigs of RAM.  The crunch though is the copy of Microsoft Office 2010 home and business £204.22. She ain’t getting that.

It’s a graphic illustration that the money isn’t in the hardware but in the software. You do also have to wonder

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Business internet

UK drops to 25th in league table of internet connection speeds, 15th in Europe – Akamai @edvaizey

Flicking, as one does, through the Akamai State of the Internet Report for Q2 2011 I note that the average internet connection speed for the UK in the second quarter was 5Mbps1.

The good news is that this is up 9% from the previous quarter and 28% year on year.

Unfortunately the bad news is that the UK is not keeping pace with its competitors. I last looked at these stats in January 2011. In Q3 2010 the UK was placed 17th globally for average internet connection speed with 11 European countries ahead of us.

In Q2’11 we are down to 25th globally with 15 other European countries ahead of us. 14 European countries had a higher year on year growth than the UK.

Now I’m sure someone from DCMS2 will come out of the woodwork with some other indicators that show how the UK is going  to have the best  superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015. I don’t think we really need to spend time arguing this one. Perhaps someone could just explain to me how we are going to do it. The Akamai stats suggest that we are going backwards not forwards.

1 I know I’m a couple of weeks late with this one but I was all at sea when the report came out and I’ve only just read it. Also I’m not sure how many commentators have really looked at the relative progress within Europe – from what I can see they have mainly chosen to comment on the gap between advertised speeds and reality.

2 Department of Culture Media and Sports – responsible for “the internet” within government.

Categories
broadband Engineer

Busman’s Holiday Touring FTTC Broadband Cabinets and FTTP Update

A little rugby, a FTTC broadband cabinet or two, all in a Sunday’s walk.

leaning against an FTTC cabinet in Leamington SpaOn Sunday morning I was walking with a couple of my kids from our hotel in Leamington Spa to my oldest son’s flat, where we went to watch the Rugby World Cup final. To my utter delight, I came across a  FTTC broadband cabinet and insisted we stop for a photo opportunity.

My kids are used to this kind of thing, and weren’t overly embarrassed when people passed by wondering what the attraction was with a metal green cabinet when there was a beautiful park and greenhouse in Jephson Gardens a mere stones throw away across the river Leam. My daughter, though, did once move to the back of the crowd when I stopped in front of everyone to take a photo of a Grandstream SIP phone during a guided tour of Southampton University student accommodation.fttc cab dslam label

There was no doubt that it was a FTTC broadband cabinet – there was a small yellow label on it containing the words DSLAM. Anyway we continued on our way to the flat to watch the rugby which finished with, from a Welshman’s perspective, a highly satisfactory narrow victory for the All Blacks. This was despite the fact that France probably had the best of much of the game, and the ref ignoring what seemed to be a number of high tackles, where in my view France should have been awarded penalties.

The other satisfactory result would have been a storming 70 point victory for New Zealand. No sour grapes at all here 🙂

Just to finish off with some BT FTTP tidbits, I note that as of last week there are now 35,020 premises that can gain access to FTTP. There has been a steep increase in the numbers being provisioned over the last few weeks, helped by the use of overhead cables rather than underground ducts to access the cabs.

This won’t mean much to the the general public as BT’s marketing seeks not to distinguish between FTTP and FTTP, with a harmonised product set due to be announced at some point. More on this schedule as I get the info.

Categories
End User gadgets

Typing can be bad for your health if you use a keyboard #Microsoft

Microsoft health warning on keyboardDoing my usual plugging in the laptop routine this morning I noticed a label attached to the Microsoft keyboard with a health warning.  It was one of those Alice In Wonderland type moments. Something like the time when Alice spotted a cup with a label saying “drink me”.

I’ve had the Microsoft keyboard a few months ago but only today noticed the label1 . This directed me to read a health warning under the keyboard and blow me down there it is as bold as you like on a 2″ by 3″ label (that’s 5cm x 7.5cm to European readers).

I take these warnings seriously and immediately gave myself a mental once over to make sure that I had no symptoms ofanother Microsoft keyboard health warning hand, arm, shoulder or neck discomfort that might be ascribed to a poor posture when typing at the Microsoft keyboard. To my horror I found I was suffering from all the problems warned of on the label.   These are however more likely caused by a lifetime of bodily neglect rather than the Microsoft keyboard itself.

Anyway there isn’t much point to this post other than it starts off another busy week.

All the best.

1  Editor’s  note –  I’m not sure there was anything to suggest that Alice herself had only just noticed the cup and that it had been there in front of her very eyes for months.

PS I am far more likely to have problems with what I type than how I type 🙂 I also wondered whether the twinge in my knee might also be down to using the keyboard but decided probably not.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity phones

Ice cream sandwiches, fruit and toiletries – a review of the Samsung Nexus?

stay cool with an Ice Cream Sandwich from Google?When I was a kid the summers were always unbearably hot (and it always snowed at Christmas). We would turn on the hosepipe in the back garden, fill the paddling pool and splash about showering each other with jets of water. Sometimes the ice cream van would come round and hearing the music we would all run outside and line up to choose a cooling treat.

Usually I’d go for a “wafer”. The man in the van would cut a slice off a block of ice cream and sandwich it between two wafers. Then I would lick the ice cream in the middle until it got smaller and smaller and the wafer got soggier and soggier and I eventually had to eat the lot.

They stopped selling wafers for some reason. Health and safety probably or some commercial packaging business case that said it wasn’t economic. I don’t know.

Now I was excited to hear that they were bringing back the Ice Cream Sandwich. Ooo I thought.

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Categories
Engineer media

The thirst for information – Colonel Gadaffi and semantic metadata

illustration of semantic metadata in use by BBC with articles regarding Colonel GadaffiSomeone told me in the office that “they had killed Gadaffi”. Unusual to not hear it first on Twitter but I wasn’t looking, I’m too busy.

Back at my desk I looked at the Telegraph website. Then I went to the Guardian, Sky News and as if I hadn’t seen enough of the same stuff, the BBC news website. We thirst for information these days.

The BBC website, like all of them, had the item as its main news.  Colonel Gadaffi “killed”: Latest updates. Below this were links to “Gadaffi’s Quixotic and brutal rule, The Muammar Gadaffi story and His Life in pictures.

It was only then that I realised I was looking at “semantic metadata” in action.

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Business mobile connectivity Net phones

Roll up, roll up, get yer acronyms here #MAM #MDM #CoIT #BYOD #MPLS #VoIP

Being a progressive high technology company we have a department that is dedicated to coming up with new acronyms. Ok that’s not an entirely fair description of the marketing department – engineering also does it 🙂

We have been upping the ante on mobile products in the last year or so.  The mobile world is rapidly moving on from merely the selling of phones, minutes and handsets (plus BlackBerry of course which has been an added value sell for years).

Unless you have been in a cocoon for the last six months (and you might)

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Categories
Archived Business

If you know anyone that might fit the bill please put them in touch #telesales #jobs in Newark please retweet

If you live within striking distance of Newark – Lincoln, Nottingham, Mansfield Grantham etc and are looking for a job in telesales then I have the job for you!

We are hiring. This is a new team.  In fact this is the first of many teams in a growing area of the business and so could represent a great career opportunity for ambitious individuals. There will be money making opportunities.

There will also be promotion opportunities. This is a classical way in to a future in account management, business development, marketing, operations, in fact you could be a future Managing Director. Everyone has to start somewhere.

If you know anyone that might fit the bill please put them in touch – details on the website here.

Categories
Engineer internet online safety security

Vint Cerf, Internet 2, Project Phoenix, Twitter, BYOD & #ITDF

Jonathan Radford our CFO is one of the least techy guys you could hope to meet.  He is often also the source of ideas for this “technical” blog because technology now reaches absolutely everyone on this planet one way or another.

Today he came up for a chat about Internet 2 and Project Phoenix and left me with a newspaper clipping from the FT (I said he wasn’t a techy – anyone else would have sent me a link). The point is though that the technology related article interested him because he could understand its implications for him personally.

The article concerned internet pioneer Vint Cerf’s comments re the need to start again with internet security. The internet is an open network currently running on the basis of trust. Starting again Cerf says he “would have put a much stronger focus on authenticity or authentication” and quoted Ori Eisen’s Project Phoenix as an example of the way forward (see original FT article for more on this).

You only have to note the recent spate of

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Categories
Business mobile connectivity Net

Communications links for IT Directors all at sea

communications aboard Aurora uses Maritime Telecommunications NetworkI didn’t felt at all claustrophobic during my time on board the Aurora for the IT Directors Forum. This is partly because there is plenty of space but also because the schedule was so packed it didn’t give you time to think about such things.

I did manage to squeeze in a chat with the guy that ran the internet cafe. There is WiFi all over the ship but it isn’t something you would want to use for casual internet access because a) at around £100 an hour  it is expensive and b) there is only 750kbps to service the whole ship – that’s 2,100 passengers when full.

In order to preserve some quality of customer experience the Aurora limits the number of simultaneous users to 32.  At the time of writing I can’t get on so

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competitions End User

It’s all about focus – 4000 throws a month & who am I with – this week’s grand prize giveaway?

Olympic medalists in panel aboard Aurora for ITDFIt’s an idyllic life, the cruising game. You board at misty Southampton and wake up the next day to the splash of the anchor running out in the calm waters of an exotic island in the stream. A stroll out onto the balcony of your cabin reveals Guernsey on the starboard bow. Not Antigua or Barbados perhaps but hey…

On this occasion the location is academic, a backdrop to the serious business of the IT Directors Forum on board the liner Aurora where I am giving some talks entitled “The State of the Internet” and chairing some debates on Consumerisation of the Workplace. More on these anon.

On the first evening we were treated to a panel session with Kelly Sotherton, Sally Gunnell, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, Daley Thompson and Steve Cram. Good entertainment with the Olympics coming up.

The one thing that really stuck in my mind

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End User mobile connectivity

Nokia gets ready for winter offensive

Bumped in to an old colleague (platform 1 Newark Northgate – location, not name of old colleague) who now has Nokia as his biggest customer. Pontificating that business might be slow I was surprised to hear otherwise.

Of course Nokia still does very well in developing parts of the world. His main excitement though was regarding “the big Microsoft launch” coming apparently at the end of October.

The view from the Nokia ecosystem is that this launch is going to be highly successful. Of course they need to believe this but the argument is that the product looks great and that Nokia is relatively unencumbered by patent litigation. The Finnish company holds many key core patents in the mobile technology space.

It sometimes feels as if the companies we support because they have developed technologies that have changed our lives are strangling each other in the court rooms. Everyone watching wishes they would just get on and continue to innovate.

Although they are currently not up there in the smart phone premier league I have never totally written Nokia off (almost have mind you). It looks as if the battalions are fuelling in the wooded hills around Helsinki preparing for a winter offensive. These days battles are fought in the full glare of the media and this is one where we will all have ringside seats.

Wallets at the ready…

Categories
Business events social networking

trefor.net xmas tweetup 2011

The premier internet industry Christmas tweetup is back bigger and better than ever.

Last year we were in the Platform Bar of the Betjeman Arms.  In 2011 we are staying with a railway station theme but are moving inside to the Booking Office Bar of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.  This is a seriously cool watering hole and a far more sensible use of the space than the selling of train tickets.

This is no ordinary tweetup. Dress code is in keeping with the 5 star hotel surroundings and the drinks are sophisticated. If past performance is anything to go by the trefor.net tweetup is the party to be at this Christmas.

Try your hand at a cocktail mixed by Nick Strangeway – Master Mixologist. The former World Mixologist of the Year as voted for by experts at Tales of the Cocktail industry event & famous for his work with leading establishments Hix and Hawksmoor, Nick is London’s leading cocktail expert.

The 2012 tweetup is sponsored by a set of extremely generous friends including Timico, Newnet, Powernet, RTP Solutions, Sangoma, Fortinet, Provu , BT and Genband.

If you haven’t been the Booking Office Bar is situated just across the platform from last year’s bash. The St Pancras Renaissance Hotel was voted the Number One Hotel in the UK in The Sunday Times Magazine’s 2011 Top 100 Hotels in the World.

I look forward to catching up with you on the night. Numbers are limited so click here to sign up. You will need the password @trefbash to register. Hope you can make it. The date is Thursday 8th December from 5pm onwards.  Get there early.

photos courtesy of St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.

Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity ofcom Regs

complexities under the mobile data bonnet and Ofcom delay to #LTE auction #4G #digitalbritain

Everyone Everywhere (pun intended) will have heard of Ofcom’s decision to re-enter consultation over the LTE or 4G mobile spectrum allocation. Issued late on Friday afternoon the statement regarding the delay caused by reopening the consultation has already attracted comments re “hiding bad news over the weekend”.

There were 64 responses that included the  A to W of stakeholders in the UK (nothing from  X, Y or Z). The  Association of Train Operating Companies was mainly concerned to ensure that good coverage at high, sustained download speeds is ensured along the whole of the GB mainline rail network. At the other end of the alphabet both the Welsh government and Wiltshire Council wanted better coverage in rural areas with the latter quoting a target figure of 99% of the population.

Straightforward right?

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End User mobile connectivity olympics

That smell of rubber, the roar of the turbo-powered engine, smart phones and the Olympics

Tref in reception at the WIlliams F1 conference centreI attended a Telindus sponsored Consumerisation of the Workplace workshop on Tuesday on my way down to the Convergence Summit. Jean Marie Stas of Belgacom gave a talk about tablet adoption – his experiences seem to exactly reflect my own – especially when it comes to the wife always asking if she can borrow your iPad.

The workshop came up with a few interesting snippets. Firstly Cisco has stopped buying mobile phones  and just give staff vouchers so they can go and buy their own. They are apparently looking to do the same thing with tablets and PCs. This seems very much to be the way forward.

Some of the service providers around the table were reporting that there was a significant interest from many areas in BYOD, notably in the Financial Services market. Workers in this industry are highly paid and typically want all the latest gadgets which is at odds with the need to maintain security and compliance.

This correlates quite nicely with

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Categories
End User fun stuff

What’s love got to do with it?

outside the Visited Hampton Court today. It wasn’t originally on the agenda but we stayed at a pub last night called The Kings Arms – situated just outside the back gate to Ennery 8’th old gaff. He probably used to nip there for a swift one before each marriage – just for a bit of Dutch courage, know what I mean?

Anyway after an early breakfast we still had time before the Convergence Summit South opened for business so Fraser Anderson and I went for a stroll around the maze at Hampton Court. Around the outside of the maze – it was not yet open for business.

Moving on through the gardens we found that someone had left the door open to the bit you have to pay to get in to! 🙂 We thought nobody would really mind if we nipped in for a bit of a look around so we did – some photos below. It was easy to imagine having the run of the place with few people around other than the odd gardener doing his stuff. Of course in Ennery’s day there would have been hundreds of people milling around so we probably had the best of it.

Fraser Anderson takes photo of Hampton Court with a view to applying for planning permission to convert to 500 flats Hampton Court
NewNet Wholesale stand at Convergence Summit SouthYou may have noticed I cheekily slipped in a picture that has nothing to do with Hampton Court. It’s actually of the NewNet Wholesale stand at the Convergence Summit South exhibition. NewNet is a Timico Group company and is launching it’s brand new white label wholesale portal.

The longer term plan is for NewNet to be able to support all the Timico Group technologies and services through this portal giving channel partners a single point of contact for all connectivity sales. That’s the sales pitch over. They are a very genuine bunch of lads. If you are looking for a partner for your connectivity needs you should try them 🙂

Categories
4g Business mobile connectivity ofcom Regs

Ofcom delay in holding 4G spectrum auction will cost UK £100s millions report says

More pressure has been piled on Ofcom and the government by the publication of a report by the Open Digital Policy organisation suggesting that delays to the UK 4 G license auctions will cost the country dear. The delay to the auction has been caused by apparent threat of legal action by a number of carriers including O2.

ODP looked at the speed, capacity and coverage improvements next generation mobile broadband (known as 4G or LTE) is likely to bring, and estimated that over 37 million business hours per year could be saved from faster mobile data downloads if 4G mobile technology was to be deployed sooner than is currently planned.

Earlier this year I chaired a debate on mobile spectrum allocation at Portcullis House in Westminster. The issue of 4G spectrum allocation is a hot potato. The three largest mobile carriers O2, Vodafone and Everything Manyplaces, have existing voice bandwidth that they are being allowed to reuse for data. 3 does not so this delay will not only cost UK business but will likely have a deleterious effect on the number 4 operator (this is clearly a numbers game).

Ofcom, the UK regulatory authority tasked with

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Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

Timico data centre update

UPS batteries in the new Timico data centreNot long to go before we start kitting the new data centre out as a data centre so I’ve chosen some a local artisan finishes off the decorative touches of the interior design of the second floor of the new Timico building in Newarkartistic and tasteful photos for your delight. Of course they might not be to everyone’s taste but there is beauty in the modern day industrial infrastructure of the country – just as we now admire the steam the view from the fire escape of the new Timico data centre in Newarkengines and rows of red brick mills that were once associated with satanic darkness.

This time around the jobs created will be highly skilled and professional at a  time when we could do with some good news in the local economy.

We are in the process of hiring for the extended shifts that will be necessitated by the 24×7 operational nature of the  expanded Network Operations Centre.

Last week we ok’d the purchase of a wall of monitor screens for electrical switch gear in one of the new data halls at the Timico data centre in Newarkthe operations room itself. I’m quite excited about this as it will have a high visibility impact on the place –  all controlled by an iPad or similar (I asked what they would be using for a remote control for all those TVs – more on this in due course).  As I said not long now.

part of the fire suppression system for the new Timico data centre in Newark

part of the cooling system - only expected to be used 4 months of hte year due to free air cooling that adds to the green credentials of the Timico newark data centre

view of Timico HQ building across the car park of the data centre It will also be worth talking about our expanded sales structure as we move in to 2012 and I will do this as some important new hires come on board.

Bye for now.

Categories
End User fun stuff

Friday afternoon blogging and the Royal Military Tournament

Timico, sales, marketing,We bloggers when it comes to Friday afternoon begin to think about the weekend. For most of us the two precious days off are a chance to recover from the stresses of the week, recharge the batteries and quietly begin to compile the ideas for posts in the week ahead.

By the following Friday afternoon these ideas have been applied, consumed, absorbed and  subsumed into the national consciousness (depending on how many readers you have 🙂 ).

So come Friday a blogger, especially of the tech variety, starts to look around for one last idea to fill his WordPress quota for the week. This is where the truly creative post are born. The cake competition results, details of the lunch with Viv Richards etc etc.

On this occasion I can offer you

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Business Cloud datacentre

We Want #ITIL Service…And We Want It Now!

New Timico helpdesk ServiceNowMany years ago I worked at Marconi Electronic Devices in Lincoln. The purchasing manager there, a canny Scotsman,  had a certain approach when it came to the acquisition of software. His opening bid in a negotiation would be the cost of the physical tape required to carry the software to our premises.

These days software doesn’t come on a tape. In fact it often doesn’t come at all but resides somewhere remote and fluffy in “the cloud”. What’s more it can’t even be described as software – more a set of APIs and capabilities. When it comes to estimating a value for such an entity it has to be in terms of the benefit to your business.

It wasn’t so long ago that Timico was a small ISP. The company has been growing quickly to the point that

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Categories
broadband Business Regs

Superfast Broadband for All – UKNetCo

The UK is in the middle of the annual round of booze ups known as the autumn Party Conference Season. High in the mindset of our political leaders will be the UK’s internet economy particularly as we await the next Communications Bill Green Paper. Stakeholders at the conference socials are I’m sure already lobbying, positioning and generally trying to get their message across.

The Eds and Daves of this world whilst being wooed by corporates with vested interests would do well to focus on basics that very much include decent and ubiquitous internet connectivity for the whole of the UK.

We are already seeing cracks in the government’s resolve to have “the best superfast broadband network in Europe by the end of this parliament” (2015). Actually it isn’t fair to call them “cracks in the resolve”. The resolve is there but the execution isn’t  and anyone who thinks that we would get anywhere near this goal without a radical change in the UK’s approach to internet connectivity is kidding themselves.

The only way we are going to achieve this is if UK plc, ie the taxpayer, invests in a full fibre infrastructure for “the final third”. This is not to say give money to BT. The only sensible approach

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Categories
broadband Business

Gigaclear Set to Show UK How to Build FTTP Broadband Network at Hambleton, Rutland

Matthew Hare of gigaclear feeds fibre into the UK network infrastructure in HambletonThe sleepy village of Hambleton lies in the heart of the old county of Rutland. In the winter Hambleton, surrounded by Rutland water, can feel quite a remote place. The wind whistles eerily across the choppy white topped waters of the lake and the snow can drift deep on the single road that leads into the peninsula. It it not unknown for the village to be cut off from the outside world and this has indeed happened during the harsh winters of recent times.

Fortunately when this does happen the foolish, unwary and now stranded individuals are able to seek refuge by the warmth of the log fire and bask in the friendly welcome that is characteristic of Hambleton Hall. The Hall, “One of England’s finest country house hotels” has luxury overnight accommodation (a snip at between £245 and £360 a room) and their Michelin starred chef will assuage the needs of the hungriest. To round off the perfect enforced stay the Hall has free wifi for all guests.

Of course how fast an internet access guests will get from this wifi is another thing – Hambleton really is in the middle of internet nowhere.

This is all about to change

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Categories
End User fun stuff

Me and Sir Viv Richards go way back

Sir Viv Richards, Umar Bajwa, Trefor Davies,Timico,MurcoOne of my massive cricketing heroes is Sir Viv Richards and I was privileged to sit at the same table with him at lunch in the City yesterday. Click on the header for a bigger shot – the guy on the left is my friend Umar Bajwa who is IT Director at the Murphy Oil Company (Murco).

We were treated to four hours or so of entertainment that included very interesting anecdotes from Sir Viv and also from Australian Fast bowler Rodney Hogg (41 wickets at 12.85 during the ’78-79 Ashes series for those who like to know these things).

This being a Friday I have another competition for you.  Who is the black guy to the right of Viv Richards in the small inset photo?Sir Viv Richards, Australian,Rodney Hogg I had not heard of him myself but I’m sure that many will have seen him in action. Again click on the photo for a bigger image. Usual prize is up for grabs (while stocks last). He is also in a couple of the photos below.

friend appears again in bottom left of photo but who is he?

The final photo  is of the auction of a signed print of a photo of Rod Hogg taking the wicket of Sir Geoffrey Boycott. There was not much love lost between both speakers and the bold Sir Geoff. The photo was  signed  by Rod not Geoff.

Print of Rod Hogg bowling Geoffrey Boycott auctioned for charity

sir viv richardsI have to sit on my hands on these occasions otherwise I end up coming away with auction prizes as a “surprise” for my wife.

At a Lincoln rugby club charity dinner I was once used as a stalking horse by an auctioneer trying to drive the price up. Having made the initial bid for a signed photo of the Red Arrows I firmly sat on my hands. The whole room, however, thought I had bought the photo and imagine my wife’s surprise when, after picking the kids up from school the next day, she was asked if she liked her new photo.  Funnily enough she could think of better things to do with a couple of hundred quid 🙂

By the way if you are wondering about the title of this post what I really mean is that I went to see Viv Richards play at Trent Bridge in 1984. He had just scored a massive 189 in the game at Old Trafford and received a standing ovation from the crowd as he walked out to the the crease. Despite being England fans we were there to see the great Viv Richards score a big one. You have to imagine the stunned and disappointed silence of the crowd when he was out caught behind for two runs. Ah well at least I saw him play and have now had lunch with him 🙂

PS Nobody won last weeks competition but  I did get two comments so if you can let me have your address there will be a mug in the post for you.

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Apps chromebook Cloud End User

An Everyday Story of a Family, its Clunky Old Computer, and Cloud Based Services

My wife’s PC has nearly ended it’s useful life. It was bought for our oldest son at the age of 10. He is now about to start his second year at university and is already on his second laptop.

During the intervening ten or so years the PC has been flattened and rebuilt a couple of times. For a few years it was the “family” computer and thus had every kind of game added and removed and goodness knows what other software.

Now it is clunky, takes ages to boot up and a source of frustration for the love of my life. To make things worse last weekend my daughter did something to it and now Microsoft Office does not work. The original CD was lost some time ago. Doesn’t sound good.

Last night I went all cloud based services on the dodgy old thing.

I set Mrs Davies up with a

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Business piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

@EdVaizey opens up web blocking talks to wider stakeholder community #deact

There has been widespread criticism of discussions being held between the ISP industry and RightsHolders over the latter’s desire to effect blocking of websites being seen to promote copyright infringement. It is natural. An activity conducted behind closed doors is bound to arouse suspicion.

The latest of these meetings happened yesterday but today communications minister Ed Vaizey chaired a session that allowed alternative voices to be heard.

Present at the meeting were representatives of the Taxpayers Alliance, Open Rights Group,Pirate Party,COADEC, Open Digital Policy.org, Featured Artists Coalition,LINX and of course me.

I think Ed Vaizey found the level of debate far more constructive than he had been expecting. The gist was

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