You saw the photos now watch the video. Massive thanks to Michael and the team at Fides Media for their support with this. Use their services 🙂
Category: Weekend
something for the weekend – interesting non work related posts
Christmas trees. You plant ‘em, they grow for a few years, you chop ‘em down and shove em in your living room for a few short weeks. By the time the needles start to fall off their job is done and they are consigned to the pile of rubbish at the bottom of the garden. Right?
Well no not really. There is science in growing Christmas trees. Technology even! As you may know I live in a very agricultural county where we are experts on growing things and in the small rural hamlet of Fillingham they grow them in their tens of thousands.
Fillingham Trees grow a hundred acres of them divided between Nordman, Norway, Blue Spruce and Lodgepole pines. In the dim and distant past I played a few games of rugby with owner William Rose (pictured right) and I met him at his farm in Fillingham to chat about the growing business of growing Christmas trees.
Did you know it takes 8 – 10 years to grow a 6 foot Nordman Fir? The Nordman represents 80% of the market because it doesn’t drop its needles. Also these trees don’t “just grow”. They are shaped, manually over the course of their growing life. Growth inhibitors are applied twice a year and once a year the middle bud from each new branch is nipped out so that the tree spreads into a nice shape. That happens to each tree individually and with around 7,000 trees to the hectare that’s roughly 280,000 trees hand pruned, every year!
Norway’s are cheaper because they grow more quickly. It’s easy to work out that with all the manual care in the case of Christmas trees, time in the ground actually does represent a cost.
The seeds for these trees come from mountainsides in northern Russia. At Fillingham they plant their trees as 15cm high transplants bought in from a nursery as opposed to growing them from seed. They plant thousands in a day using specialist tree planting kit.
Growing Christmas trees is a very competitive business. We buy 7 million of them a year in the UK and a lot of farmers will want a piece of the action. At Fillingham they employ innovative marketing techniques that include a Facebook page. The season opened this year on 24th November and for two weeks punters have been able to ride around the farm on a tractor trailer to choose their own tree. The tree of choice is then labelled ready for cutting down and collection at a time that suits the customer. Innovative.
Their ultimate success though is based on producing a quality product year after year and this is reflected in their wholesale sales of between 20,000 and 25,000 trees shipped to places as far as the Gower Peninsula in South Wales. Wow!
In one sense the Christmas tree is the ultimate genetically modified product. Many seeds come from the same “mother” tree so in theory they should all look the same. Nature doesn’t work like that though and many trees grow malformed, perhaps because of the weather or animal damage. Nordmans are also affected by needle necrosis which can turn the needles brown overnight and render the tree unsaleable.
Just like we like our fruit and veg in perfect condition we have the same attitude towards our Christmas trees. Imperfect trees are left in the ground and at the end of the season mulched and ploughed back into the soil. Brutal! 🙂
Anyway that’s about it on Christmas trees other than to introduce the following two videos. The first is how to “net” a tree for transportation using a mechanised tree netter. The second is how to net a boy for a laugh using a manual netter. You know it makes sense.
Good luck to Fillingham trees and thanks to William for the guided tour. I hope their season goes well and they enjoy a well-earned Christmas break.
The annual #trefbash was the best one so far. Held last Thursday at the PhoenixArtistClub a packed house partied into the wee small hours to the tunes of the Jeff Brown Jazz All Stars and Colin Dudman on piano. Great venue, great entertainment, great party.
These bashes are attended by a wonderful mix of industry types and Timico customers and business partners and this year we were fortunate to have the service of award winning photographer and Director of Big Brother Watch Nick Pickles to capture the many moments from the evening.
I think I will just let the pictures speak for themselves. I seem to appear in a lot of them but hey, I’m clearly very photogenic:)
If you missed it you missed out. Next year’s is already booked for Thursday 12th December. Stick it in your diary. Click on the individual pics a couple of times to enlarge. Also look out for the party video coming later this week.
Another huge thanks to the sponsors Timico, NewNet, Redwood Telecom, PowerNet, Genband, RTP Solutions, O2 Wholesale, Fluidata, Siphon, Provu Communications, Fides Media and IPCortex for helping to make it all happen.
Posts on this blog are suspended today as a mark of respect to those who fell attempting to keep pace at #trefbash last night.
Normal service will be resumed on Monday including early reports and examples of incriminating photographic evidence.
Thanks to all who made it through the night.
Tonight is #trefbash night. Details here. If you couldn’t make it follow the action, if there is any ( 🙂 ) on the #trefbash hashtag.
Ciao
It’s Tuesday morning and you find me full of beans, enthusiasm and a thirst for life. Outside it is a nice minus two degrees Centigrade and there is a hard frost but the sun has risen above the horizon and is doing its utmost to drive the low lying mist from the Lincolnshire fields. V pictureskew.
Driving in, work continues on the Lincoln bypass and there seem to be more men in high viz jackets than usual, all staring down holes and contemplating their fate. They are clearly trying to make progress before the Christmas break and it made me glad for once that I had the comfort of my office (panoramic windows & sweeping vistas over the car park etc) to get to.
As I walked in the the office I called in on the marketing department and happened to be carrying a new box of Weetabix for the purpose of breaking my fast. Suzie, who is our highly intelligent Head of Marketing with, as I recall, a degree in French posed a question that with hindsight made me think.
“How many Weetabixes do I have for breakfast?” She also asked a supplementary which was “do I eat my Weetabix when it is still firm or when it has gone soft” .
These are seriously good questions and I easily answered that I have two biscuits, thank you very much, accompanied by a banana (sliced) and upon reflection I tend to eat my Weetabix at the inflection point. ie the point at which it is about to turn from firm to soggy. I’m not sure I could eat it fast enough to have finished the lot before it went soggy but that is by the by.
The notion that some people might eat more (or less) than two biscuits had never occurred to me but is certainly food for thought1.
My question to you, dear reader and before I move on to weightier matters such as the Draft Communications Data Bill Report that was released this morning, is how do you like your Weetabix or do you have an alternative preference for breakfast?
1 sorry – couldn’t resist that one
Tomorrow I’m off to the Varsity match at Twickers with some lads and, I believe, a lass. Megamug Prize Competition number 3 is simple. What will the combined total of the scores of Oxford and Cambridge be at the end of the game.
In keeping with the rules laid down by my drinking buddies in the Tower in Lincoln when we watch internationals the nearest guess wins but not if the score is higher than your guess. In other words if you guess 33 points and the total is 34 then a person picking 40 points would be the winner. Also if the number has already been used you can’t have it. Entries close at kick-off. My game, my rules.
Good luck.
It has been said that when drinking tea from a Timico Megamug you don’t need to add sugar. The drink always comes out perfectly to your taste. These mugs are ideal for having in the house in case you have builders around. Save you a fortune on Tate and Lyle. I don’t know if the same applies for coffee because I don’t drink the instant muck and I like a smaller cup with the percolated stuff.
It is also true that tea never goes cold when served in a Megamug. It’s a magical property that defies the Third Law of the Internet1 and is therefore invaluable for geeks, tweeters and general surfers who spend far too much of their time glued to one connected device or another.
Considering this, today’s competition is simple. To what magical use would you put a Timico Megamug? I refer you to comment #55 from yesterday’s competition for some other ideas. My decision is final though I am happy that people can praise others’ suggestions and so improve someone’s chances of winning.
There could be more than one prize here. If stocks run out we’ll get some more. Simples.
This competition is open to Timico staff and their families, subcontractors, occasional acquaintances, rear admirals, readers of this blog and anyone else that cares to enter including inhabitants of former British colonial territiories and Martians though I might struggle to deliver the mug if won by the latter. It would have to be “winner collects”.
Another great chance to win a Timico Megamug for Christmas. You know it makes sense…
1 The Third Law of the Internet states that a hot drink always goes cold before you have finished it when you are surfing the web
It’s December. The radio is playing Christmassy music. I don’t mind. I quite like Christmassy music as long as it isn’t before December. It’s ok to start thinking about Christmas now. I used to leave it until Christmas Eve until the year when my wife wanted the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” board game as a present. Pretty simple really.
Only problem is I left it until 24th December. Could I find it in the shops? Not a chance. I must have tried 10 different shops and ended up buying Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Junior with a book of questions from the grown up game plus a ton of other stuff to try and compensate.
It didn’t work. She was disappointed. I was totally devastated but by then there was nothing I could do other than learn the lesson which was to make sure I didn’t leave the buying of presents until the last moment. Oh boy.
Anyway I was down in the finance department in Newark only to find an amazing Nativity scene. A wonderful array of characters, crafted by the ingenious folk in accounts.
They had held a competition to see who could make the best character. The winner was Diane Davies with her donkey. There were some interesting entries, presented here for your delight, including a Joseph that looked remarkably like a white haired Freddy Mercury plus a baby Jesus who would appear to be into hard core rock. Hey, who knows?
So now we come to the competition of the day. I know I don’t have a competition every day – that just sounded good so I thought I’d say it. The competition is guess the name of the donkey. No Timico staff because they might have already heard it. Answers via comment.
The usual Timico mega-mug as a prize which I guarantee for delivery by Christmas. You could even give it to your nearest and dearest as a present. Or a customer you want to impress. I leave it to you. They would be thrilled.
Yuletide greetings…
Categories
Mo’spotting gringo Timico
I dont really know how to put this one across. Part of me wants to talk with a Mehican accent and go around saying things like I keel you Gringo.
But then again part of me thinks I should be talking in a rather suave voice, perhaps with a couple of marbles in my mouth for effect.
Whatever you may think yourselves there is one thing for sure I’m not sure I’d want to kiss any of them. Those moustaches must tickle1 big time.
Anyway well done to James Andrade, Richard Wright, Guy Beales and Simon Brown from Timico for making the effort. They have been raising cash for Prostate Cancer and other men’s health charities. You can donate here. Also well done to our creative genius Scott Wroe for the poster.
1 I should at this point establish the fact that I don’t go around kissing people with moustaches anyway, blokes or otherwise. It’s not my bag though if it is yours that is ok 🙂
It’s a killer out there this afternoon. Minus two. Not a place to find yourself without serious levels of heavy duty protection from the cold. What happened to global warming?
I can’t believe it is the last day of November. the year has flown by once again. Anyway no time to dwell. We are busy here at Timico. Orders need entering if they are to be provisioned before we all go off on our Christmas break.
Stay warm.
I’d like you to hold out an arm at full stretch 
with your little finger sticking out. Left or right arm – it doesn’t matter which. In the mid 80s I went to see Bruce Springsteen at Roundhay Park in Leeds. There was an enormous queue of cars coming off the M1 to get there and we eventually had to abandon ours in a side street and walk the rest of the way. When we got to the park it was packed and we were so far from the stage that Bruce was half the height of the fingernail that you see before you, assuming you followed instructions 🙂
Last night at the Rolling Stones concert at the O2 was a different story. Thanks to the 
generosity of O2 we had great tickets – maybe two cricket pitch lengths from the front of the catwalk. Mick Jagger was two or three times the size of that fingernail.
You’ll all have read or heard the reviews already so there’s no need for me to go in to detail. I will say that Mick’s voice was incredible showing no signs of age. Although most of the band looked pretty shrivelled the quality of the entertainment was top notch and we got to see Bill Wyman, Mick Turner and Jeff Beck join them at various stages of the
evening.
The O2 as a venue has to be the best place I’ve been to see a concert. The sound quality is great and it is really easy to pop to the bar to bring drinks back to your seats. We had access to the O2 lounge which meant we could check our coats in and grab a couple of cocktails before the band came on stage. The lounge also has a lift that takes you up to just behind where your seats are. Life is made easy.
The only disappointment of the night was that they didn’t play “Satisfaction”. Apparently
they were running late and hit the hard stop time of 23.00hrs. They were on stage for nigh on 2hours and 30 mins which is good going at the age of seventy.
After the gig we hit the O2 lounge again and just managed to catch the last westbound tube at 23.45. Would have been a bit of a problem had we missed that. There is no way we could have caught a cab with that many people there.
The short tube ride into town was a story in itself. We were crammed in like vacuum packed sardines – not the ordinary tinned variety swimming in tomato sauce. I wanted to take a photo but my phone had run out of juice so a friendly Dutchman named Robert Jan Pabon did the honours and then emailed it to me. The power of communication. Robert was there with his wife Katja. Lovely couple. We got very close, on the tube – there was no choice :). Thanks for the pic Robert. Have a safe trip back to Holland.
The guy in the photo is Dan Cunliffe from O2. Top bloke. You have to hand it to O2. They know how to do business.
It strikes me as I write that the world has changed massively since the Stones started their careers. At the time there would have been no Personal Computers – we are talking almost back to the days of Colossus at Bletchley Park. No mobile phones, no internet. Even the TV probably had only two or three channels (all you need) and was in black and white. All they really had was sex and drugs and rock and roll. Ahh the good old days…
I’ll leave you with the observation that it’s been a weekend of gigs – the Rolling Stones last night preceded by Bellowhead at the Engine Shed in Lincoln on Friday. Bellowhead were fantastic and I urge you to go and see them. I bought their LP – my first vinyl purchase for perhaps 25 years. Apparently it’s coming back into fashion. Get with it you lot.
Thanks again to O2 for a terrific Sunday evening out. Quality.
PS check out the crowd video here.
PPS you can put your arm down now!
I’ve just unsubscribed from the UK Trade and Industry mailing list. I think I must have got on it from being at the Global Business Summit at Lancaster House during the Olympics. They need to improve their data base. I’ve just been spammed with an invitation to “Business Hindi for Beginners”.
Previously it was “Meet the Sports and Infrastructure Expert: Russia, Brazil and Israel” and before that it was “Business Japanese for Beginners”. Then it was “Financial, Professional and Business Services Roadshows for the ASEAN region (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia)”.
Maybe I’m being ungrateful because I did have a good day at Lancaster House. I guess it underlines the importance of accurate mailing list demographic data. Never mind. They’re gone now.
You find me in a playful mood. This is despite the fact that my rear driver side tyre picked up a nail this morning and I had to divert via Tanvic Tyres in Newark to get the puncture fixed. Tanvic are a customer of ours and did a great job.
They made my wait easy. There was a convenient coffee machine in reception, a PC offering me free access to the internet and the whole job was done for the really good value of £17. Use them.
The only downside was that I had to sit through the Jeremy Kyle Show. You have to like that kind of thing to want to watch it & I felt sorry for the bloke manning the desk, exposed to it day in day out. He didn’t seem to mind. A happy place to work 🙂
Anyway I digress. It feels a little like the Two Ronnies show where Ronnie Corbett told a joke from his chair and continuously got sidetracked. Look it up on YouTube if you are below a certain age. They were funny stories. Classic show. They don’t make them like they used to.
The other great show (while we are digressing) was Morecambe and Wise. They were unmissable. My kids still like to watch them today. A couple of years ago a new friend came to our house for the first time. His name is Ervin Nagy. He is a famous Hungarian Concert pianist believe it or not and he now lives in Lincoln. We showed him the Andre Preview sketch where Eric tries to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto by Grieg. Ervin was in stitches. Their comedy transcended language and culture.
So how does any of this have anything to do with mugs and colo. It doesn’t really. It’s just the preamble to my latest and greatest mug giveaway offer. No competition this time. Just straight talking business.
I am offering a free Timico mug (the photo inset shows the mug with a branded Timico pen which I am also willing to throw in – just ask) to anyone buying colo from us between now and the end of 2012. It doesn’t matter how much colo you buy but it has to be new business. As an added extra I will chuck in a free blog post on a subject of your choice for the first five orders.
The colo will be in our spanking new data centre in Newark. If you want to come and see it let me know and I’ll organise a visit. Maybe you need some DR space or have run out of room in your existing rack or are exploring colocation for the first time. 24×7 manned Network Operation Centre? Look no further. We are the colo kids.
That landing page link includes a phone number to call or a button to press for a chat. Let me know when you have placed an order. I’ll send you the mug and pen and we can chat about the subject of the blog post. It can be on any subject, within reason and decency though you will have to trust me with the final copy. There’s also a mug for anyone referring a customer to us. Again, let me know you have done it.
Just a bit of fun. You know it makes sense 🙂
Today is the quarterly LINX meeting. LINX79. It’s been going for a few years now – you can work out how long yourselves.
These are great meetings. You can learn more in two days here than in the rest of the quarter in between. LINX continues to grow. It in part reflects the growth of the internet but also the fact that LINX some time ago hit a critical mass and is a great place to peer if you provide connectivity to the internet.
LINX has 443 members. Last year the membership grew by 49. So far in 2012 they have had 86 new applications – that’s double the run rate of 2011! Since LINX78 only 3 months ago the peak traffic has grown from 1.431Tbps to 1.538Tbps and connected capacity has grown from 5.958Tb to 6.14Tb. What that is saying that the traffic is continuing to grow over and above the huge peaks we were seeing during the Olympics which themselves drove a significant rise.
For the sake of comparison if your broadband connection gives you 10Mbps (as I recall the UK average is now around 12Mbps) then the 6.14Tb capacity at LINX is about six hundred thousand times faster.
Now to the “funny” bit. I bumped into a neighbour of mine on the platform at Newark Northgate station. Colin McFarlane is an actOr1. He lives round the corner from me. Colin is working on a very interesting project that should hit the streets next year. It has a technical slant that I will talk about sometime in 2013.
You might know Colin as the Police Commissioner in one of the Batman movies or working with Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line. I’m sure he’s been in other things but not being much of a TV watcher I don’t know them.
Colin was on his way to Paris to record a cartoon voiceover and on his way was stopping off in London to audition for a stage show. He had a wodge of scripts in his hand and asked if I would help him to remember his lines.
Bear in mind we were in the quiet coach. So there I was reading a classic black American script in an American accent whilst Colin performed in the seat in front of me. I could almost hear the audience, breathless in anticipation of what was to come. Being in the quiet coach we could hear a pin drop. Very dramatic!
We finished the script, the rest of the coach applauded (very quietly) 2, the train pulled into Kings Cross and we went our separate ways – he to his audition and me to the TUC centre for LINX79. Colin did tell me the name of the play but I won’t share it in case he decides not to take the part. He is bound to be offered it, natch.
1 I left the capital O there to make sure you got the pronunciation right 🙂
2 Only joking there, they didn’t – I’m sure it was my fault not Colin’s, or maybe we were being suitably quiet
Categories
Children in need cookie sale
It’s that time of year again – Children in need time. I guess there are always children in need but at least we get our minds focused every now and again and empty our pockets out for the cause.
This time we have cookies. Fabulous cookies baked by the wonderful people that are Kirsty Watt and Leslie Young. The good folk that are the Timico staff responded appropriately.
I offer here before and after scenarios.
The before is what the cookies looked like before they were eaten. The after is what they turned into – a jar of cash.
So this is the deal. Whoever can guess the amount of cash in the pot gets a prize. To give you a clue I asked for a minimum donation of a pound for each cookie.
As usual its a fantastic Timico mug on offer for the nearest right guess. If you get it exactly right I’ll throw in a quality Timico pen 
complete with the Timico Connect Host Manage branding.
Hey, you can’t ask for more than that.
No staff entries allowed for this one as some of them already have a good idea how much we raised.
I’ll give you until close of play Monday to enter.
That’s all…
Categories
Hitler he only had one ball…
It’s been a surreal week (starting last Saturday). Monday I chaired a couple of sessions at the annual ISPA conference. Monday night I went to the Albert Hall for the first time.
I am very proud of all my kids. On this occasion it was the turn of number three. I know he reads this blog and I don’t mind if I embarrass him a little by telling him that on Monday night I was massively proud of him.
I was at the Albert Hall for the Schools Prom in which he was performing in local Lincoln youth jazz big band Jazz Vehicle. They are run by an inspirational guy called John Crouch (Mr Crouch) who weaves magic with his musical baton (wand) and has turned them into a national award winning ensemble.
You really need to hear this band to appreciate the quality of their playing. They are fantastic. I sat in the Albert Hall welling up with pride. For my boy it was a life enhancing experience. I am thrilled for him. He is a good boy and deserves his success.
Tuesday morning I had a meeting cancelled but tagged along with my pal Sue Black @Dr_Black to the Grauniad offices because she was recording the Tech Weekly Podcast with Aleks Krotoski. Sue has been instrumental in saving Bletchley Park and importantly the Turing Papers for the nation. Google it.
At the Guardian we bumped in to tech editor @CharlesArthur who mentioned that one 0f the subjects they were covering was 4G and I was invited to stay and participate.
That night I went to dinner with Dario Talmesio, Principal Analyst at Informa covering the European mobile operator market. Very interesting and knowledgeable guy. We ended up at the Phoenix Artist Club where I’m holding my Xmas bash. It was open mic night and the place had been taken over by a crowd of gay dentists! You couldn’t make it up!!
Wednesday morning I was at the RAC Club with Dave Hamer to hear former British Ambassador to Washington Sir Michael Sheinwald discuss the US Presidential Elections. The RAC Club is a class act. 30m swimming pool, classy Turkish baths and only £800 a year membership. The problem is the four and a half grand joining fee. Ah well.
Lunch followed with some great company. It finished at 5pm!
Today I’ve been back in the smoke for an ISPA Council meeting. I’m looking forward to a quiet weekend…
Tomorrow is Children In Need Day. Look out for my cookie competition post 🙂
PS if you don’t understand the Hitler reference I’m not going to explain. Sorry!
You know what it’s like. You are in the lift heading down to check out from your hotel and a gorgeous blonde gets in on the third floor. You don’t want to stare too much at her so you focus on looking somewhere else. Nothing is said. She gets out at the ground floor, you get out at the ground floor. You go your separate ways and the “incident” disappears into memory. Mine not hers.
On this occasion I went to the checkout desk and she greeted someone who was meeting her for breakfast. Blow me down if it wasn’t my old mate Phil Smith. I called to him. They came over. He said he was now working for a new company called Ipanema and the girl was one of his colleagues over on a business trip from the Americas.
I was thrilled. I had just met “the girl from Ipanema”. Now I can’t stop humming the tune…
That is all!
da da daa de da dada de daa
A year ago last Saturday Alex Murphy died. 
This was no staged death of the line fluffed comedian, booed off by an unforgiving crowd or the fate of the failed gladiatorial actor staring up at the inverted thumbs of angry Roman citizenry in a modern Coliseum.
Alex was playing rugby for the Commons and Lords at Twickenham. He died that day. Kaput. His heart stopped, it beat no more, the blood of his life had run its course. This was the ultimate act of finality.
Had Alex been playing anywhere else that
would normally have been it, his memory consigned to legend, an anecdote on the rugby tour of life. Fortunately this was Twickenham, HQ, and home not only of English rugby but of the equipment that could restart Alex’s heart. Restart his life. The fact that there were two doctors at the pitch-side watching the match was an added bonus.
So on Saturday we celebrated Alex’s first birthday, the second time around. Alex is a council member at the RFU and very generously invited some of his mates down from Lincoln to watch the England v Fiji Autumn international. We got the works, great
seats, access to the very exclusive members bar and the post-match players dinner.
Because I know that some of you will want to see what it’s like at Twickenham I have selected a few photos plus a video that I had forgotten I took.
The video has 5 people in it. There is a prize if you can guess all of their names. I‘ll help out by telling you that three of them are Paul Clarke, Craig Miller and Huw Edwards.
There is also a vid of the song sung by the Fiji rugby team to entertain us after the dinner. The quality ain’t great but it is worth putting up because of its historic nature.
Dead men naked they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon. Alex Murphy is dead. Long live Alex Murphy.
Categories
Jordan Watson man of action
Timico is a great place to work and although we work hard here we also like to have a bit of fun. Last night Jordan Watson was out with the boys and the conversation somehow came to dress down Fridays.
Through his beer tinted specs Jordan accepted a bet that he wouldn’t turn up to work this Friday in a romper suit, or his “onzer” as he calls it. Jordan, who works on the Timico tech support desk boldly took up the challenge and appeared this morning in a very nice (and very cozy by the looks of it) blue and white onzer.
Note the one piece fashion item, purchased for a tenner from Primark (a value for money high street department store I’m told) comes complete with penguin faces on his feet. A fun thing to wear for both work and play.
Jordan Watson, man of action.
I’ll finish off this Friday, fin de semaine, post with a couple of parting comments. One is that I recently upgraded my SG3 to Jelly Bean with no problems but without yet seeing what it can do for me. This morning I found out that I can take photos by just saying “smile” or “cheese” or “capture” or “shoot”. V cool. The header photo, which you can click to see the whole of Jordan, resplendent in his attire was taken by saying cheese. Note I found it has to be exactly “cheese”. “Say cheese” didn’t work. Impressive.
Secondly, because we haven’t had a competition for a while I’m offering a magnificent Timico mug as a prize for the best caption for the photo of Jordan. Timico staff may enter.
Received an email out of the blue yesterday. It was one of those legitimate spam emails selling something but from a “respectable” company.
For some reason I read it and found it was an offer to go to lunch at the Ivy restaurant in London. What’s more it was for a lunchtime meeting on BYOD which is a subject I am interested in and it had a good speaker.
I took a look and it was from someone who was notionally a competitor though I’d never heard of them. I accepted the invitation – within a fairly short time of it arriving. They must have known I was a competitor – they had my contact details – they sent me the email. I was quite looking forward to lunch at the Ivy.
This afternoon I got an email from the company telling me:
“Hi Trefor, Thanks but unfortunately the event is full now. Kind Regards, xxxxxx”
I found it amazing that the gig sold out that quickly1 – within an hour or two of the announcement. I mentioned this and wished them good luck with the event.
There isn’t really a moral to this tale other than to get your mailing list right. I might never know what it is like to have lunch at the Ivy, unless someone wants to invite me…
1 it took the trefor.net xmas bash 6 days to sell out though admittedly this is for over 200 people.
I’ve just come up for air after having my head down in my PC all day. It’s getting dark out. It’s just started raining – I can hear it on the roof of the office – one of the downsides of having the penthouse suite.
Welcome to winter. I hope you have your warm, waterproof coat ready and plenty of fuel ordered to keep you going through to spring. A car drives by with its headlights on. It is around 4pm.
All of a sudden the only sounds I hear are the rain, the air conditioning (climate control) and my laptop’s hard drive.
All sounds a bit melodramatic doesn’t it?…
PS at this point I usually get up and go and make a cup of tea. The office is vibrant and buzzing and brightly lit. The phones are humming and Alex and Andy, two of the best sales guys in the industry, smile for the camera.
That’s all. My tea has brewed. C ya.
Sometimes you get the opportunity to see something totally historic – like the Olympics for example. On Saturday I saw two things in the same afternoon that were in the same league. First of all the Cutty Sark was hugely impressive. Then we went to the Royal Observatory and saw the Harrison H4 timepiece. It was a lot smaller than I had imagined and a fraction of the size of its H1 – H3 predecessors. I could have stood there a lot longer than the impatience of offspring allowed.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about look em up. Here are some photos – slightly different perspective to normal:
I linked to that last post on why I want my Samsung Galaxy S3 back from Facebook. I wanted to make sure that none of my friends missed the post otherwise no-one might read it:).
For the first time ever I got this popup/toast/whatever they call it suggesting I might want to pay to promote my post. I could “move my important news, links and photos higher in the news feed” and the post “will be marked as sponsored”.
I’ve never seen this before and certainly wouldn’t dream of giving money to Facebook for the “privilege” of them promoting my post. What’s more there is no mention of how long the promotion will last, what position it will have in the feed, basically nothing that specifies what I get for the cash.
I clicked through as if I was going to buy and found that they wanted £3.47 for this privilege. It was almost tempting to pay the
money to find out what happens but I’m sure that most of my friends would think I was off my trolley if I did this.
In an attempt to find out what I would get for my money I searched Facebook for “promoted posts” but it only came up with a few user groups protesting about the fact that Facebook was now offering promoted posts.
Frankly who cares? I guess some businesses might want to sign up but Facebook haven’t exactly done a good job of selling it – at least not to me.
Ciao…
…the train has stopped and there is no cellular data coverage…
The Internet has gone to sleep. Around the world power stations idle and time stops. Life is not so efficient – things take longer to happen. Children go out to play and people sink gracefully into old age not categorised as “digitally excluded”. Families begin to talk, rediscovering relationships previously unseen in the light of day.
The clock on the mantelpiece counts its interminable seconds; tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock…
…eventually the journey continues, time speeds up and normal service is resumed…
You walk into some high flyer’s office, sink into the lush undergrowth that is the carpet, disappear into the soft leather interiors of the sofa at one end and gaze down on the worker ants swarming around the city, dozens of floors below.
Size of the office, backed up with exclusive accessories = status. Its a fair bet noone in the city has a ping pong table in their office though.
I walked in to meet Trevor Jones of Lincoln University’s School of Computer Science to be greeted with a table tennis bat and ball. Super cool and akin to the Google offices in Victoria. We batted round a few ideas while I was there. Trevor teaches courses that cover networking and cloud technologies – just our kind of stuff at Timico.
At the start of this year we hosted a bus load of second year students at the Newark data centre and are planning to do the same again after Christmas. It’s all good stuff. We want to be a natural choice of employer for graduates coming out of the department.
I won’t say who won the table tennis. Lincoln University where offices have ping pong tables…
That’s “All round good guys”, “VIP exclusives” and “Champagne drinkers” sold out with only 6 each of “Free thinkers” and “Party animals” left.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about you’re probably not planning on coming. It was interesting to see that the good guys went first closely followed by the VIPs. I think that free thinkers and party animals are a good match – I suspect they are one and the same though there is always the odd exception.
Once they’re gone they’re gone though if you have already had a person invite and not got your name down don’t worry – just remind me and I’ll stick you on the list at the door. That’s it for now.
Neil came in clearly ahead of everyone in the competition for who has the most home networked devices. He gets the mug. There were some great entries and it was all a bit of fun so I’m going to give everyone a fabulous Timico pen for entering. What’s more if you really want a mug you can have one of those too:)
Can everyone wishing to take possession of their prize (s) please email me their address and I’ll try and sort it out on Wednesday when I am next in the office.
PS don’t forget to sign up for the Trefor.net xmas bash. It’s gonna be a goodun.
The competition is now closed…
The caption competition got some great entries but someone has to win. I’ve run it past the editorial committee and after long deliberation (oo at least half a second on each entry) I have chosen the winner who is Stuart James. His excellent effort can be found here.
Stuart I will be in touch to give you details of your terrific prize which is a six month’s membership of the fabulous Spirit Health Club in Aylesbury.
Well done… 🙂
Just visiting my folks on the Isle of Man for the weekend and mam showed me a letter I’d written to dad dated 2nd March 1975. We were in the process of moving to the island from Caernarfon. Dad had gone on ahead whilst we finished the school term.
The letter was written in formal schoolboy Welsh and I note that my handwriting is still as bad as it was then!
I guess my observation is that I had to write dad a letter in those days. He was living in rented accommodation with no telephone. It was before the days of mobile telephony and tinterweb. That’s unimaginable for a kid these days.
I recall that at the end of that spring term in Ysgol Segontium, Caernarfon we had exams. When I arrived at Ballakermeen High School in Douglas they were about to have exams! A serious bummer for a 13 year old kid. I sat the exams and fwiw came 3rd in class without having done the syllabus (breathes on fingernails and polishes them on lapel). It all went downhill from there:).
The photo is a panoramic view gazing out to sea from the breakwater in Peel, Isle of Man. Paradise on earth and one of my favourite places.