Camp fire at Woodall Spa
Posted using WordPress for android.
I’m working from home this morning – car is in first thing having something sorted. At 8am I nipped round to Lincoln Cathedral to film the London2012 world record bell ringing attempt. There were 7 bell ringers in Minster Yard as well as the ones inside the cathedral. A small but perfectly formed bunch:)
Anyway I got home and immediately started to upload the 500Meg video file to YouTube – time is of the essence in the news business. What a waste of time. I have one kid downloading Ubuntu for RaspberryPi and two others engaging in online warfare with unknown foe.
Decent levels of broadband connectivity bandwidth are clearly an everyday necessity.
The video is still on the phone so it is probably uploading to Google+ quietly in the background, hogging some bandwidth.
Roll on superfast with stripes connectivity.
This morning I found that one of my blog posts had the word “bookmark” inserted at the beginning. Weird I thought. This afternoon I did another post and lo and behold it was there too. In fact it was on every post I’d ever written. Very weird.
So I went down to see Ian Ward, one of our resident web design gurus and we both started fishing about to see what the problem might be. Perusing through the plug ins we noticed that “Social Sharing Toolkit” had an upgrade available. This was to fix a problem where the plug in was “inserting words” into blog posts.
We clicked “upgrade” and hey presto, problem over. I must have subliminally upgraded the plug in first thing this morning. The watchful eyes of the wordpress community spotted the problem and now it is fixed.
End of story. Interesting eh? Eh??
Not sure whether I mentioned it but I’m off on holiday after this week – going to see the London2012 Olympics.
You would think that the world would drop everything and focus on the biggest sporting event to hit the UK (ok mostly London) since ever. I’m amazed at how much is still going on in the world of internet legislation. So much so that most of it will have to be left to others for comment.
We have consultations over the Draft Communications Data Bill. Then the Interception of Communications Commissioner has published his annual report – interesting reading I’m sure.
Oh and did you know that the Welsh Government (iechyd da) announced that it has selected BT to implement the Next Generation Broadband Project for Wales. BT was also the successful bidder in North Yorkshire which has become first county to deploy BDUK broadband (if I can call it that). Note the Welsh Government is also launching a Business Crime Unit.
Next up is EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes who has outlined the European Commission’s general conclusions following on from last year’s consultation on wholesale access to telecoms networks – good stuff.
You don’t need me to tell you that Ofcom has published its Communications Market Report for 2012 – I’ll definitely be reading that but not whilst I am on holiday.
You may not have noticed that the IP Crime Group, which was formed in 2004 by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to bring together experts from industry, enforcement agencies and Government to work together on piracy and counterfeiting issues, has published its latest annual report.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a consultation on enhancing consumer confidence by clarifying consumer law. In addition to goods, the consultation also looks at services and digital content.
Finally uSwitch has published a report on broadband billing.
All exciting stuff eh? Unfortunately you will have to gen up on all this yourselves as I won’t have time to do it. All good reading for when you’re on the beach.
Ciao.
PS Lists and links have very kindly been provided by ISPA.
I’ve got tons to do but I’m on holiday after this week (yay) and the Olymic coverage is building up to near frenzy already (gawd knows what it will be like when it really gets going) so I’m doing Olympic posts. For the avoidance of doubt that’s the London2012 summer Olympic games if any of the Locog police are reading.
You will remember the post I wrote ages ago about the BBC’s own forecasts for iPlayer traffic based on the which sport is happening at the time. Now of course that time is upon us. Today the ladies of Team GB football are taking on the mighty All Blacks at the Millenium stadium. Actually I don’t know if they are mighty or whether they are even called the “All Blacks”. I mean New Zealand ladies.
I’ve never watched a ladies football match, at least not in its entirety. I did watch “Bend it like Beckham” which I thought was a very enjoyable movie but I digress. The Beeb reckons that this first ladies match will be more popular than the men’s game tomorrow. Do they know something?
The Beeb has in fact identified six sessions it has labelled as having the highest iPlayer demand. These are the opening and closing ceremonies, the mens 100m and 200m finals (good old Usain – don’t let us down), Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton on the afternoon of Tuesday 7th August (yay cmon guys) and the afternoon of Saturday 11th which has the finals of the men’s footy, hockey and basketball (yawn).
As I write I’m scanning through the BBC’s schedule showing its demand forecast and I’ve just found something that casts the whole process into doubt. On a scale of 1 – 4 where 4 is the highest demand the women’s beach volleyball finals are only rated a 2. How credible is that?
That’s it for now. I normally adopt radio silence when I’m on holiday but this time I will be posting live from Olympic events using my trusty Samsung Galaxy S3 and WordPress for Android. I must get a speed tester app on the phone. Also I’ve not gone yet 🙂
Click the inset box to see which events the BBC thinks will be busy.
The Broadband Stakeholders Group today released an “Open Internet Code of Practice”. This is a voluntary CoP promoting net neutrality.
Specifically:
- users should be able to access all legal content
- there should be no discrimination against content providers on the basis of commercial rivalry; and
- traffic management policies should be clear and transparent
I’m not going to delve into the detail of the BSG announcement which is available here. What I am going to do is name the current signatories who are all in the main consumer service providers:
- BE, BT, BskyB, KCOM, O2, Plusnet, TalkTalk, Tesco Mobile, Three
The significance of this list is in who is not on it, particularly the mobile operators. You can work out who they are yourselves. Some of them are already known to block the use of Over The Top VoIP services (eg Timico’s own VoIP, Skype et al) on their mobile networks which of course goes against the principles of the CoP being announced today.
Whatever their reasons for not signing these mobile networks will have to change their positioning as 4G gets rolled out. The bandwidth requirement for VoIP services will be relatively small compared with that required for general use on 4G networks so the “lack of capacity” argument should not work.
4G is a fairly major inflection point for mobile networks. I don’t have any forecasts but during the life of the 4G (LTE) technology we should see the mobile business model transition from being minutes driven to data driven.
I suspect that growth in “data bundle” income may not offset any reduction in voice minutes revenues so the mobile operators are going to have to work out how to find cash from elsewhere. This may come from advertising, financial micro payments, device and personal security and I’m sure many more that I haven’t thought of.
For the moment I’ll leave you to figure out for yourselves why the non-signatories have not stepped up to the plate. I can’t see how they can stay away for too long. It isn’t the actual signature but the principle of how they treat their customers who will end up voting with their feet.
It’s the hottest day of the year so far. People are frying eggs on car bonnets and the homeless have left London for cooler climes – it’s too hot underneath the arches for a comfortable kip.
The suits are sweating buckets and wishing it was acceptable to turn up for work in shorts. The ladies are looking lovely in the summer sun.
Most people are complaining about the heat. Those that aren’t are taking the mickey out of friends just packing for their annual holiday in Marbella or Benidorm or Lanzarote or Torremolinos – you know – places less warm than London.
School’s out. Urchins run wild in the radiatingly hot city streets, shrieking under plumes of water escaping from broken fire hydrants. Their parents, sapped of care, languish in the little shade afforded by the concrete tenements they call home. There is no breeze. There is no letup from the infernal heat.
In fact neither is there any air conditioning on this train – the 18.30 Eastcoast from Kings Cross to Edinburgh stopping briefly to let me off at Newark to get my connection to Lincoln. I’m on my second can of diet Coke and second bottle of sparkling water with ice!
This must be what it is like on the Chennai to Bangalore Express (dep 13.00 arr 14.45 daily). At least those in steerage can catch a little breeze sat on top of the carriage
Ah well.
Yes please love – another bottle of mineral water with plenty of ice. Thanks…
PS I realise there are no fire hydrants in London. These are images more typical of New York in summer. Also the choice of Indian train service was purely random. However they both made the cut for artistic effect. Final answer.
If it’s Tuesday it must be London. Not if you’re a tourist. I’m down here for meetings but the place is remarkably calm. No queues at the taxi rank at Kings Cross Station, not many people around.
The taxi driver told me it has been one of the quietest summer he has ever seen. The regular tourists have stayed away. I’ve even been able to get a great last minute deal on 5 star hotel at a rock bottom price – only a few quid more than the Kings Cross Travelodge that is my usual haunt.
The London2012 games will soon be upon us and excited I am. I’m confident that they will be a huge success and the PR failures of Locog will fade from the national memory (not mine though – i don’t forget these things:).
I’m taking a chunk of the Olympic fortnight off. Not all of it – I’m off to a British Business Embassy meeting with Dave, George and Vince (apparently) on Friday 3rd August. If you’re going I’ll be the one wearing a suit! (I know – WTF do I hear you say?).
I’ll be with son number 3 (kid4) at the Team GB versus Uruguay clash of Titans at the Millenium stadium and with sons 1,2 and 3 (there are no more as far as I am aware) at the Kayak Slalom finals at Lee Valley wild water rapids fun centre.
Then the following week I’m at the ladies high diving final with Cisco, the men’s handball semi finals with KCom (yea I know – I’ll tell you what handball is when I get back from holidays if I remember) and then finally I’m with BT Wholesale at the closing concert in Hyde Park on the Sunday.
Thanks for all the invites for what are very important relationship building networking occasions.
I did um and ah a little about revealing all these tidbits but what the heck. Life is for living. The Olympics will not be here again in my lifetime and it is a useful way of building up to saying if anyone wants to invite me to the athletics at the Olympic Stadium itself then there is a fair chance they will become my new best pal. Preferably Mens 100m or 200m finals or any other blue riband event.
Catch you later, maybe…
Categories
Storage needs on the up
I did some backing up last night. As well as using Google+ for photos I store them on two hard drives kept at separate locations – one at home and one in the office.
The drive at home is 500GBytes and only has a few tens of gigs of space left. The one at work is a TeraByte palm drive and has plenty of room on it.
You may have noticed a bit of a theme to posts in recent weeks/months relating to the growth in storage requirements based on people taking more and more photos. As my home drive was starting to fill up I thought I’d revisit my usage pattern (if that’s the right way of putting it).
The chart below shows the amount of storage needed for photos and videos on a year by year basis. The early years are just noise. 2007 looks like a bit of an aberration – a rush of blood/new camera/special occasion maybe.
From there on there is a definite trend appearing. Remember that we are only half way through 2012 and I haven’t had my summer holiday yet. I am using the same camera technology thisyear as last with the exception that the Galaxy S3 has the burst mode which is naturally going to generate more Bytes.
I’ve discussed what BT has done make sure the athletes, journos and hangers on have a great communications experience during the Olympics. That’s fine. For me though the biggest test is going to be what kind of experience we punters have. There will be far more of us and we will be wanting to upload stuff and tweet just as much as the highest profile media type.
It’s been a tough one but boy have we got some great pics in the trefor.net phone photo competition. The standard of entries was very high and the judges have had to be brutal in the shortlisting process.
For total transparency the judges were myself and Scott Wroe – Timico’s head of graphic design. Neither of us entered the competition ourselves. We had around 150 entrants and although I did suggest that we would have a separate class for “edited” photos in reality most of the entries were straight off the camera so we have bundled them all into one single mega category. If you entered but have been left out of the short list I’m sorry about that but we have tried to be as objective as we can.
I did get a few suggestions for a polling process but to keep things simple and to allow you to give your views on the photos I’ve decided that voting will take place using the “comment” method. In other words chose a single winner and leave a comment telling me which picture you think that winner should be. By all means tell us what you think or how you went about chosing that particular photo as your winner.
You have until 5pm Lincolnshire time on Friday 27th July which is when the Olympic games start and when I go on holiday. I will count up the votes at that time and tell you who the winner is.
One vote per person please. A person is defined by a discrete email address. By all means get your friends to vote for you. Please don’t abuse the process by conjuring up multiple email accounts and voting for yourself many times. This is a white hat blog and its readers are trusted.
I will award as many prizes as looks right. If there are 5 photos that get far more votes than the rest then there will be 5 prizes – Timico mugs. The standard of the competition has been so high that it merits a better first prize than the mug. I will take the winner out for a curry or simlar provided that person is within sensible easy reach. Perhaps we can meet in London or somewhere.
We have had entries from as far afield as India, Indonesia and New Zealand. A meal out won’t be practical in these cases so if you win you will have to settle for the mug and the deep satisfaction of knowing that you have won a major international photographic competition which will be forever visible as long as this blog remains on the world wide web.
My thanks to all of you who took the trouble to enter and good luck to all those on the shortlist. Get voting…
PS I’ll sort out the prizes when I get back from holiday.
Fibre broadband install
Looks like my FTTC cab is in situ at last – progress. I think I have found out why there is a delay to the fibre broadband install though. The old cabinet (number 10 in Lincoln) is full. There is no space to feed in any fibre tails so it is going to need a new and bigger pressed Aluminium cab fitting.
I got this from the Openreach engineer who has just been to sort something out for me. He checked the cab and indeed it was chocker.
The work involved in fitting the new one is just a couple of
days but I guess that Openreach will have had to reapply for planning permission. To complicate matters the old cab is on the pavement right next to a school pedestrian crossing. There will be some umming and aahing in the planning department over this one.
In the first photo on the right you can see where they dug in the new duct work leading to the existing chamber on the corner – there is no way this cab would have fitted next to the existing one by the pedestrian crossing. Note of course the cab was
probably there before the crossing – they used horses in them days.
The last photo is a close up of the “full” old cab. One does wonder why they didn’t apply for planning permission for the new shell at the same time as the new FTTC cab.
The planning permission bit is guess work but I’m probably not far off the money.
The Digital Economy Act, which you may recall was rushed through by the last government with inadequate consultation in the desperate dying days of its tenure continues to create a stir. This time the joint committee on Statutory Instruments has strongly criticised the Draft Online Infringement (Initial Obligations) (Sharing of Costs) Order 2012 which Ofcom is also currently consulting on.
The Order has been brought by the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) no doubt trying to clear the decks before they all shoot off to watch the London 2012 perform official duties at the olympics. In its report the joint committee says:
“This instrument is drawn to the special attention of the House on the grounds that it gives rise to issues of public policy likely to be of interest to the House and it may imperfectly achieve its policy objective“
Criticisms include:
- Concern that the Order had been laid in the House whilst consultation was still ongoing and is not based on full information
- Lack of detail from rights holders or a commitment that they would actually use the notification system to its fullest (what’s that all about? why would they go to so much effort to get a law passed to support their private business interest and then not use its powers?)
- Insufficient evidence is provided to judge whether £20 “appeal fee” is the appropriate amount given that significant parts of the structure of the scheme and the appeal mechanism are still undecided.
The whole sad, sorry story continues.
PS thanks to ISPA for being around to constantly monitor this stuff. Someone has to read through and interpret the detailed legal blurb that comes out of Parliament.
Another interesting photographic weekend with the Galaxy S3. I was in Liverpool for a family party, staying at the Crowne Plaza on the Waterfront. Lots of photos – 3.3GB worth – 1,134 files. The hotel had a free option on its wifi, notionally for email & light browsing. I didn’t do any speed testing but when I got home, 150 or so of the pics had already been uploaded to Google+ using the free wifi and instant uploader.
This has to be the way to do it. You find your pics automatically backed up without thinking, as long as you chose the “wifi only” setting on the phone. The rest of the pics were taken off the phone before they had a chance to upload – I’ll have to adjust my “transfer policy” to give them time to upload.
The inset photo is of me and me dear old Mam on Friday night at a private Davies dinner in the hotel. The header photo is the view from the private room at the SoHo House club on Greek Street in London Town. I was there for a Dell Vantage Club event where the topic of conversation was BYOD. I have to say I am becoming increasingly impressed with these Dell events. Dell is restricting the Vantage Club to 350 CIO/CTO types and it is a great forum for networking with others in the industry. I even bumped into a Timico customer there – great stuff.
PS I’m going to also have to start a policy of filtering the photos I keep on the laptop and offloading the rest to an external hard drive where they will provably never again see the light of day.
If you’ve ever grown peas at home you will know how wonderful freshly picked peas from the garden can be. The only problem is that they need to be planted in industrial quantities to get a decent crop. In my own experience a single home grown crop only lasts one meal. Rubbish eh?
So when Christopher Day (@themanorhousebb) invited me to see the Lincolnshire pea harvest in action boy did I get excited:). On a dank drizzly Sunday we turned off the A15 and drove down a track looking for pea viners.
The Green Pea Company Ltd had 3 machines working fields near Hibbaldstow in Lincolnshire where the harvest is in full swing – keeping the nation fed. Where would our fish and chips be without peas? This is vital work.
There was a mobile workshop in the corner of the field and we stopped there to talk to the vining team. Once it has begun the pea harvest continues 24 hours a day for two months. Teams work 12 hour day/night shifts on a 2 week rotation. After donning a fluorescent safety jacket I got a ride with Glen.
The cabs are not as high tech as the Quadtrac but that is quite possibly a personal choice of the owner of the kit. All the driver has to do is steer though. Everything else is automated. Harvesting rate, weight in the tank – all controlled by computer.
Pea pods are “bashed” by metal tines under the viner and are effectively sucked into the belly of the machine where the casings are mechanically removed and the peas “popped” into one of two storage tanks. When the peas are offloaded to an external tractor-towed hopper they start with the most recently filled tank so that the “older” peas remain near the top when taken to processing. That hopper is taken to a bigger lorry which transports the peas back to the factory, in this case near Hull.
The viners are pricey – at £300k a pop they re even more expensive than the Quadtrac. With three of them on a job plus the other kit we are looking at a million pounds worth of cash driving around the field. They are also not as wide because the whole vehicle needs to be able to travel on the public highway without having to unbolt the front mechanism so they can’t process as much acreage as a Quadtrac. The average speed depends on many factors – weight of peas on the vine, ground conditions and instructions from the Birds Eye factory on how much tonnage they need at any given point in time. A typical average over the whole season is around a hectare per hour per machine.
Peas must have been a luxury item in the “old days”. No machines then, just men with scythes and teams of workers picking the pods off the vine. Expensive to harvest plus in my mind likely to have more losses due to the imprecise nature of the scything.
Today each machine weighs 27 tons and can carry 2 tonnes of peas. That’s heavy man. If you happen to find yourself stuck behind a convoy of viners consider yourself unlucky. They travel at 25kmh. With a convoy of 3 viners, a tractor towing a hopper, water and diesel trailers together with outrider vehicles overtaking is going to be a problem but hey… what price peas?
The teams work to specific instructions from Birds Eye who also send testers1 into fields beforehand to test the peas for quality & readiness to pick. Birds Eye even tell them how much weight of peas to store in the tank before tipping into the hopper.
All so that I can enjoy my steak and chips (and fish and burger and sausage and chicken and veggieburger etc etc 🙂 )
The Green Pea Company harvests thousands of tonnes of peas in a season using 15 viners. I went away with two carrier bags full as a memento of my time there. Thanks to farmer Christopher Day, The Green Pea company, Birds Eye and finally to Glen for letting me drive around the field in the viner with him.
They are big boys toys – quadtracks and viners. The question is where do I go from here?
1A lot of testing goes on in the farming business. The two photos below show Christopher Day’s soil samples and testing kit. The days of the bumpkin farmer with a long piece of straw between his teeth and a straw hat are gone. The complexity of the business is such that you need qualifications and certificates to grow stuff these days.
Last week we had the annual Timico watersports evening at the Activities Away lake on Lincoln bypass. As usual a great time was had by all. I’m going to let the pictures do the talking other than to say our team won by a country mile nautical league. This was mainly thanks to the raft building prowess of Ian P Christian but also of course great teamwork.
The first couple of pics are of Foxy’s team – travelling hopefully but failing to make the grade. Stay away from the high seas guys.
The second two pics are of the totally victorious Hodges’ team. We could have carried on to the Caribbean (man). Hoist the pirate flag. Splice the mainbrace.
I’ll finish off with a pic of couple of the lads diving into the water. Thanks to Carl Wright who stayed dry to take these photos but also got to ride in the boat:). You can see more of them on Google+.
I met Christopher Day on Twitter. I’ve no idea when.
People follow you. You follow people. You start to connect. Connect often enough you begin to notice and engage with them which is what I’ve done with Christopher. His Twitter name is @themanorhousebb.
I’ve met him a couple of times before today, once at LincUpLive and then again at LincsTweetMeet. During some online conversation I mentioned that my favourite vegetable is the pea. Christopher grows peas and he invited me to see some pea picking in action.
Hreodburna, which in Old English means reedy burn, is as you may know, the historical name for Redbourne in Lincolnshire. Redbourne is your idyllic English village and was to me only previously known for its pub. The Red Lion is a wonderful 17th Century coaching Inn and a stopping off point for Lincoln
RFC on the way back from away matches in the North of the county.
The car park of the Red Lion on this occasion was the place that I had arranged to meet Christopher to go and see some vining action.
What I would never have noticed in my rugby playing days was the fact that attached to the Red Lion is a fire station containing an original horse drawn fire engine (click on the header photo for a better view of the fire station). Made in 1831
by Hadley, Simpkin and Lott of London the engine is manually operated with bars on either side that were raised and lowered to pump water.
The sign in the fire station window informs the enquiring mind: “The rural disturbances of 1830-1 provoked at least 28 cases of Arson in Lincolnshire. The owner of the Redbourne Estate, the Duke of St Albans certainly owned an engine by 1834 and it is reasonable to presume that this is the same engine, bought to protect his property. There was no county fire service in Lincolnshire until 1948.”
The horse for the fire engine lived in a paddock at the back of the Inn and the first job the firemen had before attending an incident was to catch it.
Things have moved on from those days. We moved on to see the pea harvest which is going to be the subject of another post. In the meantime Christopher was kind enough to show me around his farm which includes some carp fishing lakes. I offer here some photos of one of the lakes – a hugely relaxing place to spend a day. Note the bait set up. Click on the thumbnail photo for a close up shot of some
of the bait – not for the faint of heart.
Alternatively watch the short video (18 years and over only). Amazing where you can get using Twitter isn’t it?
Despite being the CTO of an ISP I’m not a geek. The project to install an Olympics communications infrastructure, although being highly technical, has nuances and beauties that you don’t have to be a geek to get your brain around. Read on for more information.
Just as I took ownership of my Samsung Galaxy S3 my S2 died on my. Good timing? The battery ran down over the weekend and it would not recharge.
I still needed the phone. I sent it off for repair. The repairers came back and said it had evidence of water damage. I can tell you that that phone has not come into contact with water. However you can see problems if you use the phone in a damp environment. I my case it is likely to have been listening to BBCRadio4 using the Tune In Radio app over the internet whilst having a shower. The phone has not been “in” the shower – just in the shower room.
This is somewhat unacceptable. Phones should not be this vulnerable. For now I don’t think there is anything to be done but designs need ruggedizing for the future. I’m going to see if I can fix it myself. Stay tuned but for the moment keep your phone out of the bathroom.
Life is great. This morning my in-tray told me we have been selected as finalists in the Nottinghamshire & Derbyshire Chamber of Commerce Best Business Awards Innovation category.
I don’t have to tell you, astute reader, this is an exceptional achievement with the added benefit of if we win we go through to the “Nationals” in London in November.
The entry was based on our Mobile Access Management (MAM) solution which you should all by now know is a fantastic mobile data broadband backup solution.
Chambers of Commerce are obviously good places to get exposure for a business selling to business. They do need to know that Timico operates internationally and so a further tier of “International Awards” would be eminently suitable. I’m thinking the Bahamas in January or February – I wouldn’t want to miss the run up to Christmas in the UK.
If we win I’ll let you know. If we don’t it will almost certainly slip by unnoticed:)
We can see Lincoln prison from the back of our house. Last night there was a helicopter out there circling for some time. I took a a pic but it was too dark.
I tweeted “helicopter circling Lincoln prison – wonder what’s going on”.
This morning I got a reply from @Lincspolice (ie Lincolnshire Police) saying “@tref We were searching for a missing person”
Pretty good proactive PR I’d say. Lots of organisations could learn from them. I’ve followed them. I’m follower number 5,592.
Header photo is the view at dawn from our house over towards Lincoln prison – v arty I think.
Ok guys, on the spur of the moment I have decided to hold a photography competition – open to anyone who cares to enter. There are only a few rules:
- You have to email me a max of 3 photos to tref at trefor.net
- I chose a shortlist – max 10 photos (say)
- I’ll come up with a polling mechanism/widget that allows blog readers to vote for their favourite
If we can get enough entries byFriday 1pmEntries due by close of play Friday 13th July.
I’ll see what I can come up with re prizes – say 1st, 2nd, 3rd. The photos can be of any subject matter – it’s up to you. You decide how arty etc. Even I can enter as it is going to be a crowd based judging.
By request I’ve added a second category to accommodate people who want to supply edited shots (instagram etc)
If anyone can suggest a suitable polling widget please let me know.
Good luck & happy snapping.
PS don’t forget to tell me what phone you used. I’ve had a few requests to extend the deadline – this is reasonable – it was done on the spur of the moment – I’ve extended it a week to Friday 13th & judging will take place over the following week with the result decided at 1pm on the 20th.
PPS please tweet
B4RN Broadband is award winner
B4RN broadband has just been announced as winner of the Internet Hero at the Internet Service Providers Association annual Awards bash. They were pretty clear winners in the vote that involved all of the ISPA council (moi included).
I’m not going to dwell on the other candidates or on the Internet villain. It is quite fair that the attention is all focussed on B4RN. B4RN has featured on the blog before. It is literally a ground breaking project.
B4RN is aiming to light up 1,500 or so properties across the 8 parish areas in the Lancashire/Cumbria borders at a cost £1.86M. That’s roughly over £1,200 per home/business. They are doing it with a combination of hard cash raised from investors and potential customers and “effort”. The “effort” is payment in kind – much of the total cost of the project is down to civil engineering works – digging the trenches in which the fibre is laid.
The 1,500 properties will need over 256km of fibre – that’s roughly £1,200 per property connected and just over £7 per metre. A very significant chunk of the cost of the project is going to be paid for in kind so the overall cost per property/per metre will come down from this. B4RN has enough cash to initially light up the core of the network – that’s 40,000 km through 8 parishes.
If you take a look at the Openreach website you can see their regulated tariff. For laying fibre the costs range between £25 a metre and £140 a metre. Believe me this is not a “have a go at BT” post. BT has to gear for scale and is not used to having to gear for low cost.
These numbers suggest there is a clear need for competition in the local loop/Openreach space. The Openreach position will be that the market isn’t big enough for two players.
The people that got B4RN going are real heroes. The biggest problem that the UK has is that there aren’t enough of these heroes to go around. It’s not just guts you need it’s know how and it’s not just know how locally on the ground. It’s know how right the way up through the ranks of the civil service and up to government ministerial level.
BT will be whispering in the minister’s ear “do you really want to take the risk with critical national infrastructure by letting just anyone get involved”. That’s what’s happened with the BDUK rollout of funding for rural NGA broadband – we are left with BT and possibly Fujitsu though only in a few regions (that’s my understanding anyway).
I don’t have the right answers here. Hopefully B4RN’s winning of the ISPA Internet Hero award will give someone food for thought.
Photo – Barry Forde and Chris Conder of B4RN proudly show off their award.
I’m sat in the central lobby of the Houses of Parliament waiting for a 3pm meeting with my local .MP Karl McCartney.
Time was, not so long ago, if I had my mobile out a burly member of Her Majesty’s finest would have ticked me off. Not these days.
Only problem is there is next to no signal. I don’t know how MPs put up with it.
I’m getting a lot of traffic for the post on the Telephone Preference Service. It’s no surprise. If your house is anything like ours we get scam calls on a daily basis. Someone needs to do something about it.
We have varying strategies for dealing with the scammers in our house. These range from keeping them hanging on for 10 – 15 minutes to just swearing at them and telling them to “go away”.
I favour the latter but the choice is yours.
The leap second caught me a bit by surprise over the weekend. I guess I knew it was coming but had forgotten all about it.
Some well known sites that rely on accurate time synchronisation were caught out by the change. These apparently include Reddit, FourSquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gawker and StumbleUpon.
There is a bit of noise about this in the media. One might ask “do I care?”. In fact I don’t. None of those sites are of any real interest and none of them are critical to my existence.
What I am more concerned with is the fact that the world has a central clock called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). I realise that it is useful but it does seem like another attempt to organise our lives. Everything happens so quickly these days.It’s all about time.
Really time is not what it should all be about. It should be about contentment. If the world was run on the basis of contentment then everyone would be a lot happier instead of rushing around like blue arsed flies.
At this point I’m going to stop – I’ve just spotted early symptoms of hippyness and flower power. I have things to do, schedules to meet, money to make etc etc etc. If you want to know more about the leap second Google it – I don’t pretend to be as informative as Wikipedia and readers of this blog are in any case well read and highly intelligent individuals who know all this stuff 🙂
That’s all…
Categories
No swearing day? WTF?
Taking a look at the narrow letterbox shaped photo 
that is the header to this post you might be forgiven for thinking that it was a police identity parade. The strange thing is that the guys, Ashley, Carl and Luke are smiling. Clicking on the photo you will see that they are Timico staff, proudly wearing their branded shirts.
The mirth is becasue they have just had a haircut after betting that one of colleagues, Adam Rutter (photo withheld to protect
the innocent) could not go for a whole shift without swearing. I know, I know wtf do I hear you say?
Well Adam, who is a really nice guy is an inveterate swearer and undertook to maintain expletive silence in order to raise cash for the “Dogs Trust”. Adam brings his dog into work every day and keeps him in the kennel in the data centre car park.
The guys figured he didn’t have a hope so said that if he succeeded in going the whole day without upsetting Mary Whitehouse they would have their hair shaved off.
Tbh they really needed the haircut. They will benefit from huge side effects of the act of generosity – their consumption of shampoo will plummet and whenever they go out on the town will be able to squeeze in that extra beer because they won’t have had to spend as much time “doing their hair”.
Thanks to Faye Hemingway for performing the shearing – she has undoubted skills in that direction. Thanks also to Graham Busby for the photographs.
They raised a total of £250 which is great – if you want to chip
in you can do so here.
You can also check out the kennel here.
Well done to everyone involved – great sports.
Life is such a wonderful journey but it is short
and needs living to the full. If you need any affirmation of this take a look at this rose. It featured in a post a couple of weeks ago.
In the picture on the left it is just about to come to its prime. Two very short weeks later it is a picture of decay, purpose served, perhaps. Enjoy it while you can…
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Dylan Thomas
It rained yesterday. It’s been in the news. Trains cancelled or stranded unable to move due to “water on the line” – millions of gallons of it. In Lincolnshire we saw 33mm of rain fall in one day in a month that has an average rainfall of 52mm – for the whole month that is. Gigantic crashes of thunder reverberated around the Timico HQ building in Newark and flashes of lightening lit spectacularly the town darkened by the black anvil clouds above. The good honest folk of the borough took shelter wherever it could be found. Police cruised the streets in 4x4s interrogating the occasional stray pedestrian as to their sanity or motives. Noah would have been in his element.
So of course I went to play golf!
I left that last sentence as a one liner on its own for effect. Truth be told we played golf later in the day after the rains had gone. It was a warm summers evening in Belton Woods where the (by now) annual Timico golf night out took place. I hadn’t played for a while so took a few holes to get going but managed to get back into the groove. The course was somewhat waterlogged but my trusty Dryjoys kept my feet completely dry and a great time was had by all.
The videos below represent live action putting scenes of me, Kirsty Woodman and Dean Bruce, neither of whom had played before but did very well. That is all.
It is only recently that I mentioned taking a Gig’s worth of photos at the Lincolnshire show using my Samsung Galaxy S3. Well this photo mania madness must stop. Last night I rattled off almost 2.5Gigs worth. Storage is cheap but not that cheap and I have to consider what on earth I will do with all these photos and videos.
The Galxy S3 has a “best photo” mode so that when I shoot in burst mode it deletes 19 out of 20 shots and keeps the best one. This is sensible. Burst mode is good for taking lots of fast changing scenes and for those with limited photographic skills – “there is bound to be one good one amongst all that lot”.
The trouble is I like to take my time over chosing the best photo so I don’t use that particular feature. The problem is then exacerbated bythe fact that I never have the time to sort through the pictures. I’m probably going to live with it and convince myself that storage is not that expensive.
The problem then arises in how do I tag objects in the photos. Google et al seem to let you tag people in photos and they then identify them in others. I have shied away from this for privacy purposes but I may end up tagging – especially if I can do it privately on my PC.
The photo below was carefully selected from the 2.5GB taken yesterday. I think it is a very artistic shot of the rescue boats taken at dusk on the Brayford Pool in Lincoln during the Olympic fireworks display. In the style of the Impressionists wouldn’t you say?
