Tag: holiday

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fun stuff travel Weekend

trefor.net is on holiday

trefor.net is on holiday

trefor.net is on holiday.

Sometimes you just have to kick back and relax. This August trefor.net is on holiday.

That isn’t to say nothing is happening. Lots going on in the background. Under the hood (bonnet). We have an active programme planned for the Autumn – check out the events calendar.

In the meantime I may stick up some holiday snaps. First off is this picture of the new sign for the Morning Star beer garden. Seems a sensible place to hang out when you are on holiday and the sun is shining. A nice cold pint of San Miguel served by Daniel the Spanish barman. Shut your eyes and you can imagine you are on the terrace of a bar in Mallorca, looking out on the Mediterranean blue.

The sound of the seagulls, smells of barbecue sizzling outside the bar. Squeeze some lemon juice over the lamb, a sprinkling of salt over the fries, a tomato and basil salad with a drizzling of olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar that drips like syrup from the neck of the bottle. Finally some fresh bread to mop up the juices.

You get the drift. It’s important to have some downtime. If anyone wants to do some guest posts telling us about their own holidays feel free to drop me a line. I’ll be online wherever I go. Pics are the order of the day. No mountains please1. Make it interesting. Wine labels, menus, colourful market scenes, palm trees silhouetted against pearly white sands and azure seas, interesting local characters, unusual birds never seen at home, yachts under full sail racing down the wind, the sea spray rising up over the bow. etc

trefor.net is on holiday. Relax…

1 I have lots of photos of mountains taken whilst on school trips. Seemed like the right thing to do at the time:)

Categories
Business voip hardware

Time of Day traffic and the Patterns of Life by Colin Duffy

This is a Time of Day telephony traffic graph – I’ve been looking at them for most of my working life. For a normal business day they pretty much always look like this:


This is how business people use telephones on a normal working day.

They generally get into the office and start making calls at about 9am, work steadily up to about midday, then have a spot of lunch. They come back at 2pm and start calling again, then everything starts tailing off about 4pm as people start thinking of home – or beer, or both.

Telephone exchanges have to be built to cope with the traffic at the busiest hour of the day so since the very earliest days of telecommunications telephone companies have been trying to reduce the height of those peaks and spread the load more evenly.

A call at a peaks adds a cost but a call either side of a peak adds a profit.

As you can see, the network is doing practically nothing after 6pm

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Categories
End User internet

Holiday offline

our wild campsite on Mull

It seems a long time ago since I actually set off on my offline holiday. That is partly because it somewhat reaffirmed the third law of the internet. This is one where time goes far more quickly when you are using the internet.

Without the internet the pace of life is far more relaxing – proof is this video of Highland Cattle. They look pretty chilled to me and I bet not one of them has ever been online.

So what does a person do when not online? In no particular order reads a history of the UK after the Romans had left, plays scrabble with son, keeps a diary, goes walking in the hills, swimming in the loch, visits the Abbey at Iona and Fingal’s cave, picnics at Calgary Bay, camping in the hills around Loch Ba and at the shores of Fidden, has coffee on the terrace looking out over the bay at Tobermory, visits Duart Castle, sees red deer, roe deer, sea eagles, mountain hares, dolphins, minke whales, goes to bed when he feels like it and wakes up early, hears nothing but the sound of running water, the wind off the sea and the lapping of the waves on the beach, visits a distillery, sees cheese being made, visits the local agricultural show, sees sheepdogs in action, cattle and sheep being judged, talks to walking stick makers and traditional tartan cloth weavers, visits the Boathouse on Ulva, pitches the tent in the rain, takes the tent down in the rain, catches the sun and watches it set over the islands in the West, fights off midges, washes the dishes in the stream, hears the eagle chick cry out across the loch for food, eats well, drinks only water and tea made from the water taken from the stream, drives 6 miles off the road to the campsite, gets rides off a friendly farmer and an estate owner and dries walking boots in front of a log fire.

I’m back now but the time did not seem to race by and I feel as if I have had a long and great holiday. Whilst I have been away there have been global stockmarket crashes, riots in London, tanks rolling in in the Middle East. They should have all gone offline.

If you are going on holiday leave the internet behind. Nothing will really have changed when you get back.