The video stars Timico Technology Group Chairman Tim Radford talking about the plans for the data center business.
Tag: Timico
Progress is rapid with the new data center build. In fact I was to some extent lulled into a false sense of pace (if that’s the right way of putting it) because the photo I take every day from the same spot didn’t seem to be changing much.
Casting my photographic net on the other side of the building however gave a completely different picture and on Friday afternoon I wandered down, hard hat and all to take a look. I’ve take a few shots that give quite a good feel for what is going to be delivered in the new build. This first photo is a ground floor view of the rear.
The generators have not been delivered yet but one will go on concrete plinths either side of the central column.
Moving round the front there is still a big hole in the middle. They are still moving a lot of materials in. This should be covered up within the next couple of weeks.
The big central opening on the top floor will be where the Timico board room is going to be.
Moving inside we have a plant room and views of the first data hall. This will house 72 x 4KW racks using cold aisle containment and free air cooling – this should mean that for substantial parts of the year we don’t need to power the air conditioning.
Were the facility to be exclusively used for hosting virtualised services then the capacity of each rack
can be as high as 100TeraBytes.
In reality the capacity is very much dependent on the mix of resources you have in the rack – high speed/expensive drives versus bigger. This is very much dependent on the application.
The shot on the left here shows the flooring under construction. The floor tiles are heavy duty as the floor has to support a considerable weight of the fully loaded racks above.
You don’t wanbt to move a full rack if you can help it, at least not without the use of a fork lift truck.
Upstairs on the first floor we have the development engineering offices (left) and the Network Operations Centre.
You can see the raised floor again in the NOC though this does not need to be as heavy duty as in the data halls on the ground floor. The end wall will be flat and covered in monitoring screens.
To finish off here are a couple of photos of me with a view of the existing Timico HQ building from the top floor of the new and one stood on the actual floor of the data hall to give some perspective.
There are a few more photos below including ones I consider to be quite arty 🙂 if you are interested.
Last 
night we had our annual Timico watersports and BBQ evening. Another highly successful bash I must say. The weather was somewhat damp to start off but seeing as everyone was going to get wet anyway it didn’t matter and the sun came out before we started the barbecue bit.
The format is becoming settled. We all jump in and get wet – ideally making stupid noises and impressive summersaults (nil points generally for the latter). Then we have a go at seal launches on sit on top kayaks. After that we crack on with team competitions.
This year it was a kayaking polo match with team captains Gemma Jankiewicz and Katie Nicholas leading the way. At the risk of boring you with work stuff I have to say that Gemma and Katie are great examples of our graduate recruitment scheme working to everyone’s advantage.
Finally, when we are all plum tuckered out we retire to the deck for a barbecue and a few tinnies, unless of course one is driving in which case a cup of tea is fine 🙂
That’s all. Last photos are of Gemma (left) and Katie (right) and Simon Spear (I think) scoring a goal – not the winning one – that would have been me a little later on 🙂
It’s Friday afternoon. The weekend beckons and with it the barbecue, beer and a total chillout. With that in mind this is a totally gratuitous blog post. Andrew North is our star Director of Account Development. He is very good at his job which is why in the picture he walks tall amongst the giants that are his staff.
It may not be clear from the photo that the rugby ball is signed by yours truly:) I have a different one at home that is signed by former Wales rugby giant Scott Quinnell. I paid bit more for it than the one I signed.
Just to make life interesting I have decided to give away a Timico mug to the first person who can tell me who is the mayor of Timico on Foursquare 1.
Btw I’ve just realised that apart from Andrew there are 8 of them in this photo. Just enough to form a scrum. From left to right are Jess, Simon, Sophie, Emma, Kirsty, Andrew, Clare, Kate and Gemma. They make a great team.
1I’m sorry but this competition is not open to Timico staff or contractors or any of their relatives (etc)
You may have read the news on Friday (oh boy) about the Timico acquisition of Milton Keynes based B2B ISP Powernet. This is the fifth ISP that we have bought in 7 years.
Timico has a tripartite investment strategy for growth. We invest in our core business capabilities, in growing our business organically and in acquisition of businesses that will be able to benefit from the Timico core competencies.
These core competencies include network and hosting capacity, unified communications and an ever growing involvement in mobility. Organic growth proves the business model and the acquisition of other businesses allows us to leverage their customer bases with sales of services outside their initial product set. For example a pure play ISP will be able to add voice and mobile to its connectivity and hosting services with the potential to significantly increase the average revenue per customer. It’s a win win situation.
Whilst we are an ambitious business it is important for us to grow the business in a sustainable manner. The wellbeing of our customers is just as important as business growth. This also plays a part in the selection of acquisition targets.
Powernet is a business with the same core values as Timico and this is reflected its success in winning a blue chip client portfolio that includes Travis Perkins , Aston Martin, Sheffield City Council and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Powernet also brings with it a track record for innovation that will sit well within the Timico Group.
This is a good time to be around in the communications industry. A great deal of change is going on and these changes bring exciting opportunities at every turn. That said business is always hard fought with customers expecting to squeeze every last ounce of value out of relationships with their suppliers. I am comfortable that for Powernet customers this acquisition will represent significant added value and that equally, Powernet will prove to be a valuable member of the Timico Group.
Welcome aboard guys 🙂
Categories
Datacenter update
Thought it was about time you had a progress update on the new Timico datacenter build. It is currently very much on schedule. Nice bit of cladding going on as you can see. The bricked up windows are going to be cosmetic – datacenters don’t need windows. It will also have cold aisle cooling. This is an improvement on the traditional hot aisle where the hot air is contained between racks. If you think about it it can’t be efficient to have people walking about in cold air warming it up with their body heat. There is still a lot of work to be done but so far so good. Opening night party invites will be sent out in the autumn.
Short note to point out to those of you who may have missed it is that Timico is a finalist in two categories for the ISPAs (The Internet Service Providers’ Association Awards). We are in the Best Business Fixed ISP and Best Mobile Broadband categories. Sister company NewNet are also finalists in the Best Business Broadband and Best Dedicated Hosting categories. Nothing like a bit of friendly rivalry.
Our mobile broadband service is not simply a rebadge of one of the mobile operators. It’s a multi-tenant APN solution that allows small and medium sized businesses to have their own private mobile data network hooked into their fixed MPLS network without the big up front costs that normally mean this is the domain of larger enterprises. No VPN overhead, no having to reconnect after going through mobile coverage blackspots. Very enterprising I think 🙂
There were 46 entrants out of the 200+ members of ISPA so to get two “finalist” badges is good going. If you are coming to the awards night at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 7th July look me up and I will buy you a drink (limited places – get your booking in early :).
The ISPAs are genuinely independent awards – brown envelopes don’t work. They aren’t influenced by advertisers or sponsors and to be a finalist is a good independent endorsement of your service.
That’s it.
You may or may not spot Timico in the press this week with the announcement of two new senior appointments. These are Fraser Anderson as Group Sales Director (below left) and Neil Armstrong as Marketing Director (below right).
These are exciting times to be around and these appointments represent two more signs of a business growing up. Everyone is in this game for different reasons. Some have lifestyle businesses, some trundle along in a mire not knowing where to go. I am here for the action and these two guys are here to take us to the next level.
If you want to find out more about each individual take a look at the Timico press release here. They both have very impressive track records.
It is very comforting to know that we can attract such high calibre individuals to the team.
PS I know I keep going on about these being exciting times but I’m sorry – you are just going to have to put up with me. Also I’ve just noticed they look remarkably similar. Note to self Neil is the one wearing specs 🙂
We have just had the first of the new season’s Timico Cake Competitions. This one was a Betty Crocker Cake mix competition.
So what’s special about a cake made from a shop bought standard kit do I hear you say? Well first of all it gave an opportunity for some people who don’t consider themselves to be skilled bakers to enter. Secondly you would be amazed at the variations you can get.
I have pictured all the cakes below for your delectation and delight. The winner was Jess Woods, pictured with me below. Jess’ cake was wonderfully gooey chocolate covered in M&Ms. Slices available at £1 a go with proceeds going to charity.
Individual entries displayed here:
I have just been on the phone to my car insurance company to change the names of two of the kids! What I mean is I added them to the policy on Monday and the insurance company got both names wrong as well as not putting my wife’s full name on.
I had to call because I couldn’t risk the scenario of them having an “incident” and not being able to claim because of their details not being right.
This phone call took me 23 minutes and 35 seconds. This is a classic case for automation of the process. I was sat at the end of the phone waiting for someone at the other end to manually enter name corrections onto their (painfully slow) system.
Whilst I was on the phone I also realised that the activation date of the policy was wrong.
If I had been able to log onto a portal to make these changes it would have saved both of us time and trouble – remember I almost certainly had to go through the same process and time on Monday when I first added the kids to the policy.
I have tried automated portals for insurance policies before and found that I always ended up wanting to ask a question so I would abort the process and make a phone call.
We have the same problem in the communications industry. The initial sales contact often needs human involvement because the products are not straightforward. It might be simple enough to order a broadband connection online but usually there are other products and services involved. Businesses don’t buy just broadband and when you buy something you want to be sure you are buying the right product. It’s a stage at which you need expert advice.
We are investing a huge amount of time and money in to this area. This is not a big bang process where one day you will come in and – wow – be amazed at the overnight change. There are many aspects of running the business that need to be accommodated.
The most important of these is customer support which is one of the first areas to be upgraded. I do expect though that when we have finished, if that can ever be the case when talking about continuous improvement, customers will find dealing with us a dream.
The goal is to avoid finding ourselves in the situation I have just described with the insurance company. Neither party ends up happy as we will have both had to waste time and money on a problem that I could have fixed on my own in 30 seconds had I had the tools to do it.
Simples.
It’s coming along as you can see if you click on the header image. It always amazes me what one bloke can do when he has a few tools to help him. I guess it is the same in farming. Along came the industrial revolution and everyone left the fields to be replaced by machines.
Today has been spent entering industry awards. I assume it is the same in the farming business (to continue with the theme). “Why is your pint of milk better value than your competitors?” I suppose you can brush up your best cow and take her along and have something solid for the judges to evaluate:).
I have had to sit through some long hot tedious awards evenings, usually run by a magazine eager to reward its biggest advertisers. They can be useful to win though as we have found out when we got Highly Commended in the Best ITSP (Large Enterprise Category) at this year’s ITSPA Awards. Independent Awards can be quite prestigious.
I’m not going to tell you which awards these were today in case we don’t win – you will have to wait 🙂 – and my advice to you is to “drinka pinta milka day”. It will make you a winner.
I should think that by the time I put up the next photo of the new build the walls will be complete. Btw I have been asked if I can put up an artist’s impression of the new building but I’m sorry to say I don’t have one in electronic form. I will ask the builders if they have one.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to blow your own trumpet on occasion and I am please to say that this time I can use the full register of that particular instrument. Timico has been shortlisted for best Internet Telephony Service Provider in both SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprise) and Large Enterprise categories at the annual ITSPA Awards.
This is very pleasing as it fairly reflects the evolving nature of our business. A large percentage of our customers, as business demographics might suggest, are indeed SMBs. SMBs have represented the heartland of the hosted VoIP industry during its formative years.
Large Enterprises have traditionally opted for big PABX solutions, quite possible hosted. As Timico has grown we have won more and more business from the Enterprise sector and have found that this is an area of the market very willing to embrace hosted VoIP but also to mix and match premises based PBX and hosted using SIP trunks as the unifying factor.
The biggest influencing factors here have been a combination of the maturing technology and the reduced cost of bandwidth across Wide Area Networks.
The Awards are at the BT Tower next Monday evening and are usually a great opportunity to network. Good luck to all the other finalists 🙂
I am quite excited to be able to announce that we have begun the building of a new 18,000 sq ft, three storey facility at our Newark Corporate HQ. This will house a datacentre with up to 150 4KW racks on the ground floor.
The first floor is designed as a Network Operations Centre and will provide us with a great 24×7 monitoring facility, screens galore and mirrored glass – the works. The initial build is costing £5m but we are planning a further £2m spend over the next three years, mainly on increasing the capacity of our virtualisation platform and Storage Area Network.
The Newark site already has diverse fibre connections but we will be adding a further link to Manchester to increase our route options out of the UK.
This facility will allow us to offer customers we host in London Docklands an alternative DR option in the midlands. The bigger play though will be virtualisation and the private cloud. We have been offering bespoke virtualisation services for three years or so but this will represent a big step up. Look out for announcements on this later in the year.
The header photo (click to see all of it) is of me and Construction Manager Gary Davies of Lindum Construction doing the ceremonials for the “groundbreaking”. The pic below is me actually doing some digging – I went out and bought a new spade especially 🙂
I missed a trick here. We are looking for a Marketing Director. This is a new post. If you are interested check it out here.
This might not be of particular interest to the normal readership of this blog (though I don’t really know their actual demographics – other than by the fact that people occasionally come up to me and tell me they particularly like my posts about cake competitions! – it is nice to meet readers:) ). It is exciting for me personally because I am sat in a business that I helped to create and am now watching that business grow up. Other appointments we have made in the last 12 months are also indicative of the maturing nature of Timico – Group Operations Director and Information Services direction to quote just two.
Anyway back to the Marketing Director it isn’t me personally doing the recruiting but if you want to know more about the company you know where to find me. You will find there is never a dull moment at Timico:)
Media interest in IPv6 last week prompted a few questions, notably on twitter, regarding whether people should worry about the IPv4 address pool exhaustion. It would be easy to make noise and attract attention by saying “OMG yes – you should worry”. After all it is a fairly momentous event –> “The End of The Internet As We Know It”. ARMAGEDDON!!!
This blog does not indulge in such tabloid-like scaremongering 🙂 So what is the deal?
Well firstly it is very true that the IANA IPv4 address pool is about to run out. There are only seven /8 address block remaining and Asian Regional Internet Registries (RIRs ) APNIC is about to ask for two of these. The growth of internet usage in Asia has been outpacing the rest of the world.
Word has it that APNIC has been holding back on this request to a) stretch the exhaustion date and b) give IANA a chance to organise the PR surrounding the release of the final blocks. Once APNIC has received its two blocks (each /8 contains approx 16 million IPv4 addresses) we will be down to the last five. This is expected to happen in January – or mid February at the latest.
The rule is that this is the point at which IPv4 exhaustion is declared and the remaining five blocks are distributed to the five RIRs. The last five should be released in March. (all dates subject to change in this rapidly changing world)
Of course whilst this means that IANA will no longer have any addresses each RIR will. It should, however, be remembered that /8 blocks are being used up at the rate of one every 6 weeks or so. It won’t be long before RIRs will run out of stock. It will then be down to individual ISPs to nurture their own stocks so that they last as long as possible. I have already heard (anecdotal) stories of companies being bought for their IPv4 addresses, at least in part.
ISPs can make their stocks last longer by getting better at recycling IPv4 addresses from customers who have left for pastures new. These ISPs will need to move to IPv6 or, in the medium term, depart the market because they will not be able to service new customers– enter tabloid press – ISPS HIT WALL AND GO OUT OF BUSINESS PANIC/STAMPEDE/WILL MINE BE ONE OF THEM? !!!
The industry has known this has been coming for a long time – more than 10 years so what’s the state of play?
The global network penetration of IPv6 is still quite low – only a few % – it does vary from country to country. This means that relatively few networks can talk to each other using IPv6. This rate of adoption is increasing as D-Day gets closer (Depletion Day?).
The migration strategy for IPv6 implementation is to run dual stack networks ie to run both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. Existing ISP customers will be able to continue to use their existing “IPv4 only” routers. IPv4 is not going away in a hurry. However you should know that once IPv4 has been “used up” new websites and services will start to appear that only use IPv6. If your ISP cannot provide IPv6 then it is quite probable that you will not be able to access services that only use IPv6. With time this will be a growing problem.
Consumers
As long as your ISP does support IPv6 then your routers don’t need to – the ISP can do a Network Address Translation on your behalf. After all end users don’t typically see their IP address. End users use the friendlier DNS system for sending emails and web browsing eg trefor.net sits at IP address 62.121.11.173 but you don’t need to know the underlying number – the system takes care of it for you.
Their problem will be if their ISP does not support IPv6 then they will not be able to help when trefor.net (or any other DNS based service) moves to IPv6.
Now consumers don’t need to rush out and buy a new router. For one if their ISP does not yet support IPv6 it would be a waste of money, but they do need to be sure in the medium term that the ISP has an IPv6 story. The other point to note is that routers don’t last for ever and do periodically get replaced as technology develops. For example in moving from 8Mbps to 24Mbps broadband many people will have had to have a new router.
One of the things holding back the release of IPv6 to consumers is the lack of support for the protocol amongst consumer broadband router vendors. The market leader for IPv6 equipment support is Cisco, whose kit is typically used in business environments. Cisco routers are too expensive for home users who expect to get the equipment bundled with their broadband connection for free or at least a very low price.
There are very few alternatives with fully working solutions – these vendors are only now just sampling their first devices to their ISP channel.
There is no real reason for this, other than a perceived lack of market demand, because ADSL routers typically all use the same open source (ie free) Linux kernel. Linux is the pet project of a global engineering community and provides good IPv6 support. We should therefore expect to see many IPv6 enabled broadband routers appearing in the market during the course of 2011 which will likely trigger more ISP IPv6 announcements.
Business
A business should give more thought to a plan to migrate its network from IPv4 to IPv6, or to provide support for a dual stack. This is because it might be a bit of a nuisance for consumers to have only partial access to the internet but this could be mission critical for a business, especially if it is that business’ own website and services, or those of its trading partners that become inaccessible.
Up until now this is something that has been completely ignored by the IT manager community but it is something that they should be aware of in 2011.
Support from Cisco and Linux is good news generally as many businesses are heavy users of both Note a business may not know it uses Linux but for example Timico installs IPv6-ready Fortigate firewalls – it is the firewall’s underlying Linux stack that facilitates this.
There is a lot of uncertainty here and I will be arranging some educational workshops to cover this in the near future – watch this space. In the meantime if you want to know more by all means drop me a line at tref at trefor.net.
If you want to learn more about what an ISP does to prepare for IPv6 read about our work at Timico in this previous post. Note since writing that post in December 2010 the number of IPv6 routes supported by Timico has grown from 3,500 to 4,500 which shows how quickly the space is moving.
Geoff Huston also has a good discussion on this subject here.
PS I will update the percentage penetration of IPv6 numbers as I come across them.
Categories
building for growth
I’m looking forward to another year of building growth in business. Watch this space for news but to give you a clue the header photo is of the plot of land behind our current offices. The bloke in the yellow coat is a surveyor. There will be a webcam involved together with a few giant boys toys.
It’s currently minus one degrees out there so I am glad I have a nice warm airconditioned office to sit in:) Click the photo to get a bigger view of the plot.
A paper by Trefor Davies and Chris Nicholls
The Problem
Regular readers of this blog will know that we, the world, are about to run out of the IPv4 addresses that are absolutely crucial to the running of the internet. This notionally apocalyptic event is almost certain to happen over the next three months, maybe even two.
The allocation of IP addresses is managed by an organisation called IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). IANA hands out these numbers in /8 blocks containing 16,777,216 addresses. Clearly you would have to be a big network provider to need 16 million IP addresses. Because of this IANA hands these large blocks to five regional registries that then manage the distribution of smaller blocks to their customers. In Europe the regional registry is called RIPE NCC.
Whilst I have myself been guilty of (playfully) scaremongering in respect of the exhaustion of the pool of Ipv4 addresses, it is only really IANA that is about to run out. RIPE will not run out for perhaps another year and even after that individual ISPs will have their own existing unused addresses to play with.
Notwithstanding this it behoves all ISPs and network operators to get their house in order with Ipv6 which is the long since identified answer to the problem. Ipv6, a 128 bit protocol supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses compared the 32 bit IPv4 which only provides 4,294,967,296 (232) . IPv6 is expected to serve us for a very long time.
Few ISPs in the UK have announced IPv6 support. As we approach the IANA Apocalypse I thought I would share with you the engineering work that we have been doing at Timico in respect of IPv6
Perspective
Timico has been running IPv6 as part of our internal research and development activity for a number of years. The core of the network has been running dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 with external connectivity to the rest of the internet for most of this time. Attempts thus far to bring these services to our customers have been limited due to the lack of demand, vendor support and our core IPv4 operations taking precedence.
I am happy to announce that BT, Genband, Timico and Thinkbroadband have stepped forward with sponsorship for first annual trefor.net Christmas tweetup.
The party starts at 1pm on Friday 17th December in the platform bar of the Betjeman Arms in St Pancras Station. Get there early to avoid the crush – thanks to our sponsors the bar will now be free until the money runs out.
The guests already signed up come from a wide range of communities of interest including internet engineering, VoIP equipment, Parliament, DEAct, rural broadband, ISPs ITSPs, regulatory specialists, embedded software developers, oil and IT industry executives,consultants and the media.
If you haven’t already done so please sign up here
Some people who have expressed an interest in coming but unable to make this one have asked when the next one is going to be? The end of the IPv4 address pool or “Apocalypse IPv4” party is already in planning for the Feb/March timeframe. The date for this one is TBC pending the exhaustion of the IANA address pool and will be the subject of a further announcement.
Expressions of interest from potential sponsors for the Apocalypse IPv4 event are now being taken. This should be of interest to carriers, equipment vendors and anyone else in the IPv6 space.
Once upon a time there were fixed line communications and mobile communications. Then the internet raised its hand and believers said Internet Protocol communications will rule, OK. This we all know and in the early days at least the fixed providers were shaking.
Nowadays IP is everywhere. We are bombarded every day with new websites, services and products promising to revolutionise our lives. So much so that I have actually pulled back a yard from experimenting with the latest and greatest. This is because if I let it happen I would spend all my time looking at new services, most of which will never see the light of a second round of funding. These days I let other people’s ideas take proper root before getting interested.
Notwithstanding all this there are some clear trends. Smart Phones and tablets are taking over our lives. I’m particularly surprised at the latter,
As I write this post the rain is lashing against my office window trying to break the glass and play at the Ryder Cup Golf Tournament has been suspended due to the weather. Inside Timico Towers though the drizzle has been of a different sort. This month’s eagerly anticipated cake competition was, yes you guessed it, Lemon Drizzle Cake.
It always worries me that in arranging these competitions I might find myself in the embarrassing position of not getting any entries. The team has not yet let me down and the standard of entries has been getting higher and higher with each new competition.
The high levels of intelligence and stamina required to survive the rigours of life in the engineering department of an Internet Service Provider attracts a certain breed of individual. They are all well rounded, interested in writing code, computer games, sky diving, the occasional glass of beer and like to look after their mental and bodily health.
The standard diet consists of the appropriate mix of fluids (Red Bull, Monster) and health foods (KFC, MCDonalds, Dominos, Taj Mahal takeaway etc) together with an extensive reading list required to help them keep abreast of current affairs, advancement in technology and general mental health.
The photos below show what the lads browse through during their quiet moments (Sunday mornings before, during and after church).
Personally I’m reading Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. I recommend it. In fact I think I will buy some more chess books.
The 2010 Sunday Times Techtrack 100 came out yesterday featuring Timico for the fourth year running. The Techtrack is really the domain of young small companies that can easily demonstrate high compound annual growth. Six years into the game Timico is really no longer a startup and each year it is going to become harder to maintain the rates of growth.
Having said that it is always nice to be recognised and this is our fourth year in the Table so we must be doing something right. (Good 🙂 )
My cake making competitions have become very popular. The strange thing is that I get people I’ve never met before coming up to me saying that the posts I write about these competitions are amongst their favourites. Well one person did last week at the LINX meeting anyway.
I’m not sure what that says about my other posts but in answer to this huge demand I am happy to report the winner of the August competition – this time for the best cheesecake – is Paula Davies (no relation afaik).
The carrot cake competition was so successful that I was asked to organise another bake-off but this time with chocolate cake.
The 5 entries, shown below, were all top class and there were on 1 1/2 points separating the first and second place cakes.
The winner, with a fine triple decker offering, was Head of Product management, Andrew Massing – shown below being presented with his certificate.
Below is me during the judging. This is a highly responsible job that has to be taken very seriously as you wouldn’t believe the competitive nature of the entrants:)
I walked in this morning to find that the wallpaper in the office had changed overnight. Being Welsh and with no real interest in the football World Cup other than the fact that I have drawn Chile in the office sweepstake it took me a bit by surprise. Having said that everyone is excited and the whole tournament (at this early stage before anyone has been knocked out) has lifted everyone’s spirits.
The video below is a quick scan around the office to show off the decor. The bit at the beginning is where the Network Operations team sits. Note no flags here. They are all uber-geeks who care only about tech stuff and are only vaguely aware that there is a sport called football. They will still celebrate a win with everybody though. Work hard and play hard.
I walked in this morning to find that the wallpaper in the office had changed overnight. Being Welsh and with no real interest in the football World Cup other than the fact that I have drawn Chile in the office sweepstake it took me a bit by surprise. Having said that everyone is excited and the whole tournament (at this early stage before anyone has been knocked out) has lifted everyone’s spirits.
The video below is a quick scan around the office to show off the decor. The bit at the beginning is where the Network Operations team sits. Note no flags here. They are all uber-geeks who care only about tech stuff and are only vaguely aware that there is a sport called football. They will still celebrate a win with everybody though. Work hard and play hard.
Great day out with KCOM yesterday at their annual Charity Golf day at Forest Pines.
The weather didn’t put us off and the company (Steve, Steve and Chris) was great. The Timico team came in fourth, which considering I had probably the worst game of my life, was a credit to the others. I did win an umbrella in the raffle.
The charity being supported was The Stroke Association which is a very valued customer of Timico.
Photographed below are the team with the Pines as a backdrop. I can recommend the course although it is amusing to note that online the club announces itself as being “near Brigg” whereas in reality it is “near Scunthorpe”. Maybe of interest is the fact that down the road is Holme Hall Golf Club which, unless I’m very much mistaken, is where Tony Jacklin started his career. End of travel agent spiel.
Final part of an interview recorded for BT for their FTTC launch.
Announcing the Timico Carrot Cake Competition. Entries need to be submitted to me during Monday morning. Judging will take place at 1pm on Monday in the Tech area on the first floor. Entry is free.
The cake must have been baked by the entrant who must in turn be a Timico employee (apologies to readers re this – if there is sufficient demand I will conduct an “Open Carrot Cake Competition” at a later date). Fake entries from M&S etc will result in naming and shaming of the entrant.
The winner will be awarded the title of Timico Carrot Cake Cook of the Year 2010 and will receive vouchers entitling them to 1 year’s unlimited viewing of Trefor.net.
Judging will be by a top panel of gastronomes renowned for their carrot cake tasting skills. For security purposes the names of the judges will not be revealed until just before the tasting.
Happy baking and good luck to all entrants. Results will be posted here on Monday. You read it first on trefor.net.
All work and no play…
Part 2 of an interview recorded for BT as part of their FTTC launch.