port7 – co – uk

Currently looking at ways to reduce costs at work I am investigating using Skype for international communications.

It seems quite good though it is evil in the fact that it’s a propriety protocol. It also is quite horrible network wise, it seems like you have to open lots of outgoing ports on firewall’s for it to work sensibly. Needless to say that if I can’t find a way round that little ‘feature‘ it will not see the light of day at work!

So I have Skype installed on my iBook at home, so if anyone wants to contact me, my Skype name is portseven

Funny quote of the week, read in a document about handheld terminals….

Windows CE.NET 5.0 OS – the most open OS yet developed for Mobile Computers.  A development environment almost identical to Windows, with over 5 million application developers worldwide

Looks like someone has been at the Kool-Aid

Well it’s been over a month now in my new job, all is going reasonably well. I do think I still have a slight ‘rabbit in the headlamps’ thing about me, as its a steep learning curve.

This is quite different from my previous job, as it’s a much more mature IT Department. It is structured ITIL like, and so there is lots of procedure and documentation, as is needed in an IT department of such size. I no longer get called at the weekend when someone can’t login, it just all gets sorted by someone else! I must say I don’t miss the IT support side of the job.

The current thing is preparing the IT budget for next year, as the Technical Architecture Manager I have a big input on this. So I am currenty writing lots regards what I want to spend next year and why. Everything needs a business justification, which can be sometimes tricky given the technical nature of some projects. Still it’s all good experience, and quite interesting.

Just had my 1st day in my new job as the Technical Architecture Manager for Matalan, as with all 1st days in new job’s there was a lot to take in, and I know I will be in learning mode for a good few weeks yet.

Other than that it’s been really good, the people are nice. The infrastructure there looks reasonable, though there are a lot of servers, but thats due to porley written Windows apps. There are a bunch of cool things coming up that I am looking forward to getting involved in, such as a virtualisation trial, move of some apps from DGUX to HPUX & Solaris and an upgrade of the SUSE Retail Linux till systems.

In sad news, I am reeling from the loss of my Thinkpad. Looks like I will have to save up, I need a laptop and nothing other than a Thinkpad will do

Last night before I went to bed I thought I would just check my E-Mails as I had not done so all day, but like the geek I am, I got drawn into something.

3 Hours later at 1am, I had iFolder installed and configured at work. So far I am reasonably impressed, the admin is very slick, the windows client is shiney. I wonder how it scales up, as I might consider using it for our 320′ish depots.

I have just come back from a weeks residential course in Chester, I booked it through GBdirect a few months ago.

It was a course on the PRINCE2 Project Managment methodology and included sitting the 2 PRINCE2 exams, Foundation and Practitioner. It was a great week, I passed the multiple choice Foundation exam on Wednesday with 68 out of 75, then I took the scenario based Practitioner exam later today. Though I won’t know if I passed that for another 6 to 8 weeks.

The week was quite intense, there was loads to take in but the teacher Alan Lloyd was really good and presented the material in an entertaining way.

I am glad it’s over as now I can read a good book without feeling guilty by thinking I should be revising! I also need to work out how I can apply the stuff I learnt to work as they need to feel that they got some value out of paying for me to go on the course. You didn’t think I just did it for my CV did you?!?!

A strange mixed week, a few different things have happened that might be OK to blog about.

* We got a new carpet! It arrived on Wednesday and we are happy with the result, the colour was a bit of a gamble with the new wall paint, but we think it worked out well

* I am moving from Zen to Bytemark for my broadband provision. I was due to be disconnected from Zen yesterday on the 28th, but my connection is still active. I think this is because my router keeps the connection up constantly, so they might have removed my entry from their RADIUS servers so if I disconnected and tried to connect again it might fail. But as my current ‘session‘ has not dropped I am still OK.

* The new bed is due tomorrow! The old one has served us well for the past 7 years and so we think its time for a new one

* I think we will be moving from Debian Woody to Ubuntu Breezy for our new depot PC image. The reason being we are wanting to have things like nice handling for people plugging in Digital Cameras and more hardware support for the range of PC’s we are now having to support. We could have used Debian Sarge for this, but to get all we wanted we would have had to pinch bits from Etch and Sid. So instead of having a platform that is a patchwork of several different distro’s we have just one single distro to manage. Will this be the largest corporate deployment of Ubuntu yet? It would be interesting to hear of others that have done something similar

* I was informed by the tax office that my tax code is changing for the worse, meaning Gordon Brown will be getting more out of me! They claim that they didn’t know I was getting the fuel allowance! So UK Plc is taking more money from me and yet my brother over in Canada is being given money from his government! I need to move out of this country!

Interesting week all in all….

I have come to the conclusion that Sales Reps / Account Managers etc are the apendixes of the business world, meaning they are of no use to anyone!

Over the past few weeks I have been in numerous meetings and conferences with various companies that we may by doing business with. In these meetings there is usualy me and a few others from my company and some people from their side namely a techie, some sort of director and the sales rep.

In all these meetings the sales reps have contributed absolutly zero of value. Most of the talking is done by the director and the techie is the one we ask the questions of, but the sales rep does bugger all.

They also all seem to have the same image, namely fake tan and cheesy hairstyle. I guess its some sort of uniform. Even when you ask about pricing they always seem to say ‘I will have to get back to you on that’ so its not as if they are a fount of knowledge on that side.

My view is sack the lot of them, they are a risk to your business. They will say yes to anything, so if you ask the company if their system can do so an so, they will always say yes despite it being imposible for the company. You get more sense out of the techies, they are the people who know the products after all, the sales rep adds no value at all!

This week I did an 18 hour day, something I have not done since I worked in McDonalds years ago. My employer Speedyhire recently bought out Multi Group. With that purchase came some infrastructure, so Wednesday was the day that we went down to Croyden to get them. I was up at 3am, of too the office to meet a coleage and pick up the white van, then down to Croyden (got there at 8am) to dismantle and load up the racks and servers, then we headed up to Nottingham to our data centre to reassemble and plug them in to our network. We arrived in Nottingham at 4pm and didn’t leave there till about 7.30pm. I finally got home at 9.45pm, what a day!

One of the servers a big old dinosaur of a Dell, also seems to have some sort of weird power plug, similar to the normal kettle lead, but bigger and more square. We didn’t get the old plug, and can we find a replacement? Can we balls! Thanks Dell for sticking to standards…..

Have done a bit of driving over the past few days and have had the pleasure to see some lovley car crashes. I passed one today on the M62 near Huddersfield where the fire brigade were cutting someone out of the remains of a car. Over the past 2 days I have seen a total of 5 car accidents. It really puts me off driving, I do consider myself a safe driver, I try not to take risks, and I try to keep a cell of space around me. Though I can do as much as I can but that doesn’t protect me from other peoples bad driving and that scares me. But with my job at the moment I need to drive alot so I will stick with it and try and be safe.

On a brighter note I have been listening to BBC Radio4 over the past few weeks. There are some good programes on there, it makes a change from music.

Also RIP the legend that was John Peel, certainally I for one will miss his amazing late night shows.