Yuletide

So this is Christmas .... So sang that wondergroup Slade.

Yipee. A season of good cheer and good will to all men. Is it? And why should it be restricted to a season? Why not do it for a whole year? For a day or so a year, if you are a God fearing Christian you refrain from beating your fellow man over the head with a brick or rubbing a broken beer bottle in his face? What chance then the rest like me, for whom God is a word most commonly used in anger when the chisel slips and embeds itself in my palm or the car door shuts on my fingers or the last step is the one cat was sleeping on before I trod on it?

So why am I not rejoicing? Why take the easy route and be cynical? Well apart from the fact that this is what I do, it's also what I think. Over hyped - I should say! Christmas starts in August now. At least that is when the local garden centre put the first decorations up. By September they were playing Christmas music! I pity the poor staff- by December they must be sick to the back teeth with the whole festival.

Why then have we fallen victim to this over commercialisation? Why do we allow it? That kitsch vase your grandmother will never admit to hating, that next useless electronic gimmick used twice and consigned to the back of a random shelf. What do we acheive with this petty consumerism. I'll tell you what we acheive, a new Rolls for the al-Fayeds, a bowl of rice for a poor child in the Indian ghetto. So rejoice and that over used lyric from Wizzard will become true- the wish realised and it will be Christmas every day.

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The Watchers

So it appears we are the most surveilled nation. One CCTV for every 14 people in the UK. Every day there are up 300 images of each of us stored somewhere. Well, that's only the beginning!

Too add to the information from CCTV there are credit cards, every transaction tracked and localised, in real time. Store loyalty cards; tracking every item you buy, when and where you buy it. Oyster cards, tracing every journey you make on the underground or any bus around London. Your mobile phone, scanning across cells giving a rough picture of your movements. With GPS it could be better. Every phone call, every text, calling and called numbers stored for the moment the information might be useful. Everytime you log onto the net via your ISP your IP address is stored along with enough information to localise the connection geographically and in time. Send an e-mail and the full set of header information held who sent it, when, who too, how it was routed, what client was used etc. etc.

Are you getting the picture yet? The government certainly can. All this information is held about you, now. And more .... identity cards (coming soon at your expense), DNA banks, iris and retinal images, fingerprints records, tax returns, payment records, NHS data for medical and dental treatments, scolastic acheivements, records of which books you have taken from the library. It's all there. The amount of data currently held on any individual allows the most pervasive, complete and intrusive examination of their life without their knowledge, without their permission.

Maybe you think there are safeguards. Laws concerning privacy, appropriate access to data. Dream on! Just be sure ... someone, somewhere, is watching you.

Relatively Loud

It's the children's half term. This last weekend, the start, we went to visit my brother, his wife and my five nephews. They live just north of Plymouth, a place with the charming name of Crapstone. (Don't ask ...)

So we set out on Friday, it was quite early in the afternoon. the traffic should have been moderate. Wrong! The M25 lived up to its nickname as the highway to hell. By the time we had travelled about 15 miles and were irrevocably committed, to the extent that any alternative route would itself add hours of hassle, we were ensnared. So for some not insignificant piece of time we admired various number plates and exhaust pipes. It became patently obvious that, as an experiment, no lane moved any faster than any other. Having observed the ' lets change lane as often as possible' drivers, a van in the centre lane, a truck on the inner lane and ourselves in the outside lane it became evident that the only way to win was to lose two wheels and drive down the white lines between the cars. One slight problemetto - I haven't got a bike that can take four people and their luggage. Damn!

Off the motorway was no better ... to save boring you all completely to death, a journey that shouldn't take more than five hours took over seven. We tried the A303, that snarled up. Rather than queuing the whole route we opted for slow and steady, so we cut down to the A30; Salisbury, Wilton, Axminster, Yeovil etc. Very scenic, almost relaxing ... but slow. Hey, the upside is that the journey was eco-friendly!

Devon lived up to it's usual rep. It is the wettest corner of England I have been to. Periods of blue sky punctuated the grey, but woe betide the fools that thought that because it was sunny when they started the walk it would be sunny for the whole walk. Whoops!! That'd be these fools then! Did that twice - though we did take waterproofs with us once.

One thing that is worth noting is that when we are talking about a walk, this is in fact a logistics exercise which has to be executed with military precision. Organising five children, plus our own two, is no trivial feat. It is astonishing how many items of clothing need to be marshaled. Shoes gathered from various corners of the house. Socks, any two will do, the chance of a matched pair is too slim, so just the right size is good enough. Trousers? Definitely preferred. Be amazed at how long the nephews are prepared to wander around in pyjamas. Oh, I almost forgot, one or more will have to be forcibly disconnected from either games console or the PC.


And we haven't even got to the car yet. There is the inevitable debate over who goes in which car. Baby all strapped in. Assorted kids in the appropriate seating - thank you nanny state for that - and we're off. Now which direction did they turn out of the drive? Lets guess left. Phew!

One walk later, decamping from the car is much quicker, we can relax back in the house. Rewind .... did I say relax? Wrong, the kids relax, the adults run around sorting out food and stuff. We don't get to relax until they've gone to bed. This is rather like herding butterflies. Three degrees of freedom means that whilst one is settled the rest run amok, and when you turn your your back on the settled one he's out like a shot joining his brothers. Hmmmm, scene one, take two, three, four ........

And now the return, we set out later than advertised, see above for excuses. It was raining a little, by the time we got to Exeter there was enough electrical discharge to power a small country for a few weeks. Roughly one lighting strike every 2 minutes. I not see horizontal lightening before, but this stuff was running between clouds as well as cloud to earth. Oh, and the rain .... that was monsoon style. Sheets of the stuff, so heavy there was an inch or more of standing water on the motorway in places. Still, it made for a more interesting drive I suppose.


So what learning do I take from this:-
1. Do not have 5 children ... they are very loud and very hard work.
2. During any particular interval when they are not in bed any two or more will be at each others throats for one reason or another. Corollary - Do not expect to understand the reason.
3. Do not turn your back on any of them.
4. Whatever time you allocate for preparation to go out is increased proportionally by the number of children under 10 involved.
5. Consider yourself lucky if you return with the same number of children, boots and gloves as you set out with.

Request for Proposal

What is he on about? Request for what? Is he looking for a marriage guidance council, a dating agency? Just desperate for a relationship? Errr no! Actually non of these things. This is what my life seems to revolve around at the moment; 'Request for Proposal'.

At one time I used to be on the other side of these wonders, I used to be a supplier. Now I'm a buyer. (NO! Not drugs ... despite Amsterdam) So this is how it works - I, the buyer, know I have a gap in my ability to provide a service. I can either buy the skills and build it myself, or I can go to someone else who may have the expertise and a ready or partway ready solution and buy that instead. I really can't bothered to go into the arguments for build versus buy right now ... maybe another time. But it boils down to horses for courses - sometimes one is better than the other.

Ideally the request should be an outline of the business, and an outline of the requirements. Nicely structured so the supplier can understand what those requirements are and address each one in turn. This will take a few hours to draw up .... well, I lied ... OK, maybe days. If you think that's tedious; on the other side of the fence the supplier gets the RFP and issues their response. This takes them some tens of hours and quite heavy duty personnel commitment .... at least if they want a good chance at the work it does. I've played this game, it's at least a week of hard labour preparing a decent response. The solution proposed is always glossy, assured and bears no resembelance to reality. Areas where maybe just a day has been spent reading up suddenly become relevant expertise. It's all one big spin exercise. Finally, the response is ready - 30 pages of preamble, the detailed response to the questions and as much associated bumf as one can find on the company, it's products, personnel, commercials, references and accounts head towards the buyer. 2 truckloads later .....

The buyer takes delivery of the Responses to RFP. They will have set aside a small warehouse and assembled a team to evaluate these. This is tedious, amost as tedious as producing them. But as the buyer you will have maybe 4 or 5 of these to plough through. Don boots and start wading. Stiffle laughter as you discover that point after point has been missed or misanswered. The solution proposed bears no obvious resembelance to your problem. Vendor briefing is required to clarify requirements. RRFPs reissued in the light of new found understanding. More stuff to plough through. Brain goes into melt down and all the answers merge into one.

Finally you pick a couple or three that look viable and invite them to present their solution in more detail. And after this comes a drawn out series of commercial negotiations to agree a price and contract terms. And finally you get to pick the winner. Yippeee!!!

One slight problem. This has taken months now, the business has moved on. The problem has been worked around or just bypassed. The solution is no longer required. Damn!!!

Ah well .... there's always the next RFP just around the corner!

Hamster? Damn!

Another long absence, another post. Well if there is pattern emerging, it is that there is no pattern. Still better random than never I suppose. So here goes. Subject of todays post is Amsterdam - if you hadn't guessed.

'Well! What are you looking at?'

Once in a while my company allows me out of the office to pastures further afield than the other London office. Sometimes, and this was one of them, I extend my stay. And anyway, I like Amsterdam.

Advanced eco-friendly transport - just watch the wear on the heels!!

So, arrive, get hotel space, unpack a bit, go find food. Missed the Kantjil, my fault - should have been a bit more observant - but found a decent Thai. One thing Amsterdam is very good for is Indonesian and Thai cuisine ... so just as well I like it then! The other thing(s) Amsterdam is good for I elected to avoid - so no interesting visits to 'coffee shops' and the window shopping was restricted :-) I had enough to amuse me in other directions than turning left out from the Central Station.

I finally got to see the house of Ann Frank. If you don't know the story then Anne_Frank_House is a good start. Now this is probably not the time to be cynical - but suffice to say that never has the absence of anything tangible made so much of an impact on me. Hats off to the Dutch - they absolutely got maximum impact from almost bare walls and floors.

Surprising what you you can get in good cafe these days!

Then on to the Van Gogh museum. I 'ear its supposed to be good - but that's as far as I got. Tad late in the day, by about 4 or 5 minutes, having found the wrong way round the Rijk's Museum, the security guard wouldn't let me in. Well thanks - I suppose the walk was useful, but really would have liked to get a quick look as well. I bent his ear a little to no avail.

So, Monday's a work day. Data centres ..... yummy. I eat them for breakfast, lunch and tea. Nothing quite like a few thousand kilometeres of Cat 6 network cable, multimode fibre, inter-rack patching, kilogrammes per square metre floor loading and watts per square metre of cooling. Each one of these major datacentres consumes as much electricity as a small town! So, next time you browse the internet, surfing from site to site, streaming high def video and audio just spare a moment and think of all those megawatts of power underpinning your on-line experience.

What happens when you're knackered?

Well ....... Goood Eeeeeeevening VietBlog!!!

'S bin a while, some weeks actually. Not had much inspiration for blogs recently. The news has been disastrously predictable ... Tony and Gordon Show, Iran, Iraq, Terrorism yada-yada. Yawn!

Actually been doing a lot of that recently ... yawning that is. Having just come off my first all night stint for a quite a while, I'd forgotten the peculiarly bizarre effect fatigue can have on the body. Not being 23, snorting interesting white powders, popping pills, or generally overdosing on any caffeine based substance I still managed to make it through the night and most of the way through the following day before admitting defeat and going home for a rest.

But a 30 hour stint can take its toll and it is interesting to note how many ways I found of effectively shutting off. For example, sitting in the chair half my brain would shut down, with the result that I felt I was slipping sideways. It was after a couple of vertiginous episodes like this, despite my best efforts at concentrating on the task at hand, I decided that riding a litre or so of motorbike 40 miles home might not be such a good idea. I reverted to primitive train man - still at 3 in the afternoon there's plenty of space and seats were easy to come by.

Another trick of the brain, trying to subvert my attempts to work, meant that entire minutes would disappear without my noticing them. Just gone, vapourised, vanished. Specks of my life, obliterated without trace. OK, so I was just sitting in front of a screen, so no harm done. But if this had been some critical task, what then?

Of course, when I allowed myself to shut down - on the train - I managed to lose large swathes of time, no problem. Not quite sleep, but a half consciousness. Now that is weird stuff. Not that sleep deprivation is mandated to reach this state - there appear to be a fair number of people who are permanently like this, many of them behind the wheel of a car in the mornings. But, the strange thing is the brain's ability to respond to salient input whilst ticking over - like train inspectors, proximity to home and livid green cycle suites. Near instantaneous ability to respond appropriately, yet able to return quickly to a quiescent state. That's quite a handy trick to have in one's arsenal. I think it's a trick I'll need to develop further for those tedious meetings.

And, when I was finally able to get my head on a bed. PHONE CALL!!!!! Aieee Karamba!!! What? where?!! Wow, was I confused. Whole seconds passed before I was able to re-orient myself. That, and the irrational, immediate reaction to a) fling the phone out of the window and b) find the individual responsible and encourage them towards a long term career pushing up daisies. Fortunately the homicidal stage didn't last too long, most of the people in immediate vicinity have survived without serious or life threatening injury, but that flash of anger. Interesting - as Spock would have said.

Still, awake now, moderately sane and scribbling this blog (OK, maybe that's an oxymoron) I'm good for another few hours before I'll need to crash. All this on less than 2 hour's sleep throughout - makes me think, how much sleep is really necessary, how quickly does the debt become too great and what happens when it does. (Yes I know there are books on the subject - but it's the individual response I'm really interested in)

Well, that's about it for now. It's a bit random - no social comment, no cynical dismemberment, just the story of tired bloke. Go figure.