Stuart Herbert

The new job continues to go extremely well.

Work News

I’m still wrestling with the problem of taming the department’s TODO list, and so far I haven’t decided whether or not MS Project Server is a help or a hinderance. It’s fair to say that some of us have had trouble believing that it’s a product someone would actually want to charge money for.

But it is nice being able to sit down and put together a comprehensive technical plan. It’s no secret that I’ve no time either for the vast majority of online project management tools (of which Basecamp is the poster child) nor the people that these tools are aimed at. Project management is, by necessity, a rich and detailed skill. It can be simplified to stop it becoming the Ministry for Administrative Affairs, but it can’t be glossed over. I was horrified when certain folks I’ve worked with in the past used to laugh about being unable to create project plans. I’m a great believer that if you don’t want to do the job properly (whatever your job is), get out the way and let someone else do it right instead.

And what I love about my new job is that my boss is on my back all the time to get the job done right. That’s how it should be. We’re building something special at Gradwell, and you can’t do that if things aren’t done right.

Tech News

Rather than buy a 3G iPhone, I decided to get a HTC TyTn II instead. Unlike the iPhone, it has a removable battery, and it can be used as a 3G modem by my MacBook Pro - extending the battery life of my laptop by a good 45 mins. It also has a very usable slide-out keyboard, making it very easy to use as a way to get at my email when I’m out and about.

The downside is that it runs Windows Mobile. You think Vista is bad? Windows Mobile is worse. It crashes daily, comes with the second worst browser around (Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile), and doesn’t seem to have an equivalent to Apple’s App Store. The email client is quite good - except that this week it has decided to freeze when syncing email with work’s IMAP server. Tomorrow’s job is to snag someone else’s TyTn II at work and do some testing to see whether it’s my device, or the IMAP server.

Turns out that the TyTn II is also surprisingly affordable. If you try and buy an unlocked one, the cheapest I’ve seen was over 450 pounds. Nowhere seems to stock one either, so I’m not sure how easy they are to get hold of that way. Instead, I signed up for a 12 month contract with Vodafone. For 30 pounds a month, I get the TyTn II and a 5GB data allowance. At the end of the 12 months, I can cancel the contract, I get to keep the TyTn II, and I’ve saved a hundred pounds. Bargain.

Sad News

Last Friday was Rob’s funeral. The service was held in St Mary’s Church in Butetown, and it was standing room only. I thought it was a lovely service, and a great send-off for him. He was buried in Thornhill Cemetery, where we watched as mourners grabbed shovels and buried the coffin there and then. After that, a lot of folks headed down to the Wharf, but I couldn’t face it. I came home and locked myself away for the rest of the day. I just wanted to be alone with my own grief.

I think Corina said it best when she described Rob’s passing as a bad dream that we all wish we could wake up from. After the wife, and being at work, I probably spent more time with Rob than with anyone else the nine years that I knew him.

Teaching News

I had the all-important bit of paper through from Barry College. I’m now formally qualified to teach adults in Lifelong Learning programmes. I passed the teaching assessment with a grade ‘A’ too, which gives me a bit more confidence as I try to turn the Tai Chi class into a more structured two year programme. The whole point of the changes is to build on what Rob figured out about learning Tai Chi, to put it into a format that’s more accessible yet again and also into a plan that’s well paced for the students.

I’m also hard at work with the camcorder, experimenting with the best way to record Tai Chi lessons. This is something I must work harder on

It’s the end of the fourth week in the new job, and after an overnight stay in Bath and trips to London, Somerset, Sheffield and London again, it’s good to have a bank holiday weekend to look forward to.  And then next week it’s off up to the North East to meet another colleague for the first time and do some coaching.

The time has flown by - I must be having a lot of fun :) 

It’s a shame that this First Great Western train I’m on atm (the 19:15 from Paddington to Swansea) isn’t going as quick.  For once, it’s not the fault of First Great Western or their (in my experience, all too often unprofessional) staff, but after two hours we’re just pulling into Didcot Parkway, and not Cardiff where we should be.  Hopefully we’re past the latest problem to plague this service, and it’ll be a much quicker second half of the journey!

This job is full of pleasures both big and small.  One of the small ones today was to introduce one of my colleagues to the joy that is the Foyles bookshop in London.  If you’ve never been to Foyles, it’s difficult to explain why this wonderful shop is different to all the other bookshops in central London (and, I believe, in the UK as a whole), but every time I get to show someone this mecca of books, the reaction is always a good one.

I managed to escape with just three books: one of the Wu style of Tai Chi, a replacement for my loaned-and-never-to-be-returned copy of the Principles of Effortless Power (another martial arts book), and the new book from Packt on OpenSER.  That last one is going to live in the office, me thinks.

I also managed to escape the Apple store without a new Macbook Pro, but only because they didn’t have a 4GB RAM model to hand for me to take with me there and then (they normally do the upgrade in the shop on demand, but I didn’t have the time to wait the three hours they quoted for it).  As much as I love my current Macbook Pro, I’m finding the short battery life (<2 hours on average) to be a bit tight on the longer journeys I’m now doing.  The later generations can manage double that, which I’d find much more convenient.  Ah well, maybe later in the year as a Christmas treat to myself. 

The worst thing I’ve done so far was totally self-inflicted.  I managed to brick my Nokia N82.  As wonderful as Parallels is for running Windows on the Mac, never ever try running a Nokia firmware upgrade using it.  I tried; the whole virtual machine died partway through the firmware upgrade, and the N82 was toast.  (Wouldn’t it be great if Nokia had A/B firmware slots like digital cameras do?  They could release firmware upgrades much more regularly and not be worried about silly folks like me bricking their phones).  It had to be sent back to Nokia, and I’m missing it greatly.  I hope it comes back soon!  Then I can start loading Ordnance Survey raster data onto it

Oh, we’ve just made it to Swindon.  Maybe I’ll make it home today instead of tomorrow after all …

I smell of train, that horrible recycled stale-air smell you find on British trains these days.  But I don’t care.

The first week in the new job has been great.  I’ve got this big silly grin on my face (even though I’m thoroughly knackered from all the commuting).  There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but it’s exactly the sort of work that I find fun.  I guess there’s something wrong with me

The travelling hasn’t been too bad.  Monday was the worst, when the 18:35 from Bath Spa didn’t turn up at all.  I finally got home just after 21:00, thoroughly shattered.  Lesson learned; I need to be out the door in time for the 16:35 where possible, or for the 17:35 at the latest.  Any later than that, and a hotel for the night is worth serious consideration.

Working on the train out from Cardiff on a morning is a real luxury.  Most managers never get - or take - the time on a morning to review the day ahead.  At the moment, the time’s mostly going on all the new stuff I have to learn, but it’s going to be a real godsend as I’m more involved in the day to day.  Amusingly (to me, anyway) this is the same train I was catching down to Southampton during my secondment to the OS (albeit an hour earlier), so it already feels like I’ve been doing this routine for months.

On the train back, it’s a bit more hit and miss.  Most days, I’ve been able to snag a table seat, or one of those seats at the end opposite the space for the wheelchairs (those spaces are the best; the table seats on these First Great Western commuter trains are quite cramped), but when FGW forget to stick the right number of carriages on the train, it’s standing-room only all the way back to Cardiff.  Thankfully, there are plenty of excellent audiobooks one can buy and listen to when this happens.  Management audiobooks are very popular, but I’m seriously thinking of getting all of the Harry Potter audiobooks for when distraction is the better approach.

I have to give a special mention, and a huge thank you, to everyone for making me feel so welcome.  Most places make an effort for new staff, but this is different, because I don’t think they’re making a special effort.  It feels a lot like my time working at the University of Sheffield - and those were without doubt the happiest years of my professional life so far.

I definitely owe Aled a beer for putting me onto this job in the first place.

I ran into Richard from Box UK on the platform at Cardiff a couple of times this week.  It’s nice to hear that I’m being missed, and I certainly miss the sort of work I wanted to do there, but right now I don’t miss the work I ended up doing there.  Everyone tells me that I’m great at consultancy, but it doesn’t give me the personal satisfaction that working on products, services and systems does.  I guess it’s why I took to Tai Chi; I’m a natural observer, and I love that iterative polishing and improving something release after release after release.  You just don’t get that in consultancy.  Consultancy all to often is like a one-night stand.  As some of you who are married will understand from your own experience, there’s a much more meaningful fulfilment to be had from a deeper commitment.

I bumped up the RAM on the MacBook Pro this evening.  It’s now at the max of 3GB; shame it won’t go to 4GB like the later generation MBPs will.  It’s mostly to speed up Aperture 2, and to make things a bit quicker when I’m running a couple of virtual machines at a time (CentOS and Ubuntu for work).

Tomorrow is toy day.  Got to send the dead Cisco router back for a replacement, and the new phone and GPS navigator should arrive too.  I’ve bought the Garmin Mobile XT product and an unlocked Nokia N82 to run it on.  The N82 is mainly to play with VoIP over Wifi, although it does have a 5 megapixel camera too, which I’m looking forward to.  Bath is a very pretty place after all, and I’m learning the virtue of travelling as light as possible.

Hopefully Sunday I’ll make it out to get some more Merthyr Road photography done.  There’s some old railway tracks in the woods at Treforrest that I wouldn’t mind taking a careful look at.

… and I’m really looking forward to starting the new job on Monday.

Most of Thursday went on a nice walk around Pontypridd, taking photos for my next Merthyr Road article, which I’m calling Bridging The Rivers At Pontypridd.  I also wrote up blog articles for two older photosets from my travels … Winter In Eden, and Back in Brighton.  That brought me almost up to date (but not quite) with my backlog of work.  Spent the evening processing the bridge photos, and went to bed unhappy with the results.

Friday was a lazy day, after tidying up the house that is!  Two more photography blog articles to clear the backlog: The Towers Of Brains Brewery, and Easter In The Malvern Hills.  Took another look at the bridge photos.  Decided to keep the HDR versions after all, but to tone down the colours to make them look much closer to LDR (ie normal) images.  Figured out how to fool Aperture into backing up photos to a network drive - I need to write that up in a blog posting.  Also had fun playing around with the “create a book” tools in Aperture.  I like the idea of taking my Merthyr Road articles, and making them into books that can be ordered online, but I think Aperture’s book features are a bit too limited for that.  More thought required here, me thinks.

Work up this morning with terrible cramp in my left calf.  Haven’t had a cramp attack like that for months!  Taught Kristi some basic Chinese massage so that she could fix up my leg.  Hobbled down to the station, and bought my monthly season ticket to Bath for Monday.  The look on the lady’s face was priceless, and I promised her that when I can finally afford an annual ticket (costing over £3k), I’ll come back and buy it through her, and not down in Cardiff.  Watched Never Back Down at Cineworld in Cardiff with Kristi … it’s shallow and predictable, but with plenty of eye candy on offer for both sexes.  Watch out for the guy who plays Ryan; I think we’ll see a lot more from him in the future.  Enjoyed the first episode of the new Doctor Who series this evening, although I still think that RTD over-uses background music. Here’s hoping he takes a back seat from here; the best episodes of the last season were those he didn’t write.

Kristi made me watch the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie this evening (boo for Sky+ boxes).  I’m utterly amazed that they managed to get a TV show off the ground on the back of this outing.  I managed to escape after an hour or so, but Kristi carried on as apparently the comedy vampire death at the end makes it all worth while.  Go figure.

Haven’t seen the footie yet (yay for Sky+ boxes; I get to spend Sunday morning vegged out watching Match of the Day), but I did read that Newcastle United won again :)  We must be safe from relegation now, and a good end to the season will improve spirits at the club ready for the next campaign.

I think I’m all set for Monday.  Part of me isn’t looking forward to the commute, but once I’ve settled into a routine and I’m able to work on the train, I’m sure it’ll just become a normal part of the day.  I’m really looking forward to starting the new job.  Working on secondment at the Ordnance Survey for the last few months reminded me just how much fun work can be when you’re working for the right sort of people and you’re encouraged to apply yourself to make a real difference.  In the last year, after years of a fairly stable life, I’ve lost three people to cancer.  Life is transitory, and if you’re just going through the motions every day, what’s the point?  That’s not living, it’s surviving.  That’s why I left my old job, because I want to get back to making a real difference, and I want to work for someone who demands that I do, rather than being afraid of me and looking to hold me back every opportunity going.  I wish everyone at Box UK well, and I hope they all achieve the success that they deserve.  But that chapter of my life is over now (well, almost; it’ll be over when basic paperwork like P45’s turn up), and I’m ready to take the next steps forward.

Well, I have my MAC code from Demon, and it’s good for 30 days.  I’ve been with Demon for many years, and it’s a real shame that I need to take my business away from them, but what can you do?  I don’t believe that Demon care about my custom any more, and the final proof of that was my experience obtaining my MAC code.

When I called Demon to obtain my MAC code, I was asked about why I’m leaving.  I explained my reasons (I’ve gone from a 2mbit service to less than 512kbit service - that’s sub-broadband speed imho), and my disappointment in their technical support.  The chap on the other end of the phone expressed his sympathy; apparently I’m not the first customer to transfer his business for this reason.

But what struck me is that there was no effort to try and retain my business.

If a company cares about my custom, then I expect them to at least try to convince me to stay.  I would expect them to explore the options, just in case something can be done to make me happy once again.  (It doesn’t take all that much to make me happy; all you’ve got to do is keep my trust).

But Demon didn’t even try - although the chap I talked to was very helpful.  Like the call centre staff at BT, he seemed powerless to do anything to make a difference.

Hopefully someone will turn them around, and restore the excellent service that made them one of the very best ISPs before THUS bought them.  But until then, if you’re looking for a broadband service, I can’t recommend Demon at all.  

This is my week of unemployment, before taking up my new job with Gradwell.com.  I was hoping just to chill out and spend the week out and about with my camera, but there just hasn’t been any time for that.  I’m beginning to understand what some of my students mean when they talk about how their retirement is going!

After fun with the call centres on Monday, I dug my old bike out of the shed and headed up the Taff Trail for some much-needed exercise.  I made it all the way up to the Abercynon Feeder bridge, which is pretty good going for my first bike ride in a couple of years!  Then it was cook tea for Kristi before collapsing in a heap.

Yesterday went on my Tai Chi class prep.  I bought a Samson AirLine 77 wireless mic system a while back, so that I could record an audio lesson for my students.  Took the CDs down to the class last night, and hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll get some good feedback to help me plan a v2. Also learned yesterday that one of my students passed away recently  More on that this evening when I update my Tai Chi blog.

This morning, and it was back to dealing with Demon and BT.  I checked with the bank, and neither organisation had provided the refunds that they had promised.  

I found this particularly amusing rant about Demon’s poor customer service, and whilst I don’t necessarily agree with his refusal to call their support line to get his MAC code, I have to say that his experiences with Demon largely mirror my own.  Now I just need to do some research and decide who to switch my broadband service to.  Sky is tempting, because it’s cheap, but I’m very happy to pay more in order to get a fixed-rate service.  I’m currently looking at the service from ukfsn.org.

BT got a letter of complaint.  I can’t remember the last time I wrote a snail-mail letter.  Anyone else unhappy with BT may find their Consumer Code of Practice to be a useful guide, especially their escalation procedure.  I’ll write more here when they respond.

As with Monday, it’s difficult to overstate the difference in contrast between Demon and BT, with their poor customer service, in the one corner, and other companies who do provide excellent customer service.  On Monday, it was Lloyds TSB showing how to do this, and today it was Hardware.com.  My brand new Cisco router has died  A quick chat with Anthony @ Hardware.com, and it was agreed that I should return it for a replacement.  Whilst it’s a shame the product turned out to be faulty, the way a company puts problems right makes a huge difference!

This afternoon, it’s get the shopping done, and then decide which dish to cook for when Kristi gets home from work.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it out to get some photography done!

I’ve spent the last hour on the phone to three different call centres, chasing up a mixture of owed money and missing goods.  Two of the call centres were offshore (presumably in India), whilst the third was here in the UK.  The contrast between them was substantial, and worth looking at if you’re interested in customer service.

1. The first call centre was Demon’s, which is offshore.  Unfortunately, the call quality was terrible, and I was unable to progress my query with the lady at the other end.  Thankfully, Demon’s helpdesk is also available via email, otherwise I’d really be stuck there.
2. The second call centre was BT’s, which is also offshore.  The call quality was fine, but the lady at the other end wasn’t empowered to assist me with my query.  The systems she had access to required her to submit an internal query to another department - a process which quotes 5-7 working days for acting on a query. She did escalate my call to her supervisor at my request, and after some discussion her supervisor agreed to resolve my query today.  This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that from BT about this specific issue, so the jury’s still out about that.
3. The third and final call centre was LloydsTSB’s, which is here in the UK.  Fine call quality, and the phone answered by someone who not only seemed to have all she needed to resolve my two queries, but who also didn’t sound like she was reading from a script every time she answered a question.

I really feel for the folks out in India.  We don’t just seem to offshore the jobs themselves, but also we seem to send bad practices out there too (reading from scripts all of the time), and we don’t seem to give them the tools they need to do their job (poor call quality, no empowerment, and inefficient secondary processes).  I’m very impressed at their professionalism - in general, folks in India are educated to a very high level, and it can’t be easy having to do such a mundane job with poor practices and systems.  I somehow can’t imagine a UK-based call centre managing the same level of professionalism under the same circumstances.

I wonder what the quality of these three experiences this morning says about the management responsible for each of these services?

I do know what it says about the UK’s Direct Debit scheme.  Two of these companies (Demon and BT) owe me money, because they’ve used the Direct Debit scheme to over-bill me.  I’m seriously thinking of cancelling my Direct Debits with both firms, and paying them directly when their bills arrive instead.  Unfortunately, BT is still an effective monopoly, but at least I can cancel my Demon account and take my business elsewhere …

Got home this evening to discover that the fog lights on my Ford Focus have been stolen. There’s no sign of any other damage to my car - it’s worrying how easy it appeared to be to take the fogs out

I’ve reported the theft to the local Community Watch scheme, but so far this evening I’ve had no luck reporting it to the Police. The Community Liaison team are part-time (as in, not every day of the week), and when I called the number of my local station, the switchboard transferred me through to an extension that no-one answered.

This is my first experience of reporting something to the Police. It seems unlikely they’ll ever catch the thiefs or recover my stolen fog lights, but it would be nice to be able to actually report that a crime has happened Here’s hoping my experience isn’t as bad as Aled’s was.

Yuck … that was a week to forget. I’ve been ill with the flu, it’s only the second week into my recovery from a broken toe, my GPS device lost all its waypoints (and it isn’t backed up because of a problem with Windows grrr) and the car’s off the road until I get it into the dealer to have it fixed - the first real breakdown since I bought the car three years ago. I need to get it fixed by Thursday if I can.

I didn’t see much of Saturday either … I pretty much slept right through the day, and didn’t wake up until Sunday. I’ve been fine today, fortunately, although my appetite’s gone again

On the plus side, I’ve finished merging the various backups of my photo archive into a single copy, which now sits on Moby (my paranoid fileserver). I’m missing one photo that I care about, which (fingers crossed) is sat on my PC at the office. I’ve shutdown my own hosted gallery, and moved everything up to Flickr. I tried geotagging my photos, but Yahoo Maps just doesn’t have detailed enough data for the UK to make it worth bothering with.

I’ve also finished migrating my personal sites over to a Gentoo LAMP Server install. Ran into one serious problem, but otherwise everything’s up and running. I’ll blog more about that on my Gentoo blog later in the week.

The builders are done, and it’s very surprising how much warmer the back of the house is now. That wasn’t something we were expecting at all. The back of the house is a modern brick extension (as in the last twenty years or so), and the rooms out there have always felt the cold more than the rest of the house (which is made from stone). I’ve cleaned out the downstairs light switch that’d filled up with gunk from the building work, so now we have two usable bathrooms once more (yay).

Daylight saving time is over … which means it gets dark before we leave the office on an evening. Oh joy.

Kristi and I have tied the knot We were married in a small civil service on Saturday 25th September 2004, and were joined afterwards by dear friends and family to celebrate the occaision. There were plenty of cameras present, and we’ll post some piccies once we’ve sorted through them all.