Some assembly required

Well, the bits have arrived.

Not sure when I will have time to make it.

Fun fun fun.

The Theory of Financial Relativity

I am sure that as we go through life we all learn valuable lessons and so wish we could teach "the young" those lessons in advance. I have five kids, and so I feel that as much as any of you. They will not listen and will learn in their own way.

One of the many lessons of life I have learned so far (and an still learning) is the relative nature of money and finance. I am rather unsure of posting this, as some will see me as a rather strange but wealthy nutter but I hope some will see the wisdom of this.

I stress that I very vividly remember the days, notably when first married, when money was a challenge. I had moved from managing my own small amount of money to managing a family and their finances, and I was the bread winner. Those were the days of a "real job".

In those days I would go to the pub with a few friends for a drink maybe once a week and would dread that it would end up as my round. It was a challenge. My friends were in much the same boat. We coped.

When we went on holiday (caravan in Cornwall) we had to plan it and save for it.

My monthly income was worked out to the penny and I automated all of the payments exactly, including many credit cards. I managed the problem with technology!

But things change. And now I run a company I "have money" as some would say. Now, a pub round or paying the bill in a restaurant is not a problem. I am really glad that some of the day to day issues are gone.

But what I did not realise is how things move on and change over time. How one lives in a "level". I am reminded of the level of my character in WoW and how spells and damage and money move on....

I have things to worry about now that would have driven me to, well, fuck knows what, a decade ago. I had a bill from my favourtive telco this month that was around £35,000 more than I thought. Looks like it is right and just not what I expected for various reasons. I'll cope. But FFS a decade ago that would have killed me. I had not paid the £30K mortgage on my first house back then. So I have worries on a new scale. No more do I have to worry about the cost of a round but I do have things to worry me.

Now, what I have realised is that it is relative and you sort of "move up the ladder" step by step. I am sure there are people that day to day deal with millions in a way that would even now make me lose a lot of sleep or worse.

What we have to do in life is work out if we want to move up that ladder and if so how we do it. There are plenty of people that stay at one level, and are happy there. They have their challenges where they are, but what they risk is less. What shocked me one day was working out that there are people with nothing, begging on the street, who had a lot more than me because of negative equity in my house. The bigger the stakes, the bigger the win and the bigger the possible loss.

So as a life lesson we have to work out what risk we can handle - where we want to be. We all want to be "one rung up", but when do we decide we are safe where we are. When do we stop and say "I am happy here".

One life lesson though, if you are working your way up the ladder, if your friends and relatives ask for money - i.e. people lower down on the ladder want help - it is nice to help - but one day you have to say "no" and be the "bad guy". If not then they keep asking and keep asking for more and more and more. So that *will* happen. The sooner you say "no", the better. "Giving" should be something you want to do and something you feel happy to do and can do - it should not be forced upon you. Give when *you* want to, and can afford to, and don't give in to demands and pressure. Everyone is happier, including you...

Money is relative - use it wisely.

To infinity, and beyond...

Needless to say - our favourite telco yet again! This time I would like this chance to publically apologise to our customer for the inconvenience. I know the fact it was not our fault is not much consolation and I understand the frustration of having an office off line like that. It is appalling.

What I find particularly annoying is when problems like this are quite so unnecessary. It is not like something broke, even!

It all started when an engineer went to install FTTC and refused to proceed because the customer did not have a "business hub".

We have seen this before, occasionally, and usually they either refuse and go away or they continue reluctantly. This time the engineer left the job half done with no ADSL or FTTC.
This really looks to me like a case of favouring their retail arm over other communications providers, and is just not on. It is very clear to me that has this been their retail arm, this would not have happened, and I challenge them to deny that.

What is worse is that they they took 8 days to fix it. In a long series of emails, marked confidential, that blamed system problems and claimed that delays where their suppliers fault (AKA their own). Madness.

I have to praise my escalations manager, Shaun, for staying on top of this. At one point he was working around the clock chasing them from shift change to shift change to get things progressed.

Finally, they seem to have refused to provide any sensible explanation that we are allowed to publish and are not even waiving the install cost to compensate for the problems.
I would stress to customers reading this that things normally go very smoothly, and this is the first time the job has been aborted half way through...

[Reposted as blogspot lost it. Thanks to Simon for finding a copy]

How fast can you get broadband?

Just under 3 working days for phone line and working ADSL is probably a record :-)

Normally a phone line is around a week to install, and broadband is also around a week to install. Usually both can be done together though, but often a phone line can take several weeks.

However, it seems that some times we can get lucky. We have one customer who is now connected on a brand new phone line which was ordered only 3 working days ago.

The first bit of luck was the phone line install. A business line install was available on a 3 working day appointment. That is without paying any sort of expedite fee! This depends on engineers being available in the specific area at the time, but we have WLR3 B2B XML gateway systems now that make it easy to check appointment availability and book the appointment.

The other luck was that we were able to do a simultaneous provide of broadband. We do that all the time, but as broadband is normally 5 working days lead time we were not sure it would work. BT actually put a due date for 5 working days, but it was all done at once today like any normal simultaneous order.

So, just under 3 working days from start to finish, phone line with broadband.

Please don't expect this every time though :-)

Longer term plans are that we should be able to offer the appointment dates to customers on the on-line ordering (in some cases) so that people can know when they order what they can expect, and reserve the appointment there and then!

And well done to Paul, Andrew, and James for their work on the WLR3 B2B XML gateway interface over the last few months - it is finally paying off.

(Once upon a time broadband service would go in for existing phone lines in under 24 hours, but the system was improved by our favorite telco some time ago, and now one can pay a lot to expedite an order and still have no guarantee it will be that quickly)

Sky being a pain

What can I say!

They call, insist they need to replace the sky box, but want me to give out details of who I am. FFS they called me!!!

http://www.me.uk/20110503sky.mp3

Phone lines

What a busy day...

Been working all day on fine tuning WLR3 B2B XML (yeh!). Basically it is a computer to computer way to talk to BT to order, cease, and modify phone line service.

No end of stuff - things like "picking a phone number" or "picking an appointment" and all sorts. However it is going well.

We may even start doing phone lines with phone calls soon! At present we only do them for DSL service (outgoing calls barred) and about 10% of our broadband lines use this. It means one bill for broadband with the supporting line.

I think that we are now at the stage where, in theory, when we have it fully integrated, that we can do anything BT Retail can with a phone line, which is pretty cool really.

Just a nightmare of badly written XML specs. Mind you - I have to say - overall these are way better than the BT Wholesale B2B XML for broadband lines :-)

Fun fun fun...

Beer festival (stats)

I think I can say the wifi for the beer festival worked well.

Over 15GB was downloaded, and around 1.5GB uploaded.

There were 642 distinct pieces of equipment connected over the event.

Based solely on DHCP client names it looks like:-
34% iPhone
19% Android
2% Blackberry
1% Nokia

We provided both 2.4GHz and 5GHz services, but during the event we saw very few devices using the 5GHz. My iPad2 and Mac Air were ones that did. I suspect 5GHz wifi is only in the newest devices. I found the 5GHz was much snappier to use, but that is not surprising.

We provided a password protected SSID (AAISP) as per the posters, but having realised the event was not going to swamp things we provided an un-passworded SSID called "AAISP Beer Festival" which is what most people connected to.

Coverage was based around one AP (Ruckus) in at the cider area, but covered both tents and a most of the field quite well.

In future it is sensible to operate a few APs to ensure more thorough coverage including the queue.

Our DHCP server (FB2700) worked well, but the number of clients did result in us making a few tweaks to improve the way it handled things and new s/w has been issued. We also had one hitch for a few minutes when we deployed some additional IP addresses and had not set up DNS correctly.

The whole event was run on public IPv4 addresses and public IPv6 addresses with no NAT. Google access defaulted to IPv6 as well. We confirmed iPads, iPhones and Android phones and tablets were using IPv6 with no problem.

All in all - very educational.

I hope everyone that attended liked the beer, cider, and the wifi, and had a fun weekend.