New boys toy

 

A new mobile phone turned up on Friday – only half an hour after the SMS text to say it was coming ’sometime today’ – aren’t modern logistics wonderful! [when they work].

  So what was it then? It was a Sony Ericsson K800i, not covered in robust rubber like my old Nokia 5140, but from the experience of my son who’s lifestyle is a good robustness test for phones, a fairly durable device.

Robustness apart this new device is so much more cool than its predecessor – 3.2 mega pixel with flash and multi-shot, 3G, Bluetooth, quality MP3, large quality display.

Much playing over the weekend elicited a ‘Dad you’re such a geek!‘ from the seventeen year old daughter – praise indeed.

Something I didn’t expect to find was an RSS Feed reader option – already hooked in to Panlibus.

True to geek type, one of my first jobs was to set-up the Bluetooth link to my TomTom sat nav, to get live traffic and speed camera reports.

The only downside to all this was checking with Vodafone to discover that I’m paying £3.25 per megabyte for data.  – Can’t wait for next month’s bill!

A long, proud, cold day

Just got back after a long slog up the M5 from Plymouth.

My eldest daughter has just set off with her 250 shipmates on HMS Cornwall on a tour of duty which will take them to some nice places, and then on to the Gulf – not so nice!

A substantial part of this morning was spent, with many other families and friends of the ships company, on the wind-blown Devils Point on the edge of Plymouth Sound.  There were a couple of false starts as sister ships of the Cornwall left the Tamar estuary, but it at least gave us some camera practice.

It was well worth the wait, though.  When the prow of the F99 appeared around the end of the Davonport dockyard you could feel the wave of anticipation ripple through the assembled crowd.  Watching, and waving madly at, the assembled ships company lining the decks was an emotional and very proud moment that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. 

A jog along the cliff top path, then ensued as she rounded the point so that we could do a bit more waving.  She then turned her stern towards the fine City of Plymouth and headed out to sea for the next few months.  We eagerly dived in to the car park  and got the car heater going in an attempt to remove the chill from our bones – I don’t think I’ve really warmed up yet several hours later.  I can’t help wondering how cold they were when they got stood down from lining the deck.

Plymouth Sound has been the starting point for many important sea journeys, not least Charles Darwin and his captain Robert FitzRoy in their ship HMS Beagle in 1836, as a plaque on the cliff top wall helpfully informed me.  Hopefully Kerry’s trip will not be as momentous, but it will be as important to the close friends and family that lined Devils Point today.  - Bon voyage!

Travelling by train – oh what joy

Off to London today – loads of work to do – I’ll take the train and rattle the laptop keys on the way – what a good idea.

From the key rattling point of view it is great – from the train traveling point of view it isn’t so hot.  Firstly the train I was going to get for some unexplained reason had its  journey beyond Oxford cancelled, so I decided to get an earlier one.

A rush to Evesham station, past the queue in the ticket office, I’ll pay on the train as it is already pulling in to the platform, grabed a free seat and then…. the on-time train sat in the station for 20 miniutes before setting off.  That was just the start!

The weather report for today as I left was high winds and rain. It appears to be this that has caused the attendant on the train to announce that “All trains in the South of England are now subject to a 50 mph speed restriction“.  Considering that much of the Oxford to London part of the Journey is useually done at speeds well in excess of 100 mph, it’s going to be a long old trip today.

Us British are great at running things like railways, just so long as the weather is not too hot, too windy, or delivers only the right kind of snow.  Makes you wonder if railway designers ever work outside.

Still loads of time before my meeting, so I’m not worried.  It just means that I will get my work done on a cramped train as against in a relaxing coffe bar.  The people around me don’t seem as relaxed though – the moblie phone networks must be making a fortune out of all the calls that are benig made putting all those meetings further andfurther back.

Update: Paddington Station at last! only an hour and a bit late, which is fortunate looking at all the cancellations on the departure board. – I wonder what the trip back will be like.

Why can’t we have a JIT life?

It is with fond nostalgia I remember the days when, if you felt ill, you could pop in to the local doctors surgery and get to see the doctor.  OK you probably had to wait a while catching untold infections from your fellows in the waiting room, but at least the process was simple – wake-up, feel ill, go to doctors, get treatment.

It was the same with car repairs.  Yes you would book your car in to the local dealers for a service in advance, but if it broke down between services you could usually get the garage to look at it on the same day.  Fair enough such a visit to the garage was often greeted with much muttering, teeth-sucking, and comments about not knowing if they could fit you in today, but more often than not you would be on the road again by the next day.

In those days purchasing things such as car parts, electrical components, plumbing bits, etc. was also very different.  You either found what you want covered in layers of dust in a shop that seemed to stock at least one of everything you ever wanted, or whatever it was had to be ordered and it would take weeks.

Then came the Just-In-Time world.  The influence of Japanese car manufacturing techniques spread across the planet and, from a retail point of view, now you have huge supermarkets and DIY megastores with a mind-boggling array of stock in every small town. Of course the there is the Web which means that you can get most anything without having to move from your arm chair.

So from a getting stuff point of view JIT manufacturing and logistics have been of great benefit to us.  Why is it then that, over roughly the same timeframe, getting stuff done seems to have gone backwards?

This has been brought home to me on a couple of recent occasions when something failed unpredictably on my car.  Phoning around the local dealers and independent garages drew similar responses on both occasions.  “I can fit you in in a couple of days or early next week” seemed to be the standard reply.

Luckily for me I have access to a friend’s fully fitted workshop in the evenings, and I spent enough time as a spotty youth years ago fiddling under various car bonnets to know what I’m doing. So on both occasions I could get myself back on the road by the next day.

It does make you wonder though why is seems that you should nowadays have to book an appointment to be ill or break down.  Couldn’t the JIT techniques be applied to identify when these events are going to happen so the services are ready for me when it happens – To quote Monty Python “Life! – Don’t talk to me about life!“

Writing in the Dark

The other day I pointed my colleague Paul Miller, an avid Mac disciple, at WriteRoom.

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full-screen, distraction-free writing environment. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

Just the job for someone concentrating on writing a document in the increasingly distracting world we operate in. Paul seems quite enthusiastic about it, so I took another look at it to find that it has a Windows sister application – DarkRoom.

DarkRoom seems to be a couple of revisions behind WriteRoom, and doesn’t seem as capable of freezing out interruptions like the Outlook you’ve-got-mail pop-up, but next time I need to attack a white paper or a report I may well give it a try.

Five Things

Having been tagged ages ago by Davit Tebbutt, I feel quite ashamed that I haven’t joined in the blog-tag game yet when so many others around me have.  My lame excuse being that I was waiting to set-up It Occurs before I did – see I said it was lame!   Anyway here we go, 5 things you probably didn’t know about me:

1. I completed an aprentiship as, and therefore am a fully qualified weighing machine fitter.
2. I used to be known by the nickname Wally.  This died away after the term started to be used to describe a bit of a fool.  The urban ledgand is that this first happened at Weeley Pop Festival in 1971 – which I was at, I remember the cercumstances, but wasn’t the Wally in question.
3. I once worked as the Keyboard Roadie for the seventies progressive rock band Gentle Giant. A track on their live album Playing the Fool came about because of me.  Breakdown In Brussells [a.k.a., Sweet Georgia Brown] was played whilst I tried, unsucessfully, to repair the Clavinet.
4. The sound system hire company I ran for semi-proffesional groups in and around Birmingham in the 1970’s helped groups such as UB40, Dexies Midnight Runners, and Steel Pulse on their way towards recording contracts.
5. Although only joining the library software industry in 1990, I can trace back my involvement to 1969, when as a service engineer I used to repair the paper-tape punch devices used to enter bibliographic records into the IBM mainframe used by the BLCMP cooperative cataloguging project. The BLCMP project eventually evolved in to Talis, my current employers.

So that’s my history exposed for all to view, now who’s turn is it now?

David Burden, Kathryn Greenhill, Lorcan Dempsey, Grant White, Tim Hodson - thats who.

Why – It Occurs

So why does Richard Wallis need a personal blog?

Well unusually for most prolific bloggers, up until now I have only posted on company blogs.  As Technology Evangelist at Talis, you will find my postings on Panlibus and Nodalities.  Although those two blogs do have a fairly wide coverage (see here to understand what that is) they are not the ideal place to cover more personally relevant issues.  Most who read those blogs will not be interested in whinges about airline travel; books that I’m reading, things that have caught my eye in the news; my opinions on general technology or; why I felt the need to kick the dog in the morning.  Hence It Occurs where I won’t have to think “is it appropriate?” for a company hosted blog before posting.

So why ‘It Occurs‘ as a title? – Two reasons.

Firstly, when I first start to describe new ideas in a meeting, presentation, or similar situation I often hear myself say “It occurs to me that…..“.  Hopefully this blog will be a place to do much of that.

Secondly – I have found, that although you can by your own actions have a significant effect on what happens to you between cradle and grave, the is a key attribute about ‘life’ – it happens.  It occurs all around you – it rains when you do/don’t want it to; your government invades a foreign country; your kids grow up to be great people, despite you skills as a parent – the list is endless.  Also on bad days the name of this blog could be most appropriately be prefixed with the librarians war-cry ‘ssh‘.

Enough for a first rambling post.  I suspect postings here will be fairly intermittent as most of my efforts will will be targeted to the readers of Panlibus/Nodalities, but lets see what happens occurs.