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The little things in life that make it all better

8th March 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

We moved into a new office on Monday. It’s more modern but also open plan and features hot desking everywhere. I hardly need to point out that all the studies show this sort of environment leads to increased sick days, staff turnouver, noise, stress, and distractions. While also reducing productivity, employee satisfaction and performance. It also sends a message to employees that they are seen as just another interchangable resource. But hey, it is about 30% cheaper so that’s all good in the end.

And it is a long way from the worst ever work space I had. Back in my Accenture days I had a length of shelf in the corridor of a client’s office. I worked there for a few months whenever I was in the office.

Still, if I get in early I can grab a desk with a nice view as we are on the 9th floor. This was it at 0800 on Monday.

That’s Irish snow though. It manages to quietly sneak away when you are not looking. Four hours later it was all gone.

There was a moment of panic when I discovered that they had only stocked our caffeine stations with Lipton Early Gray tea (as well as the coffee of course). It would be a cold day in hell when I am reduced to drinking that. Fortunately I got a special delivery from home yesterday.

My productivity will go up a few notches tomorrow I think. Now if only I could get scones, and Ballymaloe relish delivered here as well.

Privacy Shield vs Safe Harbour

7th March 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

This is a good overview of Privacy Shield, the replacement for Safe Harbour.

The big question is whether it will pass muster by the CJEU. And as many or the original concerns there related to US government surveillance it is not clear whether these have been sufficiently addressed.

Hiking in Sweden – Sörmlandsleden stages 3 and 4.

6th March 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

Yesterday’s Meetup.com Sthlm Outdoor hike was on the Sörmlandsleden, the major hiking route that runs south of Stockholm for about 1000km. We just did stages 4 and 3. Which made 22km of walking. We even managed 300m of ascent. Runkeeper says I burned 2100 calories and I can feel it today.

The terrain was different to what we had on the previous hikes. It was rougher, and far more uneven with hillocks the sometimes rose to 70m! On those occasions when we were going up steep ground I could feel totally different muscles working in my legs. And today while I feel tired there isn’t the satisfying soreness that comes from having done 1500m of climbing.

The weather was different too – overcast, about +4 to 0°C with occasional fine snow or rain. The warmer weather meant the ground could occasionally be mucky. For stretches, particularly along roads, there was a lot of compacted re-frozen snow which was like sheet ice. Apart from a few minor foot slips it didn’t bother me too much – I was asked whether being from Ireland was why I was why I was so sure footed on the ice. Years of experience has taught me the trick is to take small steps, and keep your feet as flat as possible (no toes or heels). With practice you can end up walking almost as fast as on “normal” ground.

During the week I had offered my help to the hike leaders, so I ended up as the back marker. It is a fiddly job, especially for someone like me who prefers to set their own pace out at the front. Instead you keep the pace of the slowest person. Making sure those that are struggling, or have stopped to go to the toilet in the trees don’t get left behind or lost. But it’s an important job and someone (with decent skills, experience, and fitness) has to do it.

We had the usual mixed group – about 1/3 Swedes and the rest expats – some very experienced walkers, and others who struggled with the pace and conditions. Maybe it’s me getting old, but I think hikes are no place for headphones. At least that person kept their spoiling of the outdoor experience to themselves. One person took a very loud phone call for several minutes. When they finished they kept working on their phone. They looked up to see me standing politely a few metres away waiting calmly.

“Am I the last? Sorry I didn’t realise.”

“Yes, because you were looking at your fucking phone” was what I thought but did not say.

One person chose to finish half way and get a bus home. One hardy individual letf us to stay the night in the shelter where we had lunch. If I had a decent winter rated sleeping bag I might consider it. But I’d like to arrive to my sleeping place at 5pm when it’s getting dark and not lunch time!

It wasn’t as much fun as the 2 previous walks I had been on. But not by much. Assuming I am in the country again next weekend I will be out for the next walk, a more sedate Sörmlandsleden stage 5, (15 km).

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$Hiking past people\'s back gardens$

$Sign of one of Sweden\'s favourite sports - Orienteering$

$Runkeeper\'s track$

Anyone for a 20km walk in the Swedish woods?

4th March 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

Map and Compass

Here comes the weekend, and I am in Stockholm on my own – so I guess I will go walking. I have so impressed the organisers with my background, skill and enthusiasm I have now been bumped up to walk leader. That or they had so many turning up, they decided to run a second walk, and yours truly was one of the two volunteers to lead it.

This is going to be fun anyway. I don’t think I have to haul wood and hot dog for a mid walk hot meal. But in the interests of cultivating an air of Irish eccentricity, and because I fancy a cuppa, I will bring my stove, tea and milk.

It won’t be the only Irish flavour to the walk. The temperature has gone a little above freezing, and it has turned misty and damp. While the demand might be there for Irish coffees and hot whiskey, I am not sure Swedish hikers are quite ready for that just yet. Maybe next walk.

Keeping positive

3rd March 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

What am I going to do at work today? I am going to spend a few hours wrestling with my work laptop and HPE support as I try to make this error go away.

HP Error

Right now I cannot log on, except from a full reboot, and even then I have no network access (wired or wireless). It is a bit of a productivity killer.

There are a couple of frustrating things with this*.

First, this is the same problem I had a month ago. HPE, who provide our work IT support, struggled with it for a few days. Eventually they swapped the SSD into a new laptopo chassis, and when that didn’t fix the problem they just nuked the hard drive. The re-image cost me two days work that time. And now the problem is back.

The other frustrating thing is going to be spending all the time dealing with support people. It is a cheap shot to complain about Tech Support. There are a lot of smart hard working people in that line of business. They are generally constrained by the “one-size-fits-all” processes they are required to follow. And they do have to deal with a very very large number of clueless idiots (I know I have briefly done the job). But it would be nice if they were a little consistent in how they deal with people’s issues.

When I dealt with HPE about this the last time, three different people gave me three different approaches. One support person told me the others were lying to me. And I encountered Kafkaesque things like HPE taking a backup of my machine before they re-imaged it, but asking me to wait 2 days to get access to the backup when they returned it.

Would Don always look as suave if he had to spend an hour on the phone to tech support?

This sort of stuff is not good for my blood pressure! So today I resolve to be calm and professional, when dealing with the support team – while still being firm. And I reserve the right to be point out contradictions and idiocy in their instructions to me. All the while wishing I could do this with a stiff drink in my hand. Wish me luck.

* When I ran this blog before I sometimes felt I was doing a bit too much ranting. It’s something I want to avoid with this incarnation. So when you read a post like this, I hope you understand I am approaching the whole thing with a positive and hopeful mindset. As naive as that may be of me 🙂

Mobile World Congress 2016

19th February 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

Arlanda airport on a February morning as I wait to travel to Barcelona.

Here I am sitting in Stockholm’s Arlanda airport, waiting to board a plane towards Barcelona. I am going to be down there for the week for Mobile World Congress 2016. This is the highlight of the marketing calendar for us. The last few weeks have been occupied with getting ready. Long hours, far too much caffeine and sugar, all the frustration of trying to co-ordinate dozens of people across multiple countries, and aligning different often contradictory messages makes the job stressful and often frustrating.

During the week I will man a stand, organise meetings with employees, media, analysts, customers and partners. I I will act as a spokesman, a bouncer, a recruiter, a foreman, a camera man, an interviewer, an author, a scout and an spy. And I will talk my vocal cords raw (my voice went by the end of the second day last year).

But deep down I will love much of it. I am learning new things every day, about business, marketing and most importantly cloud technology. I rarely consider going back to college, when I learn far more intensively at work every day. I get to do really interesting things, like be one of the small team delivering a huge launch for a Fortune 500 company. But mostly I get to work with really great people. The team is totally international, from and spread around the globe. It is full of smart people who are pushing every day to be better, learn more and do more.

And when it all comes together it is a hell of a rush.

Another great thing about Mad Men – the destruction of Budweiser

17th February 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

I was sad when Mad Men finally came to an end last year. But as well as the fond memories of the program it may be that I can also credit it with changing American’s terrible drinking habits.

According to this article in the Washington Post, since 2007 there has been a 6-fold increase in spirits consumption which a lot of people are attributing to Mad Men making it look cool again.

Back when it was fine to drink in the office.

Personally I have moved most of my drinking to spirits as loads of beer is not good for a middle aged waistline.

Whether that is true or not, what is heartening is that overall beer consumption has stayed largely flat while craft brews have taken off. The consequence is that per capita consumption of Budweiser (which barely qualifies as beer in most people’s books) has halved since 2005.

There is hope for the US yet!

The weather, Cloud Computing and automation

16th February 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

My pre-getting-out-of-bed ritual includes a check on the weather. This morning I see that in Upplands Vasby (the Stockholm suburb where I live) the high will be 1°C and the low -3°C. Which is fine, except the current temperature is below -8°C.

When automated calculations go wrong

And it is not just Weather Underground with this problem. The BBC is reporting similar unusual conditions for Stockholm with a minimum temperature 6°C warmer than it actually is already.

Whoever wrote the system for generating or importing the forecasts must have left out a check to see does the forecast match the current reality. But then again, if they did have one, what can the system do if it finds a mis match? Ask for the forecast to be re-run (a massive computation problem for the agencies that produce them), or try and come up with their own? Neither really is viable. I guess they just have t hope that the theory and the reality will converge during the day.

It’s an interesting problem from a technical point of view though. At the weekend I talked with a guy who works at making sure the reviews you see on price comparison sites are correct. He doesn’t ensure that if someone says a TV is great, that it is. His problem is that when they scrape the retailers websites for product details and prices, they must match the products that internet users are actually looking for. Nothing would damage the credibility of a site faster than if you search for details of a fridge, but the responses include electric toothbrushes.

The solutions of course cannot involve humans checking these things. The volume and variety of things that people look for in the internet mean this all has to run without human involvement. The job of the people is to build and tune machine learning systems that constantly improve the quality of the output.

This is one of the key things that I have learned about Cloud – it’s all about the machines. Providing services on demand to users at scale means automation. Everywhere. From the things people see – you don’t ring up AWS to get an EC2 instance provisioned. Through the back end platforms – the only time a human in Amazon should get involved in your bill is when it becomes so big that they feel you need your own account manager. All the way through to the management of the underlying infrastructure.

A metric I was given recently was that in a traditional data centre 1 person can manage about 50-300 servers. In a Hyperscale data centre like Google’s or Facebook’s it is well over 10,000 per admin. Why? Because of automation. As well as enabling the system to manage itself (I am sure they rarely see “routine” errors), automating everything also removes one of the biggest causes of issues in the first place – human error.

Of course this isn’t easy to do (or everyone would be at it). Cracking the problems of automation, governance, and machine learning has enabled the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook to scale to the size they have, without collapsing under the need to recruit half the planet to be admins for their infrastructure.

The challenge then is bringing that capability to everyone else. That’s what the teams I work with are doing, and is one of the reasons why I am (usually) happy to head into work each morning, even if it is -9°C.

Hiking in Sweden – Lunsen National Preservation area

13th February 2016 / seamusk / 0 Comments

This week’s hike with the Stockholm Outdoor group from Meetup.com was in the Lunsen National Preservation Area 50km North of Stockholm. It’s an area of about 35 square kilometres, mostly forested, often swampy, and about as wild as you can get this close to the city.

It had snowed on Thursday so we had great conditions with temperatures of -4C and clear skies. There was enough snow to make everything pretty, but not so much that it made the going difficult.

Like the last walk the area was very well equipped. The trails were wide and easy to find with good markings and signs. Much of the route was on the Uplandsledden which we had walked on two weeks before. A lot of Lunsen is swampy, but any of the wet stretches had a board walk. I can guess that the place would be far less fun in the summer when the mosquitoes are rampaging.

Lunch was had at the Lunsentorpet. This log cabin sits in a clearing, and is open to all who want to use it. Inside there was some simple furniture, 6 bunks, and a huge traditional range and oven. It has no running water or electricity though. At the back was an outhouse for those that needed it, and in the clearing there were a few well equipped fire pits and a bivvy shelter. I will freely admit that I would love to own such a retreat in the woods. That would be my dream bolt hole. I would just prefer mine not to be in the middle of a swamp.

Our group had brought fire wood, and a load of sausages. I am told this is the Swedish way of doing hiking. I wasn’t too keen on the long stop though and found myself getting cold. But I was able to retreat to the cottage where the stove had been lit.

The walk leaders set a good pace again this week. It was a shorter walk though. And I was surprised to see two people in jeans. Probably worse was the one who did the walk listening to music on full ear covering headphones all the time. Philistine. They were “Beats” though, which is a clear indicator of someone who doesn’t know anything about decent music hardware.

This week I learned:

The furthest you can get from any road in Sweden is 67km. Compare that with the 2km distance I have been given for Ireland. We don’t do wilderness!
The Mossies come out from about mid May until end of August/September.
More than a few of the Swedes have done some or all of the Kunglseden – the 440km hike in Northern Sweden. They all recommended it, which increases my desire to spend a least a week on it at some stage. The best advice they gave me though was not to go there during the Fjallraven Classic when about 3000 people are on the trail!

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