Jun 30
Ben KingCustomer Service, Life Berocca, Blogging, Customer Service, Digital Marketing, Twitter
So the other day I had a hangover, a bad one. So I twittered about how Beroccca came to my rescue.
Anyway Outside Line, the digital agency responsible for Beroccas online marketing contacted me, basically they have a special Berocca bloggers relief pack, which you can get yourself at this special microsite:
http://www.berocca.co.uk/bloggerrelief
Clever stuff Berocca/Outside Line, I like it!
Apr 20
Ben KingBusiness, Life, Vyatta Abu Dhabi, Benoy, Dell, Formula 1, Vyatta, Yas Island
I have deployed Vyatta to a lot of different locations, however the deployment I did last week was a little different…
Yas Island is a naturual island on the coast of the United Arab Emirates of about 2,500 hectares or which 1,700 hectares is being developed. It is to be a $40 billion playground of marinas, shops, theme park, water park, hotels and villas not to mention a Formula 1 track.
At the minute though it is little more than a lot of sand, some mounds of earth, a few roads and a lot of cranes, and I get the pleasure on behalf of my client Benoy (architects), of extending their existing Vyatta network to cover both their Abu Dhabi city office and their Yas Island site office.
There were a number of challenges with the deployment:
- The connectivity; we had ordered a 2mbit/s leased line from Etisalat, the UAE telco, this was being delivered via a microwave link back to Abu Dhabi, at the point of landing in the country, we had no idea of the reliability, IP Scheme and weren’t even confident about the presentation!
- Disruption; the users were using a shared network provided by the client, which was painfully slow, but worked to give them email and basic web access, we had to minimise downtime.
- Reliability; we had to do everything we could to ensure reliability and remote maintainability of the network once we had left.
The Kit
Vyatta was the natural choice not only because we were using it across the rest of the Benoy network, but also because of the cost effectiveness of the hardware required to deploy a resilient configuration.
At each site we deployed 1U Dell 860s, with:
- Dual core Xeon processors
- 2GBs of Ram
- Hardware mirrored Sata drives
- Additional Intel Dual NIC card (giving 4 ethernet interfaces in total)
- Vyatta 2.3.1
The Configuration
- 4 Subnets: Workstations, Servers, Internet 1 (leased line), Internet 2 (ADSL)
- All subnets clustered across the two routers
- DHCP for workstation subnets (split across the two routers)
- Masquerade NAT for internal subnets
- Incoming NAT for email and video conferencing
- IPSec VPN tunnels back to the UK network and the other Abu Dhabi site
- Internal and external firewalling
The Microwave Link
The microwave link was a V35 serial presentation that we passed through a Cisco 1841 before passing onto the Vyattas, the resulting connection performed remarkably well giving us about 14ms round trip on pings back to the main Abu Dhabi office.
The Result
The end result is fantastic, speed and response of performance at both sites far exceeded expectations. At the main site we were replacing a Firebox VPN tunnel back to London, which had proved to be a little unreliable and extremely slow, we were putting this down to the quality of the Etisalat connection, however once we replaced it with the Vyatta VPN the network response and reliability was far in excess of expectations and performs as well as the MPLS circuits we have connecting other sites.
Martin Neal, IT Director of Benoy, said ’I am really pleased with the speed and also the “feel” of the network.‘
Photos
The Yas Island site office…
The Benoy team at Yas Island…
Our Microwave Link…
Apr 20
Ben KingBusiness, Life Heathrow, UK Public Transport., Virgin
<rant>
I live in Coventry, which is as near as damnit slap bang in the middle of the UK, and within spitting distance of our second city, Birmingham, given this fact why is it soo damn difficult to get to the UKs biggest airport (Heathrow) on public transport?!
Normally when I fly its always easier and quicker to get to go from Birmingham to Frankfurt, Schipol or Copenhagen than it is to Heathrow, but this time it just wasn’t possible so I committed to Heathrow.
The options to travel from Coventry to Heathrow are:
- Drive, while you have to endure the M40, M25, and the extortionate parking fees at Heathrow, it is nethertheless the flexible option.
- Train to London, underground to Heathrow/Paddington then Heathrow express. This always strikes me as a dog leg of a journey and you have to suffer the underground with luggage. At least though the wheels keep turning.
- Train to Reading, bus to Heathrow.
- Train to Watford, bus to Heathrow.
There really is no optimum choice, and despite knowing better I went for option 4, what really irks me is that I am sure there used to be a train from Watford to Heathrow.
This should be easy but alas… my journey was:
- Cab to Coventry Train station (less than a mile, easily done).
- Virgin Train to Watford, just like going to London no issues.
- 1.5 hours spent stood in the wrong place at Watford, the signs being in the wrong place for the bus. Rather than leaving from the bus terminal at the station, it leaves from over the road and down the street a bit, out of site from the station. There were about 10 of us all stood in the same wrong place, so I am confident it wasn’t just me being stupid. To add insult to injury the bus drivers actually drove past the station and obviously could see a load of people with suitcases stood at the wrong bus stop and drove on regardless with an empty bus. I asked 3 members of station staff, until I got one ansy woman who said testily ‘its obviously over the road’, this deteriorated into a full on argument and she was completely unuseful and totally jobs worth.
- Finally I got a bus to Heathrow and once I was on it, it wasn’t too bad.
Coming home.
- Land at Heathrow.
- Go to designated bus stop, according to time table bus at 19:45, turns up 20:05 and departs with just 2 of us on it immediately, with no regard for the timetable.
- Arrive Watford Junction (approx 20:40), train apparently at 20:55 to Coventry, wait on platform 20:55 completely fails to turn up, no warning, just vanished off display and a 21:05 to Preston (calling at Rugby) turns up instead… so I get on that.
- £30 cab ride to Coventry from Rugby and I am home.
I may as well have driven, it would have been easy, and probably cheaper in the end.
Until this country gets public transport right, people will stay in their cars. Nuff said!
</rant>
Feb 15
Ben KingBusiness, Life China, Hong Kong, McDonalds, Nanjing Road, Shanghai, Starbucks
…is the question I am asking myself right now…
I am in Shanghai, a city of some 18 million people, the biggest city in China and in the top 5 largest in the world, the answer should be obvious.
However, here I am sat in Starbucks (one of two in this building alone, an one of five that I can think of within a couple of minutes walk), sipping on my ‘Venti Cappuccino’ reading the Wall Street Times (Asia edition), looking out across the shopping mall at a McDonalds full of Chinese eagerly stuffing their faces on whatever crap it is that McDonalds sell in the morning, I begin to wonder…
This one of the many many shopping centers along the Nanjing Road, Shanghai showcase shopping experience, it runs 5km East to West through the center of Shanghai. The array of shops is staggering with pretty much every brand (so many Rolex dealerships I have lost count) you care to mention and a string of car dealerships including Mercedes, Porsche, Maserati and Ferrari.
You would be forgiven for thinking that the prices would be cheaper, it being China and all, and to an extent it is, however my cappuccino has set me back 31RMB (about £2.20), and the nice new Samsung LCD screen I am about to buy for home is exactly the same price in the shops here as back in blighty.
So who is buying this stuff?? Westerners? I don’t think so, unlike Hong Kong, when you see another non-Asian here, its still a case ‘oh look someone white like me’, they are generally pretty easy to spot as well due to clearing the surrounding populace by a clear foot. The other day I took a walk the entire length of the Bund, a 1.5km river side walk, it being Chinese new year it was packed with tourists, 1000s of them, during the entire walk I never saw another non Asian, not one!
It is the Chinese, the door is open to western capitalism and they are embracing it as fast as they can, and best of luck to them.
I suspect however they are lining themselves up to a serious class divide issue, there are people paid a minimum amount to do every job, meanwhile people at the other end of the scale are getting very rich.
Shanghai for example is clean, really really clean, you never even the smallest bit of litter, cigarette butts, or even chewing gum, why not? Well thanks to having plenty of people and not being hindered by such idiocies as minimum wage, they throw manpower at everything, from street cleaners, to traffic assistants on every junction, and not just one, sometimes 3 or 4 people per road junction just to ensure you make it across the road!
There are lots of fine examples of throwing manpower at the problem, the hotel I am staying in for example, okay its 4* and its costing a mighty £48 per night, all week though I haven’t had to open the door to the hotel, 24/7 they have at least 4 people manning the doors! When you go into a restaurant its often the case that the staff outnumber the customers, the same in shops, this Starbucks has 5 staff on at the moment.
I am quite a fan of Shanghai, its lacks the outright outright debauchery and exuberance of Hong Kong, however in its place comes an air of refined proud elegance.
To answer my original question, I am physically in China, however I suspect this far from reflects the real China… I suspect if I travel even 1 hour from Shanghai the picture will be very different…
Jan 18
Ben KingLife, Other Chickens, Jamie Oliver, Jamie Oliver Career, Jamie's Fowl Dinners, Liquid eggs, Sainsburys, Slaughter Chicken, Supermarket Pricing
I finally got around to watching the much hyped ‘Jamie’s Fowl Dinners’ which seems to have caused a bit of a ruck as we see our once favourite TV chef trying to shock us into not buying caged chicken.
Before i go on lets get my personal buying habits out of the way, I strictly buy free range and where possible organic eggs and chickens, it tastes better and makes me feel better and frankly the for the small number of pennies different in price, why not?!
I applaud Jamie for trying to raise awareness, and I did watch it with a bit of an attitude of ‘its okay I buy organic already’, shocking facts to me were:
- The price supermarkets pay to farmers for chicken, 2->3p per chicken, surely that can’t be right? I always apply a 30% rule to anything I buy in the supermarket, i.e. i pay £3 for a chicken, and the farmer is getting a £1… apparently i am way wrong, can anyone clarify?! The messaged seemed to be that if you spend a £1 more on a chicken for sunday dinner, that £1 mostly made its way back to the farmer making a huge difference.
- Liquid eggs – makes sense I suppose, however the thought of it being in many products i buy is a bit sickening and I feel horribly powerless to do anything about it!
Taking a step back I am interested in why Jamie Oliver is doing this, killing chickens live on TV is bound to upset some people, and apparently the RSPCA are more than a little pissed at him. Although Jamie Oliver has fallen in popularity over the past few years, I am sure there is plenty of money left for him to coast along for a good few years to come… so I can only conclude that either he genuinely believes what he is doing now… or he is taking a high risk approach to taking his career to a new level.
PS Sainsburys – bad on you for not appearing in the show – slap! to punish you I will be defecting for precisely one shop – oh wait like you care!
Jan 11
Ben KingBusiness, Internet, Life Copyright, Digital License, DRM
Commenting on: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/11/att_want_to_block_copyrighted_material_at_network_level/
The solution to all this is very very simple.
I want the luxury of being able to download whatever material I want, when I want from where I want in whatever format I want. That as a customer is what I want, and the customer is always right.
The only question is what I am prepared to pay for it, and how. As I don’t want to be bound to any particular channel (iTunes for example), and I don’t want to be paying per use, there is only one option which is some form of Digital Download License, which we pay an amount of money per year (say £150), to do whatever we want online, bit like the TV license.
The question obviously is, how do the respective rights holders get their slice of the pie, well simply offer a discount on the license fee to anyone happy to run some form of software that monitors what copyright material you are downloading and reports that somewhere for statistical analysis for revenue distribution.
This won’t work however if I am required to buy more than one license or there is in anyway some restrictions, for example you can download everything except shows by NBC.
Oct 19
Ben KingBusiness, Life Business, energy, Life, Other
Commenting on: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/19/bt_wind_farms/
In a nutshell BT (which accounts for 0.7% of the UK power usage), is investing £250m in building its own windfarms which it estimates will generate 25% of its power needs, or enough to power a city the size of Coventry) .
Firstly good work BT, good to see a corporate taking its responsibility seriously.
The numbers however lead to some interesting thoughts, and it all seems soo cheap, that why aren’t we doing it… over simplified argument coming up.
We are based in Coventry and as of the last Census theres about 300,000 of us living here. If £250m buys you enough power for a city the size of Coventry… unless I have got the zeros wrong on my calculator that equates to £833 per person… I reckon I spend half that per year on power at home… so where do I sign up?
Take this up to a national scale and it equates to £143b, which while not a trivial sum of money still only equates to £2380 per person… so I wonder what the ROI on a wind turbine is?
Oct 03
Ben KingLife Life, Travel
On the way to work at the moment there are some roadworks in Canley while Coventry City Council adds yet more bus lanes… this has led to a 400m length of dual carriageway (passed the graveyard) that filters down to one lane at the end just before hitting the roundabout with the roadworks.
Everyday there is a queue in the left hand lane (usually backing up and blocking/slowing down the feeder roads) with a completely empty right hand lane…
… and everyday I simply jump into the right hand land and merge in at the front of the queue, much to the disgust of everyone else queuing patiently in the left.
This beautifully exemplifies:
- ‘Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity’ – It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if we split the traffic evenly between the two lanes that would mean less congestion on the surrounding roads.
- ‘British Politeness’ – Frankly the British love queuing and are just too polite to use sense.
- ‘No one reads the Highway Code’ – The Highway Code says here ‘where lanes are restricted due to road works, merge in turn’.
Nuff said!
Sep 15
Ben KingLife Life, Selling
8pm Thursday evening, relaxing on the sofa with the girlfriend, watching TV, waiting for our Chinese… a knock on the door…
I answered to be greated by an ultra-chirpy NPower sales person, now normally I would just tell them to go away, however on this occasion I was feeling a little bit sporting and I always relish the opportunity to ‘play’ with the B2C end of the sales spectrum.
What I experienced was actually very very frightening… NPower use a combination of clever techniques to get you to sign over the them…
Now I would be the first to admit I am not shy of the odd ‘Jedi Mind Trick’ here and there in my own sales techniques (only asking open questions, etc.), however its business to business sales and you are (generally) sparring with someone on an equal footing.
However Joe average relaxing at home with a beer in the evening probably isn’t so well skilled or experienced to deal with what are some pretty clever techniques.
So how did they do it?
- Friendly, polite and apparently harmless - she was very friendly, polite and appeared to represent no threat.
- Qualification – she has a list of all the addresses on the road and householders surname (register of electors I guess), the line she used was ‘Your name is on this list and I have been asked to talk you about saving you money on your gas and electricity bills’. Her statement was obviously the truth however a little misleading, using the list to demonstrate authority.
- Only ask a closed question if you know what the answer is going to be - ‘You do want to save money on your energy bills, don’t you Mr King?’ Well of course I do, just not necessarily with you!
- Reinforcing the benefits - She kept reinforcing the points, if you pay my direct debit with give you £80 cash back, there are no standing charges, only pay for what you use, blah blah blah. This in my opinion is a huge weakness and I hate being sold to like this and won’t personally sell like this. However I am sure it has some kind of hypnotic effect on some people.
- Gaining entry to your property – Now this was slick! she is carrying a variety of folders, information, pens and she fumbles and nearly drops the whole lot while trying to show me some information (again adding to the illusion that she is a harmless imbecile). She then pulls a ‘can I just sit there?’ pointing at the stairs. So she is through the door… cunning…
- Objection handling – Up until this point I hadn’t bothered objecting (I was enjoying myself too much), however she had some great objection handling spiel and she wasn’t about to miss out on the opportunity to use it… ‘Mr King, you can move to us for trial, if you aren’t happy within 2 weeks you can cancel and I will move you back to your old provider free of charge’ – Wait a minute can’t I move providers FOC anyway?!?! Also I am not going to be unhappy in 14 days as hopefully I won’t need to call your customer services…
- Slick materials - When I did ask a question she had a folder full of charts, graphs and headlines to answer the question. My main point was ‘I have heard that NPower have crap customer service, how crap is it?’, her response was ‘No we are number 1 for customer service’ and then flicks to a section of her brochure showing a ‘We a number 1 for customer service’ icon. Who says?!
- She was an imbecile after all! - I laboured on with the customer service line of questioning with ‘How quickly do your customer service representatives, on average, answer a call?’ She didn’t understand this and replied ‘10 Days’
(I think still in response to the trial period).
- Closing me – ‘So Mr King, can I put you down for the free trial?, afterall you have nothing to lose.’ I thought I may as carry on the fun, so I let her get her form out and complete it…
- Closing her down - When the inevitable ‘Can you just sign here please Mr. King?’ came… I pulled my phone out of my pocket and on speaker phone called my friend Steve who had a terrible customer service experience with NPower, and asked him ‘Steve, who was that energy company who gave you really really shitty customer service’ his response was fast and short… ‘NPower‘. Thanks Steve! Clearly her training did not cover this sort of objection – she went quiet, then stood up said thanks and left.
So it was a bit of fun and I enjoyed it (thanks NPower – you are my favourite energy company – just not for the reasons you want), however the serious point is that these techniques are extremely powerful, work and are potentially very misleading, and in my opinion its not a fair sales technique.
Interestingly a quick Google revealed NPower have been in trouble for this in the past http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1913534.stm.
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