hitting the wire*

engineers. doomed for life.

Being who I am, engineer jokes are something I collect, if only to disappoint my lawyer, CA, and medic buddies when they say "have you heard the engineer joke about..." "yup".

This is the first animated Dilbert I've seen.  Love it.

 

Who's buying Storm now?!?

Amazing how acquisition rumours ricochet around an industry like pings  on the Net!  I'm almost able to count on the fingers of one hand the entities that have NOT recently been rumoured to be buying Storm.  A MyADSL article on Vodacom's foray into the ISP market, mentioned as an aside almost, that they'd been in discussions with Storm.  The phrasing was interesting:

"Vodacom confirmed that they had a few discussions with large ISP players like Internet Solutions and Storm, but added that they have not progressed much further than that.  According to Vodacom’s COO Pieter Uys, Internet Solutions is not for sale and the discussions with Storm did not lead anywhere."

All of a sudden, people are under the impression Storm have got a "For Sale" sign hanging on the door and have ads out the classifieds column!  The funniest was an incident yesterday.  TimWG, one of our Joint-CEO's, wryly commented before the Marketing meeting "Oh, I believe that XYZ (another significant player in the ISP industry) have bought us."  Not an hour later I get a call from an ex-colleague (we'll call him Ted) from XYZ to say "Can you confirm a rumour for me?  Are Vodacom buying you?"  To which of course my reply was "No, but I believe you are!"  Honestly!?

It would be irresponsible of any management team of any company not to consider and explore strategic alliances, partnerships, JV's, acquisitions even.  It would be even more irresponsible not to entertain approaches by entities with interesting offers to discuss.  But 9 times out of 10, discussions of this nature are not fruitful.  They sure seem to get to the "have your heard...?" stage reasonably often.

It is a time where South African ICT companies are waking up to the changes in the regulatory environment, in technology, and the way that margins on basic services are dropping.  It is natural for some mergers & acquisitions to be forming.  Telkom are wanting to buy BCX.  It's hard to keep track of who DataPro have acquired or are about to buy (I trust shareholders are going to see some organic growth there at some stage... mmm?).  Neotel are buying Transtel (good move that, I believe - Transtel have a very good network, quite apart from that appropriated by the DPE, but they lack sales and marketing clout). 

So, do you have any juicy rumours of who is meant to be buying Storm next? 

Drop me a mail. ;)

SA Telecoms in pictures

I love cartoons. I particularly like the way political cartoonists can often capture complex issues.  This is one of Zapiro's from this last weekend's Sunday Times.  I'd love to start saying positive things about the way our government handles telecoms policy.

The cobblers kids are poorly shod - confessions of an inept home sysadmin.

For someone involved in telecoms and IT, I sometimes think I make poor use of technology.  My home network consists of a 512k DSL link to the Net, a Linksys WAG54GS all-in-one DSL router / LAN switch / DHCP server / WiFi AP / Firewall, into which my wife's PC is plugged and a Senao PCMCIA card (SL-5354CB) which I bought at an iWeek when WiFi was still young here.  My kids are blissfully unaware I could network their PC and provide them with the joys of online gaming - right now the likes of Age of Empires and Sacred fulfil their thirst for death and destruction by design, with no threat to our traffic-cap.

I bought the Linksys from Miro about a year back and have been quite happy with it.  Until last week.

All of a sardine, the damn thing stopped issuing my laptop with an IP address.  Nothing I tried seemed to work.  I resorted to my fallback, and hauled out the HSDPA card I use when I'm out of town.  One or two automated backups later (I run Attix5 every night now after learning the hard way that dead hard drives don't talk) and my traffic limit is trashed.  Time to get the link to the DSL line sorted!

I find some other guy has had similar problems, but can't find an obvious fix anywhere.

Part of the suggested fix from Miro was to uninstall the driver for the card and reinstall.  Nice idea. Only no one told me Senao have discontinued the card and no longer supply driver files (and the ruddy install disk has eloped with my favourite pen and has not been seen in years).  Not good.  Fortunately, Miro managed to dig up the correct install file, but still no joy from the DHCP server.  Grrrr!

Decided it must be the AP - either a factory settings reset will sort it out, or it needs a brain transplant and I'll have to take it in.  Now, few things raise my wife's ire like a broken Net connection when she has a deadline to hit and is embarking on an all-nighter.  The time she caused it herself during a DSL network wobble by pressing the reset button for too long and inadvertently reverted to factory settings (while I was away from home)... she was ready to throttle her inept sysadmin!  So, with my heart in my mouth, I hit reset and went through replacing all the settings.

I can't tell what a relief it was to have connectivity back to normal.

If you need driver files for a Senao PCMCIA card (SL-5354CB) - drop me a mail.  If your Linksys AP's DHCP server goes on the fritz... start all over.  If it starts this crap again soon I'll be ditching it for a Netgear.

Now, if anyone can tell me what I can do to speed up my wife's PC that has slowed to a crawl, I'll be delighted.  So far, I've tried most of the usual tricks, so bar laser surgery to the registry file... or wiping the hard-drive, I'm stumped.

that's me.  admin'd out.

Have you ever wondered what the airspeed of an unladen swallow is?

Well if you have mates like Dirk Pons who once spent at least half an hour of a hike along the Drakensberg escarpment with me calculating (in his head no less) the coefficient of lift of a Lammergeier, you may just have.

Bronwen Kausch sent me this gem.

And in case you were feeling short-changed… Jonathan Corum throws in the capitals of Assyria as well!

Now you have had your dose of useless information for the day.

Out with concrete slippers... slip into some concrete canvas.

This is so not telecoms, but I really love these kind of wacky ideas that have practical use!  These guys have come up with an inflatable, concrete shelter that comes in kit form…  just add water and an hour later… voila, a concrete shelter!  OK, so it does weigh half a ton to start with, but then expecting it to be light as a feather to boot would be a bit much.

Reminds me of those cake mixes I tried to make while in digs, which never quite looked like the picture on the box, but were never the less hugely enjoyed.

getting as much as you give.

If you take the p*ss... expect to have the p*ss taken out of you!

Storm has a number of parking bays in the basement of our building.  The bay I use is the same width as all the rest, but slap up against a brick wall.  The bay next to mine has a pillar on the other side of it, which allows the driver more space to get in and out of their car, even if the back of the car is close to the pillar.  If they park towards the left of their bay, I can get out of my car, but only if I scrape the wing mirror down the brick wall on the left and suck in my gut during the 'escape procedure'.

A few months back the bay next to me was assigned to a another company in the building.  After a few "narrow escapes" I left a note to ask the driver using the bay to leave me more room.  They obliged.  Then a week or two back, a different vehicle started parking there and the same problem began again.  Yesterday, I decided to leave a note again.  This is the note.

OK, so my handwriting ells you I should have been a GP and not an engineer, but I trust you get the gist?  When I got back to my car yesterday evening, what do I find on the windshield?

you guessed it.

a can opener.

Unbeknownst to me, our Customer Services Manager had acquired a new car and 'moved in next door'.

Nice one Steve... you got me.  If you find a potato in your car's exhaust one of these days, it might well be me! ;)