Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in Simon Lockhart's LiveJournal:

Friday, January 26th, 2007
9:17 pm	Photography I bought myself a shiny new dSLR for Christmas... We've had a digital camera in the family since our wedding, in 2000, and I figured it was about time I upgraded to something better than the compacts that we've had so far. I've been reading a lot of photography magazines since I got it (still trying to work out which magazine I prefer...), and a couple of books, and I think I've learnt a lot - not just about the mechanics, but also the soft elements of how to take better photos (positioning, framing, etc). I grabbed the camera out after dinner this evening, and snapped away while the kids did some crafty stuff, and also after they'd got ready for bed. These are my favourite two: I would never have taken photos like that before Christmas. I'm really impressed with them (and I've had some nice positive comments from people I've shown them to, too, which is nice...) Current Mood: artistic (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 5th, 2006
9:08 pm	Exploding cows This made me smile today, so I thought I'd post it here... Outside the farmshop we went to today there's a lifesize fibreglass cow. Having removed Nick from the shop because he was being a little s*d, leaving Liz to pay, we stood next to the cow, and I thought I'd explain where milk comes from... Cow eats grass, it goes into the stomach here (*points*), then it gets turned into milk, and collects here (*points*), and the the farmer gets the milk out through the teats here (*demonstrates*). Nick was able to recount this perfectly, so it obviously sunk in well. Perhaps a little too well... Nick: "What happens if the cow makes too much milk?" Me: "It'll dribble out the teats" Nick: "Oh, so it won't go pop?" then... Nick: "What happens if the cow eats too much grass?" Me: "um..." Nick: "Will it go pop?" Oh dear. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 6th, 2005
10:19 pm	Settling into new Job Well, I've been in my new job for a couple of weeks now. Talk about dumping me in the deep end :-) My head is spinning with all the work I've got to do. I'm really enjoying the challenge. In a nutshell, the company has been running for about 2 years, doing product and market research, and more recently has been off selling their "product" to potential customers. They've got one _huge_ customer committed, and another 2 firm orders. All well and good, but currently there's no "product". My job is to make that product. From scratch. (Okay, I've been given a design that I can work from). To deliver to 55,000 users. By Easter. *Gulp* Day one job was to buy servers and VPN routers for the company internal network. That kit's starting to arrive now, so next week I should be installing that - then at least we'll have shared storage, calendars, and an email system that's under our control. Right now, apart from going to meetings with potential suppliers, and potential customers, and at least one company that could be both a supplier and a customer, depending on which way you look at it, I'm trying to put together a lab, so I can prove to myself and to everyone else that this is all going to work. We've been given some space in an office building in Slough, owned by another company in the Wesley Clover portfolio (Wesley Clover are major investors in the new company). I'm still not convinced about working in Slough, but it's not *too* bad. There's a McDonalds 3 doors down the road, which is one redeeming feature :-) Anyway, I'm trying to write a list of everything I need for the lab. For the last 10 years, I've had everyday items, such as cables and things easily to hand. Now, I'm starting from nothing (apart from my personal collection of junk that I can finally find a use for). I'm having to buy nuts, screws, cables, plugs, sockets. What am I likely to have forgotten to order? Simon Current Mood: busy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 18th, 2005
8:53 pm	End of an era Today was my last day in the office working for Siemens. Not quite my last day of employment - I've got a few docs to finish off first, but I'll be finishing them off from home. It's the end of an era. Just over 10 years ago I started at BBC R&D, as junior Unix sysadmin. At the time, I was just supporting the users within R&D, but soon started getting involved in the BBC's Internet access, which went through the R&D dept, and out over a 64k link to Pipex. The WWW was just starting in those days, so most of the Internet access was for email, usenet and some FTP. It all went out through a Sun Sparcstation1 firewall. The BBC was just starting to do some webpages for itself, and that same Sun also run the CERN httpd to serve a few webpages. My boss at the time was a guy called Brandon Butterworth. If you don't know him from the BBC, you may have come across his name on BBC BASIC for the IBM PC - he was one of the programmers. Brandon is a fantastic guy. He's still with BBC R&D, doing "New Media" type stuff - particularly around multicast disribution of streamed content - as well as making use of new codecs such as Dirac. I will still be working on contract with BBC R&D as network specialist on the multicast project. Brandon is also the other half of Bogons - our own ISP. Anyway, since the early days of BBC on the Internet, Brandon and myself have designed, developed, operated the Infrastructure behind bbc.co.uk. Even today, the bulk of the infrastructure for www.bbc.co.uk is our design, although scaled up significantly from that of the early days. Over the years, we developed an operations team and a development team to keep the infrastructure working, and to add new functionality. (Read the potted history at http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/history.html ). All this until 2002 (IIRC), when BBC Internet Services, then part of BBC Technology, merged with Streaming Media Services (acquired by BBCT from Intel), and moved to Maidenhead. Brandon was very close to being made redundant (until R&D took him on as a Principal Researcher), and was replaced by a new management team. I moved over to Maidenhead, as Technical Authority (or Technology Manager, depending on which piece of paper you looked at). In October 2004, Siemens Business Services acquired BBC Technology. I think this was probably the turning point for me. I was already starting to be side lined - a new Technology Manager had been appointed, and was taking over - I no longer was in charge of designing the infrastructure. One of his team took on responsibility for the network, and so I was no londer responsible for that either. Without really realising it, I had become a nobody, doing menial design work, and backfilling engineering work. Under Siemens, I could see a number of changes coming in, none of which seemed particularly beneficial, and certainly not in a direction I was looking forwards to being part of. So, when I was approached by an IPTV startup to join them to be in charge of Technology, I thought it was an interesting opportunity. They'd been working with Brandon for a while to understand multicast, and used some of the R&D multicast demos to demonstrate IPTV to potential customers. I dithered a lot, being a bit uncomfortable going from the security of large organisation to the potential risk of joining a startup. It wasn't really what I wanted to do - I wanted to join Bogons full time, but now isn't the right time for that. I talked to a lot of people about it, and they persuaded me that it was an opportunity not to pass by, and I finally took the decision to take the job. I'm really looking forward to the new job now. Lots of opportunities. I'm looking forward to having responsibility again. The rest of the management team seem like a good group of people, who seem to really value my input in stuff I've worked on with them already. They're very keen for me to continue to be involved with LINX (I'm a director if you didn't know) - something which my boss at Siemens seemed to resent ("you've got it on your CV now, I don't see it as beneficial to the department, can't you resign?"). All in all a pleasant change. Anyway, I'm off to work for a company called Ubivisum. They've got a PHB focussed "website" at http://www.ubivisum.com/ . Yes, the website will be changing real soon (and possibly a complete rebrand). I'm gonna have fun. Current Mood: nostalgic (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 14th, 2005
12:32 pm	Geocaching Does anyone else do geocaching? We started, as a family, last Sunday after reading an article in the weekend Telegraph about it. We found one cache on Sunday, during a 4ish mile circular walk form home. Since I've been on leave this week, I've been out a couple more times, and found another 8 caches this week! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 18th, 2004
9:47 am	gwendraith pointed out that I hadn't posted this announcement... Philippa Anne Lockhart, born 9th June 2004 at 14:00, weighing 8lb 6oz. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 23rd, 2004
3:33 pm	*GAH* Okay. Thankyou to the *expletive* who pointed my boss at my livejournal. I hope you're satisified with yourself. All entries now friends only. *GAH* (3 Comments |Comment on this)