All moved...

I've not updated in a while, it's been a busy 2 months.

Made a lot of progress since early June: House was sold, 2 cars sold in the US, 1 car purchased in the UK and we've moved in. Marina and the kids (and the dog) arrived last weekend in London.

Given the way house sales are going in the US we were very fortunate with regard to selling. School finished on Thursday, we left on Friday and closed on the following Monday. Timing could not have been better.

Thankfully we downsized a fair bit prior to loading the container for it's 5 week trip over the pond, but looking at the size of the truck/lorry it's safe to say we still had a lot of stuff to move. Somehow we've managed to get everything into the house though the attic space is being used.

The UK quarantine issue for the dog was thankfully managed by Marina, we handled it all in the US as we had the proper amount of time. The amount of paperwork and proper sequencing of it all was important but that too is behind us and the dog now has it's own 'pet passport' for travel to/from the UK for the rest of her life.

Given various travel and family visits we will not settle into the new 'normal' until sometime in September after the kids have started school. It's good to be all together again, the distance bit was tough for everyone - except perhaps for American Airlines which I've racked up 72k miles on already this year (along with another 8k or so on a BA flight in there somehow).

Changing times

Left the house in New Canaan yesterday afternoon for the airport for the final time. The next time I return to the USA the house, and my 2003 silverado, will be sold. We bought the house 5 years ago this month, it was a great house and we will miss it. While we were in Stamford when the kids were born, this really was their house.

The movers are showing up this morning to start packing up the house, by Wednesday everything we own in that house will be in a 40' shipping container bound for the UK. I'm told it will be in the hold of a cargo ship mid next week on it's 7 day trip over the pond

No regrets with the move to London, have to do new things, but this has been difficult. Will miss all of our friends in New Canaan.

virginmedia....

I moved this last weekend from Holland Park (London - W11) to Belsize Park (London - NW3), and asked virginmedia to move my cable box and cable modem. The original order was indicated no problem as both sides were wired.

Woke up to no service in the old flat, expected, no big deal. Disconnected everything and brought it to the new house. Connected it, no go. Called and was told needed new gear - I protested as (a) pain in the arse for me; (b) costs them money. In truth don't care about (b) personally but care a lot about (a).

Knew that the electronics were the same but they simply would not listen to me. Went out and picked up a 3-3G USB dongle for email access for the few days..

Gave virgin my work address to send the gear to but of course when I got home on Monday and Tuesday had the UPS slip there saying they tried to deliver. ARGHGHGHGHGHG. Called Wednesday am and confirmed they had 3 boxes for me. Re-routed to the UPS depo, which is thankfully only 10 minutes away.

Get to the UPS station, pick up the 3 boxes:
Box 1: cables
Box 2: another set of cables, exact same as 1
Box 3: cables (same as 1&2), wireless router, cable modem and cable box

So 3 sets of cables which I didn't need as I had from the old house. A cable modem and cable box that were IDENTICAL to what I had. I then had to call them to GIVE THEM the serial numbers/mac addresses of the units. I'm sure if I had used the old ones they would have worked.

I really don't understand as I've now got an extra cable modem, cable tv box, wireless router and 4 sets of wires - AND - it took me 5 extra days to get up and running...

Waste of my time and their money. Did I say I don't understand? They really wasted their £££s on this one

Status Update

Yes, I've been bad on posting - though to be fair - follow me on twitter as I use that.

It's been a very busy couple of weeks since starting at the BBC 5 weeks ago. While I do not pretend I've figured things out I am starting to understand how the place works. I'll leave the what we are doing to the official postings - coming soonish. What I need are more hours in the day as I usually run out of time.

On the housing from I've moved out of Holland Park (W11), to the Belsize Park (NW3) area of London over the weekend. We've rented a 5 bedroom house near where the kids will be going to school in the fall. I should be able to drop them off at school most mornings which will be nice after this year of not being with the kids. Hopefully they won't hold the last 9 months against me later on in life.

We've got an offer on our house in the US, hopefully closing 3 days after the school year ends in 4 weeks. Still a lot to get through so in the interest of not saying too much am going to let this run it's course.

Regardless, we will have the movers show up in mid-June to put everything into a 40' container to get it to London. Everything should arrive mid/end-July. Marina and the kids will be coming over around then as well as we've no furniture in the house. Bit of a pain actually, but I'm working insane hours, traveling to the US and am generally busy so I'll deal with an empty house.

Marina has sold just about everything that can not come over. Electrical equipment in particular is a pain, though anything without a motor can come over which is good. They either have 110/220 power supplies or a transformer will handle the conversion.

We've sold the mini-van and the truck and a4 are both on the market. The 2003 silverado can't come over, but if we do not sell the a4 guess we will be driving a left hand drive convertible as our only car here (ideally we sell it and pick up a used estate wagon).

Beyond that I'm back in the US every other weekend for the next month and then I'm all but done travelling for the rest of this year. Made platinum on american by June, hopefully I won't make executive platinum this year...

iPhone and the Blackberry

As I've posted in the past I've wanted a iPhone but given international travel could not justify one. When I started my current position, which has `something` to do with mobile, decided it was time to try out the iPhone full time and give up the Blackberry.

I've had the blackberry since the early days, well before there was a phone and it looked like an over sized pager (am I dating myself with that reference?). Marina will tell you I'm more than addicted, but it is a great tool for keeping up on email.

So for the last 6 weeks I've been using the iPhone exclusively for work email. It is good and bad.

Good: Unit is solid, screen is great, watching movies and listening to music/podcasts is great.
Bad: With the exception of personal email using the keyboard for email is - well - difficult. Battery life is fine if you charge mid day.

I've ordered a blackberry for corporate email, I've tried. I need email to work quickly, be on the unit at all times for the bus, train, plane (yea, real push is coming...), have quick cut/paste, fast and accurate typing (look at some of my recent twitters to see my typos).

That said, I will not be getting rid of my iPhone if I can help it. It's too good for everything else. Granted, I will end up carrying 3 units on a regular basis (n95, iPhone and 8800), along with a smattering of others for testing as well as the occasional US mobile (bberry 8820). But I don't think I'm normal.

On a side note, after ~10 years I'll be getting rid of my US-646 mobile soon. I'm still using the 8820 (see other post a few months back) but only when it is on wifi for free calls. I've dropped all data and moved calling to the bare minimum along with the wifi calling option. Once my family is in London I'll cancel it completely. For all the gripes, I've had a good run with the US T-Mobile folks, but I live in the -44- country code now.

New Role at the BBC

I've been mostly out of reach today as me and my family were sightseeing in Paris the last two days. Opted to travel light and leave the laptop behind. Otherwise would have posted this earlier today once the news broke.

I am glad to announce that as of next week I am starting at the BBC as the new Controller for BBC Audio & Music (A&M) Interactive and BBC Mobile. I will be reporting to BBC Future Media & Technology (FM&T) Director Erik Huggers. Along with my new team we will be responsible for the all BBC’s output on mobile platforms and the multiplatform delivery of Audio & Music content.

I will be spending the next few weeks with my predecessor, Richard Titus. Will be good to have a real transition on taking a new role, something I've not had the opportunity of before. I wish the best to Richard in his new role.

I am looking forward to starting and working with my staff on getting products out the door to consumers again.

A few links to stories today:
Official BBC Press Release
PaidContent-UK
Guardian-UK

All this said, this will likely be the last posting from me in regards to this role on this blog. I'll use the official BBC blog for anything work related and stick to the purely personal here.

I have hopped out of the building

As of this afternoon I've formally left the employ of UK VOD LLP (eg: Project Kangaroo) as it's CTO. Somewhat bittersweet ending given our the regulatory hurdles that we had, but what can one do?

It would have been nice to have launched the product to the public to see what consumers thought, but in the end it was not to be with this structure.

As to what is next for me, not able to say today but what I do know is that I will be staying in London. Marina and the kids will be moving to London sometime this summer.

I am somewhat offline for the next week as everyone is in town, we will be looking for a place to live, showing the kids their new school and taking a quick trip to Paris for a few days.

Frequent International Travel - Telco

I've been shuffling back and forth between London and Connecticut for the last 6 months. I've manged to do this with out killing myself on roaming charges. The worst I've had it in excess charges was the first month I was in London prior to getting wifi in my flat - that month it was 'only' $50 in charges that month for calls. Given $0.99/minute ...

For communicating with Marina and the kids Skype has been the savior. Video chat works well and can use from either my office, flat or hotel room. We have since expanded this to include both grandparents. This probably saves the majority of what I'd have spent otherwise.

I do have a UK based nokia n95 mobile phone, which works for those people that have the number and do not mind the international costs.

Since not everyone has skype, and I've had the same US 646 mobile number since 2000 (1999?). Given my shuffling back and forth I do not yet want to give up a US mobile. As a lot of people have that number and I don't want to yet make people change. I've thought about either a skype or gizmo5 call in number and have that forward to a PC, but that does require being near a wifi connection at all times.

As my wife will also confirm I'm somewhat 'attached' to my blackberry. I've got to have that working on both sides of the Atlantic with out excess data rates.

In looking around at options, I discovered that I could get a US based Blackberry on either T-Mobile or Verizon with 'unlimited' international data roaming. I had the Verizon world phone in a prior life so knew that worked. My personal mobile has been on T-Mobile so I let that be. The cost for this is $29.98/month for base enterprise blackberry with a $19.99/month add on for the international roaming. For both carriers this is hard to find, but in my case it is an add on option in my.t-mobile.com

Given I'd had $25/day roaming costs in the past this was a clear no-brainer. Note: I did look and I do not see any UK carriers that have the same type of roaming, but if people know of any let me know as I'll likely have to change at some point in time.

This solved one issue, but still had the issue of voice calls. Turns out US T-Mobile has something called Unlimited Hotspot Calling which is a $9.99/month add on to my mobile bill. This uses the same technology as their T-Mobile @home for doing the voice over ip, but works on any of the wifi enabled phones.

This turns out is the real solution as my Blackberry 8820 unit is a wifi enabled unit with UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access). When the unit is in the range of a wifi connection it knows about, like in the office or at home, the unit switches off EDGE/GPRS to UMA. It also switches, in my case, from the roaming mobile network to the normal 'T-Mobile' network as if I am in the states. At this point in time all data and call activity does not cost me anything.

I simply check the status when someone calls - if it says UMA - I am free to talk with no concerns I am about to go broke.

I've looked and besides the US T-Mobile network, I can not seem to find any providers in the UK that have the same type of setup. My Nokia unit in theory will do wifi calls, but with out the UMA settings it does not work. In my case perhaps this is due to my carrier, there is some hint on Orange.co.uk they might have it - dunno. If someone does please let me know as I do have the similar problem in reverse when I take my UK number to the US.

In the end this solved a bunch of issues for me, including what to do in the US when I'm in places with low cell coverage (including my house at times). The wifi option solves that in US or UK.

My remaining gripes on all this:
1. I'd really like a iphone - but can not deal with the roaming costs internationally.
2. When I'm just normal roaming in the UK I'm at GPRS speeds instead of EDGE. Has to be something with the UK networks by choice, when my unit hits France it is in EDGE out of the gate.

What I really want moving forward:
1. More carriers using UMA and more wifi devices
2. Google Voice - WHY or WHY can I not forward to an international number? I'll pay the international calling rate you charge me for making calls through the system.

Some might say that T-Mobile does not have the same coverage as AT&T or Verizon. Look, that may be true, but in truth it usually works where I need it to. Has worked a lot better than an old nextel I had. I'm not normal as also tend to carry multiple units on different carriers, but still, t-mobile has been my primary phone for years.

Zachary William Wachter

My sister and brother in law just had their first child. He just happens to be my first nephew. Tyler is also happy that he finally has a boy in the family, "too many girls" ;-)

Photos here

What am I missing?

While I do think we need the current administration to start focusing on the positive and not the political crap vs Limbaugh right now, I'm trying to understand a few things

1. Errr - if memory serves Obama has been president for less than two months. During that time the dow is down from 7949 to today's 6594. A loss of 1355, yea that sucks. But exactly which party's president was in place at the 52 week high on the dow of 13194? There is no argument that one can make that the downward trend started on Jan 20th.

2. Complaining about 'hand outs' to homeowners as a bad idea. If it's such a bad idea why didn't the banks reject the money they took to stay in business? And then to turn around and give bonuses after accepting MY MONEY? At least the 'handouts' on mortgage help is going to other tax payers in trouble.

I could care less about large bonues - greed is good - but only if it is your money. If it is, do what you want.

3. Higher taxes - heck I'm in the higher tax brackets being hit - but lets be honest at some point you have to figure out how to pay for what you borrowed. I recall the Clinton years as being pretty good and we paid more taxes then.

That said - lets stop the nonsense about politics as we are really running the risk of another depression. The last time we got out of it only after 10 odd years AND World War II. Given our weapons these days WWIII is not an option....

The chunnel is kewl

I've been in London since early October and have not had a chance yet to see almost anything outside of London. I did mange day trips to Manchester for a football game, York for a meeting and Kent for some understanding of the sites - but nothing really outside of London. Most of this has been due to the lack of time given I spend a lot of time traveling to/from New York (next trip is this coming weekend).

So this last weekend when I found myself with nothing to decided to take the train from London to Paris just for the day. Left at 620am, got to Paris around 930, wandered around, caught the 615p train back and got back to my flat in London at 8pm ish. ±2:30 train ride, no airport hassles.

Wandered around the Louvre. As in the past I find it just too big to deal with - I think you have to live in Paris to get much out of the place. Waaaay too many great things to see, way too little time. Found the same true in New York, was better to just do a couple of halls and then flee the museums and come back another day. Did wander to the Mona Lisa - though you can barely see the darn thing. First too many crowds; Second it's too small to see from 10+ feet away where the barrier is. I do not know what the optimal viewing distance for that painting might be, but it is certainly closer than 10 feet.

On the flip side one of the better museums is the Musée de l'Orangerie and I do not know how many people bother to visit it. If you find yourself in Paris make a point of seeing it.

Spent the rest of the day just wandering around.

From an engineering point of view though going through the chunnel was cool. Apx 20 minutes travel time for the 20 odd miles under ground. The English Channel kept Britain at protected/bay for hundreds of years of military history, but now you can get from London to Paris in a few hours with out getting your feet wet.

We forget how things change and how much easier it is. Though I'll still complain when my flights are delayed even though I'll be sitting, mostly, comfortably in a seat in the sky.

Saving Money

I've followed the lead of Jaime in regards to money monthly. Recently the cable/phone/internet access as our weekend place went from the 12 month rate of ~120/mo to ~170/mo. Given we do not use this daily this was over the top.

Dropped internet from the cable company and am replacing with a DSL line from AT&T: saving $25/mo. Yes, it's 5Mb -> 768Kb but as I mentioned we do not use this often.

Dropped the all you can eat phone from the cable company and replace with a bare-bones dial up line: saving $22/mo. Yes, back to per minute charges but we just *don't* use this line much. I tried gizmo5 with an older cisco voip box but that does not work with fax lines unfortunately. Perhaps I'll setup a line-2 on our phones for outgoing.

Dropped the advanced cable with the box to basic cable. Dropping another ~$25/mo. Given we don't watch too much TV. I'd switch to over the air, but we really are remote and not much will show up.

And to top it off I don't have to deal as much with the cable company customer support - that alone is worth it. AT&T can't suck as much as this particular cable company support.

Course as luck would have it, I tried to save money last month with them and they offered to go from $170 -> $150/mo which was still too much. Explained that was not enough given our weekend usage and that I would absolutely be dropping. Told there was not anything they could do for me. When I called to drop the phone/internet services was told they could get me to a 12/month $99/mo deal - course too little/too late

Bit of a pita, but saving ~$80/mo or so for is worth it

Is it ok to hate the UK Government?

I started back in October with UK VOD (Project Kangaroo) back in October. As I stated in that post the company had been referred to the UK Competition Commission due to fears about the ownership structure.

This week we found out the output of the findings which were not favorable to us.

I am not in a position to discuss details about what this means in public, I'll have to be somewhat silent.

What I can say is that it is disappointing, yet not at all upset that I tried to make a go of it.

quicken not in the uk?

Was trying to figure out how I'd start to sort out my UK finances as I start to build them up.

We've been using Quicken for the PC for ~15 years or so in the states, started with a dos version and have kept upgrading over the years*. History going back that far. Have some gripes but it does work and keeps track of multiple banks, credit cards, investment accounts, etc - mostly automatically.

So I figured I'd just pick up quicken for my mac and start using it here. Alas... it is not supported for UK accounts. Seems they discontinued the product ~4 years or so ago. Use MS Money perhaps, well that would be frustrating, but possible. Except that too, while still sold here, was last updated in the 2005 version and folks tell me it's getting dated.

Seems odd to me, I've recently started using mint.com in the US for tracking my $ accounts and it works pretty well. Probably well enough that we would not need quicken were it not for the 15 years of history.

Has to be a reason folks have dropped out of the market, but it isn't that small of a market? How hard could it be to keep software up to date? Am I missing something?

* my main gripe with the US quicken is that there is still no apparent way of going from PC --> Mac without the data getting all messed up. The last time I tried my accounts went haywire to the tune of multiple million dollars, which given the inputs was mathematically impossible. Annoying to have parallels installed just for quicken, but so be it, it works.

Best of luck #44

Today we watch one of the more impressive things of the US system with the changing of the president. The 20th amendment states the time, the constitution provides the words. Lots of things have changed in the 222 odd years since the creation of the constitution, for such a 'simple' document it has held up amazingly well.

I never bought the whole 'King George' argument that the conspiracy theorists had about Bush 43 canceling the election, then canceling the inauguration. He was a lot of things to many but I never got the feeling he disrespected the process nor the fundamental rules.

One could argue that he never should have been president the first time as he did not win a majority of votes - but the US federal system is not a true democracy. He won the states. We could change the rules on this, no one has even suggested it seriously.

One could argue that his executive orders were not legal, but all presidents use them. Congress has the power to overrule, either directly or through political means: change that order or we withhold funding for X. But on that count, sadly we've got a congress that has lost it's backbone over the last 30 odd years.

Anyone want to buy a house

We've taken the next step in our journey to the UK, this week we put our house on the market. While we do not want to move until the school year is over we needed to get the house on the market now for the spring selling period.

Will see how good the housing market in the general NYC/CT area is soon I guess. Hopefully we will not have a huge issue selling later this spring.

Football

Went to my first football match this weekend. And no, this is not US football but the international definition of the term.

Went to see a Manchester United game against Chelsea - manutd won the match 3 to 0. Given manutd is one of the most widely known teams in the world, it seemed safe to see them if I was going to see any match.

I'm not an expert in the game, though it was fun to watch the crowd if nothing else.

No idea if I'll get into the game but the general rule still holds that going to see professional sporting events is a good time. Been to a number of great stadiums over the years (and no - the old Shea was not one of them), though not sure I'd want to see Green Bay play at Lambeau field in the middle of December.

How times have changed

This last Saturday I went to Longitude 0°, Latitude 51° 28' 38'' N. Otherwise known as the Greenwich Observatory - the home of the original GMT.

With all of the technology we have today we forget just how much math goes into the world around us. That math is further driven by time (or is it time is driven by the math, ah what ever - chicken and egg).

But to see the time galleries and to understand that for a very long time sailors at sea had no way of telling time reliably. Without a proper time reference you can not figure out your longitude/latitude. Without those you are kinda lost. They still have a giant ball at the top of the building which falls at 1pm GMT daily, on the off chance you want to set a cheap watch.

Granted, that time is set by some 100 atomic clocks around the world working on UTC and is not a pair of clocks in this building. Navigation has gotten a lot easier with GPS devices.

Course, those satnav systems apparently use a definition of 0° that is a few meters off the line on the ground in Greenwich, but who's counting ...

"How SaaS hurts a fragile IT economy"...

Title borrowed from this article on Computerworld. Of course you should read the article and make your own decision on this one, but the gist is summarized in the final paragraph:

Despite this dark analysis, let me go back to my first sentence. "SaaS is a wonderful choice for a business manager." It is. And, should these tough times ever pass, it will be a god-send choice to launch new business initiatives and to quickly gain competitive advantage in an expanding market. Until those days come, however, it will be used in large measure to avoid spending money, which, during a recession is an added burden weighing down our economy.

My general feeling on this topic is - SaaS is great:

1. As anyone in the IT world knows, most IT projects fail. And it's not just a small percentage that do, this article has it at 68%.
2. One reason most projects fail is that there is a HORRID communication problem between technology and business. It's not that the IT people know better, nor that the business side does. It's simply that the two sides simply do not know how to talk to each other.
3. No one likes failure - and everyone involved with it goes home depressed dealing with it all
4. There really are grunt level IT jobs, the 'IT Crowd' show does hit home
5. If you can't compete you can't win - and if someone else can provide a product faster and cheaper to market they should use it
6. Did not realize that companies exist to provide employment, believe the ability to employ comes from having products that consumers want.
   

While there are some that look only at costs, most business people I've worked with understand nothing is ever perfect and there are always trade offs. However, in a lot of situations you've got the choice of working with an IT group and all it's headaches against working with a subject expert on a manageable project with less upfront risk - why would you not try it?

Be strategic on the IT side and add value and you and your company survive. Do not and you've two options:

• Your company will realize it can get work done elsewhere faster and will choose to
• Your company will not realize how to get work done anywhere and it will fail

I vote for enabling and not getting caught up on where things get built