Stuart Ford

I’ve much to thank the Internet for and I’m only sorry that it didn’t come along earlier. It certainly would be different without it.

It’s provided me with a career if nothing else, although since I’m an old-school educated software engineer I can in theory turn my hand to any kind of software development, regardless of the application. It just happens that I cut my teeth on web software applications.

When I was coming out I didn’t have access to the Internet and neither did the Internet have the sort of resources for gay people it has now even if I did have access to it, so I was pretty much fending for myself. I can only imagine how different my life would have been had I been born ten years later.

Glamourous visions of the future in old films told us that we would have flying cars and have almost everything automated. They never predicted that the whole world would one day be connected in the way that it is now. A flying car would be great, but I wouldn’t swap it for the Internet.

Decided to give Formspring a go. I will answer most questions but if you want to insult me then please do it to my face.

I’ve been working on the next stage of the IT and AV installation job I’m doing at a friend’s house in Eccles this week. It’s second fix now which means the plastering, tiling and (most of) the painting and decorating has been done, so the job this week was to attach 69 CAT6 sockets to the CAT6 runs pulled through the house and solder all the home cinema faceplates on the speaker cables that we ran through the walls (all 10 of them). Fiddly jobs in places, but no major snags or hiccups, so far at least. When we come to test each and every cable will of course tell us whether we don’t just believe that we’ve done a good job!

All but two of the speaker cables terminate on this one plate, which all has to be soldered.

The next and final stage before equipment install (i.e. the final infrastructure installation stage will take place in a few weeks once the builders have finished the basement, where all the cables terminate and the equipment rack will be situated. Although I have all the bits we need to finish this I can’t do it because the basement to the house is not yet secure. Once the walls are finished and the external doors to the basement are fitted I can move the equipment in and finish it. Then it’ll be the big test.

There are also 12 runs of CAT6 that I’ve not yet been able to do anything with simply because the walls on which they will sit haven’t yet been built, so I’ve just run the cables to the ceiling or floor at the point at which they will eventually be and left sufficient length coiled up ready. Part of that was lifting up huge slabs of concrete out of the floor in the new kitchen which, with hindsight, would have been better done wearing a pair of gloves.

Once it’s all done my “client” can then think about home cinema and computer networking equipment. Right now he just wants to concentrate on getting the builders finished and out so that he can move back in again. I hope he doesn’t think that he “over-egged” the installation. Certainly, a 69 run CAT6 structured cabling system is definitely on the upper end of what you would normally put into a house, even of that size, and he may not even be able to buy a Dolby 9.1 home cinema system for a while. The point is that the infrastructure will make the house very future-proofed, which is what he wanted.

For the past week or so I’ve been working on an IT and AV installation job at a friend’s house in Salford. It’s a large Victorian house which he bought and is in the process of having it gutted and extended.

As part of this he wanted a fully integrated IT, telecoms, TV and and audio system installation, which he’s asked myself and Chris to do since we’ve some considerable experience with such things. He knows nothing about such things since he’s a GP, and so is trusting our judgement on what to install and buy. I hope he doesn’t regret doing so!

Phase 1 is first fix, so basically the hard work of pulling 80 runs of CAT6 and loudspeaker cable through the house (67 runs of CAT6 and 13 runs of speaker cable, including outdoor cables to the gardens). Once this is complete (on Thursday) we then have to wait for the builders to finish ready for second fix (where the cables are connected to sockets and patch panels). This forms Phase 2.

Phase 3 then becomes the really fun bit where we install all the specified equipment, including a computer network, a 9.1 speaker home cinema system, a distributed satellite TV system, a zoned audio system and other smaller features. After that comes the housewarming party where our friend gets to impress everyone with our work :)

It’s a manual job but it’s a fun job and it’s something I’ve done many times before so I don’t mind doing it. It’s not every day someone asks for a structured cabling system in their house, let alone on the scale of this one. Luckily, since it’s an old house, it has a cellar and lots of voids through which cables can be run. Ironically newer houses are harder to retrofit in this way unless it’s done at initial first fix because they simply don’t have such spaces, usually in the name of cost saving and profit maximisation on the part of the developers.

Here are a few geeky pictures of Phase 1. Apologies for the poor quality, they’re iPhone pictures. I’ll replace them with nicer ones if I remember to take any.

AV cables ready for home cinema installation

Many of the cables run through the cellar

The smallest bedroom is being set up as an office and so has trunking

Plant room in basement, where cables will terminate in a rack (image helpfully rotated by WordPress)

I am often asked by friends and family about which broadband service to buy and time and again my honest advice is ignored in favour of price and/or offers. Recently, certain amongst my friends have come-a-cropper as a result of this and have learnt their lesson, so I have decided to impart my advice to everyone, officially.

First, there are four simple DO NOTs:

1. Do not order BT Broadband.
2. Do not order Sky Internet.
3. Do not order Virgin Media Internet.
4. Do not order broadband from your mobile phone operator.

I don’t care how cheap these services are or whether or not they’re bundled with anything else. They’re bundled and/or cheap for a reason and with broadband it very much is a case of you get what you pay for. That’s the harsh honest truth. If you want a fast, reliable and un-crippled Internet connection then you’re going to have to stump up a bit on your monthlies.

Once this is established, this is my definitive, boilerplate, standard advice:

1. Buy this router. That one. Not a cheaper one, that one. No, you cannot use your existing BT Internet, Sky Internet or Virgin Media router.
2. Order this service, or this one (the “Pro” version) if you download lots of movies or use iPlayer (and similar) frequently.

This isn’t the cheapest router in the world, nor are they the cheapest ADSL services in the world, but there’s a very good reason for that. They work. All the time. You get what you pay for. It really is not worth trying to save what amounts to a matter of a few pounds per month for what is nowadays an essential service.

You are of course free to ignore either or both of these, but do so at your peril and if you get into difficulties with your broadband service having ignored one or both then I at no point want to hear about it.

I would also take this opportunity to point out that whilst Wifi is a useful technology, you should not leave yourself dependent on it. Most wireless networks work fine, but at the end of the day there is no substitute for eight strands of copper. There is a plethora of variables that can affect the performance of a wireless network, so if your Internet connection is critical, use a cable.

YMMV.

I’ve always wanted one of these ever since a mate of mine bought one. They sell on eBay for about £40, all refurbished and modified for use on modern networks (BT’s network at least still understands pulse dialling). Firebox also sell them, for £60, but it’s not clear whether they are new or refurbished. I frankly can’t see how they could be new, I find it hard to believe that someone’s actually started manufacturing them again.

Anyway, I bought a black one for the spare room, and it looks fantastic in there. It’ll never, ever get used, of course, the landline at home is only there for the broadband and rarely do we make or receive a call on it, but the phone does work! When it rings it breaks windows in Salford!

I love the description of it on the Firebox page, it’s hilarious. Especially:

Lovingly refurbished internally and ready for use in the modern world, this endearingly clumpy phone is guaranteed to bring the memories flooding back the second you poke your finger in the dial and hear that familiar ugh-ugh. You might even be tempted to start answering it by reciting your number in your finest nasally operator voice.

My Dad still does that! I think he still only announces the last 5 digits too.

Absolutely no modern features whatsoever!

Lift like TARDIS that only goes to the 70s

We’re moving offices at the moment as we’ve completely outgrown our small serviced offices and have signed a lease on an entire floor in the building literally across the road (so no wacky races with vans and things will be required). The building across the road is perfectly fine, but the landlord hasn’t quite finished refurbishing it yet and has a few things still to do, including the refurbishment of one of the two lifts. One lift is all modern with digital controls and voice floor announcements and all that jazz, but the other, although functional, is still as it was installed when the building was built in the 70s.

It’s totally retro, with big clunky buttons, wood paneling, an old fashioned floor indicator panel above the door (which doesn’t work) and inside the emergency phone cabinet is this fully functional dial telephone (pictured). It actually works too! It’s like going back in time 20 years.

I’ve also added a third monitor to my Mac Pro at work, because I’m greedy and I can. It was a spare monitor I had at my Dad’s house, liberated from the Rhydio office in 2006, and so I thought I’d put it to good use. Very soon I’ll wonder how I worked without it and be wanting a fourth one, which will be entirely possible since my Mac Pro has 4 monitor ports.

Because I am greedy

Yeah, so I spent exactly four days and four hours traveling to Boston, being in Boston and travelling back from Boston this week. It’s kind of a surreal feeling; I feel as if I should be totally overwhelmed by such an intense trip but I’m not, I’m really chilled out about it and it feels like Boston is no further away than London rather than being five timezones away over the Atlantic. Each journey and each day went off without a hitch; never before have I had such a relaxed and straightforward trip abroad. Would that all our holidays were the same!

The conference itself, Fall VON, was very interesting and I truly immersed myself in the IP communications world for two whole days, meeting some very clever people and some notable industry names. I’ve gathered a wealth of information that will prove to be very useful for my current project at work and so the trip was well worth it from a commercial point of view. A couple of the talks were by people who had used the technology with which I specialise in specific applications and while these applications were reasonable clever they weren’t on the sort of scale that my current project is going to be, so I’m going to see if it’s reasonable and feasible for me to do a talk myself at next year’s event once my project is finished.

Boston is a marvellous place. My favourite city in the United States is of course New York, but Boston comes a very close second. Its relative age combined with its New England environs, cleanliness, friendly inhabitants and functional transportation systems make it a pleasure to be in. Manchester, Boston and New York are the three places in the world where I really feel at home, more-so even than my birthplace. The only thing it’s really lacking is the sort of gay scene that I’m used to in Manchester, but then I’m willing to admit that my standards have been set pretty high in that regard. Not even New York comes close to Manchester, mostly thanks to the Republican Party, but that’s a different story.

The local baseball team, the Red Sox, apparently won the “world” series last week, although unclear how much of the rest of the world beyond the United States were invited to participate in this tournament. There was a giant parade through Boston on Tuesday which lasted practically all day. I didn’t see it because I was at the convention centre, but it was apparently enourmous.