Chris M Evans

Resume and Personal Blog

Personal thoughts and background information on Chris M Evans, an IT Professional and Blogger.
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Challenges 2017

December 31, 2016 by Chris Evans

It’s always good to have challenges in life.  I’ve always strived to achieve more than I am (at any one point) and it’s one of the things that has driven me over the years, especially having worked independently for most of my career.  This year I thought I would document my 2017 challenges and see how I shape up over the course of the coming year.  The term “shape up” might be more than appropriate for at least one of my efforts.

Physical

  • Lose 50lbs.  There’s no doubting I need to lose weight and it’s been a constant battle for me.  The excuses are the same as everyone else; busy lifestyle, too much work to do etc, and in reality in years gone by that could have been true.  However working from home, I have no excuse.  I have the kitchen on hand and can make anything I want.  So, the challenge is to get to 50lbs less by the end of the year than I am now.  It’s not a huge target, but more likely an achievable one.
  • Do 100 Gym visits.  It doesn’t seem a lot, but getting to the gym regularly with an average of twice a week will help with the weight loss and increase overall fitness.  The regularity is the key thing; keeping a constant twice weekly schedule.
  • Cycle 50 miles.  This doesn’t mean 50 miles in total, but 50 miles in a single journey.  I managed it before when I completed the London to Brighton race for charity.  It’s time to get on the bike and do something again.

Personal

  • Learn Japanese.  I love languages, but only managed to get to speak French (and obviously English) fluently.  I can understand and do some Spanish and German too, but in reality not that much.  Japanese fascinated me years ago; in 1988 I started an evening class but had to give it up as I started to work away.  Let’s see what I can achieve 29 years later!
  • Cook more.  I really enjoy cooking, including baking and trying food from around the world.  This year I want to make more time to get focused on using even more basic ingredients, cutting out what little processed food we eat and generally trying out new ways to increase our vegetable/meat ratio.

Professional

  • Found a Startup.  In 1998 I founded a music company and acted as the Technical Director (CTO nowadays).  It was a great time, with lots of stress, but great opportunities to do creative things.  This year I’m on the cusp of founding a new startup in the data management area.  My professional goal for 2017 is to make this a success.
  • Build my Social Brand.  I’ve been blogging since 2003, travelling to events since 2009, but not really focused hard on making my social brand a success.  Although I can’t complain, there’s room for improvement and that’s the second half of my 2017 professional goals.

This doesn’t seem like many new or improved things, but of course underlying each one are specific separate tasks.  I’m going to try and produce an update each week to talk about my progress.  This will include talking about what was easy, what was hard and how I managed to achieve some these 2017 goals.

Filed Under: Challenges

UK Privatisation Hasn’t Worked

September 25, 2016 by Chris Evans

Today I received a letter in the post informing me that my already expensive broadband was going up by another 6.6%, well above inflation by any measure.  There doesn’t appear to be any real justification in the letter for this change, simply a restatement of the service I already receive.  I am fortunate to live in an area that was fibre cabled to the property by NTL (acquired by Virgin) in the late 1990’s.  Today I have an unlimited 200MB/s service, which means we stream content, download and generally access services without considering the amount of data we use.  I also have a backup service on Zen Internet with fixed IP addresses that is a work connection for VPN connectivity to the lab and other things (like public cloud).  This service is a mere 7Mb/s. I am never going to stop paying for my 200MB/s service!

Our exchange has conflicting views on whether it has been unbundled or not.  Some websites say it has, with 21CN available; others indicate that Zen isn’t available from the exchange, even though I have it.  Only Talk Talk and Sky offer LLU services from our exchange (allegedly), while uSwitch shows up to 76Mb/s from SSE, a deal that actually is only 17Mb/s when you redo the availability checker.

Broadband provision is a mess.  For years, no company went up against BT and NTL/Virgin Media in our village because the BT service couldn’t complete.  BT saw no reason to invest in our exchange.  Virgin Media can increase their prices whenever they choose as there is no real competition.  BT was privatised in 1985.  We’ve had broadband since 1999.  Why is competition still not there, some 30 years after BT became a private company?  Now the government is having to invest money in the infrastructure to bring broadband to the masses.  Unbelievably, BT is in most cases the preferred bidder (link – search on BT preferred Bidder Broadband for more examples).  The government is effectively giving money to a private company to roll out a service they should have done in the first place.

The solution here was quite simple.  Create a new government owned company, invest the money directly, competing against BT and the other providers.  Once rollout has been done, float the company and let the market acquire it.  This would stimulate competition in a stagnant and lazy market where the regulators don’t want to use their powers.  The UK continues to lag other developed countries.  Without positive government action, the lag will continue to increase.

 

Filed Under: Moaning Myrtle

Personal Development

September 11, 2016 by Chris Evans

Working in IT is great fun.  I love technology (always have) and can remember my first programming exploits on the Commodore Pet 64 around 1979/1980.  One thing I learned early on with this industry is that things never stand still.  In fact technology changes so much that someone once told me 25% of our IT knowledge becomes irrelevant each year.  Have 4-5 years out and you’re almost starting from scratch.  While I think that’s an overestimate (because experience also counts for a lot), I do think there is a real half-life to any technology learned.

So what does that mean?  Well, looking at news articles like this (link), you’d think that IT was in decline.  But that’s far from the truth.  In reality, large corporations are simply getting rid of staff that have experience in technologies that are less relevant to their core business.  These people don’t get retrained, but are “let go” and new employees are hired.  It’s a cyclic shift that happens across the industry all the time.

What the numbers in the above article show is perhaps the churn at which new technologies are coming along and being adopted in the industry.  This is something I’ve focused on over the years, with a huge investment in learning new technologies.  There are many things I never work with at all (like programming languages, mainframe), but did add to my overall work experience and development.  That said, the time needed to keep up with new technologies seems to increase each year.

Many people might think this phenomena is new, but that’s far from the truth.  Alvin Toffler described in his 1970 book Future Shock many of the experiences we have today about technology and information overload.  Professional development is important for everyone and a lifelong task.

Filed Under: Work

Reading

April 19, 2016 by Chris Evans

I enjoy reading and go through a reasonable number of books per year, with a mix of fiction, non-fiction and work related stuff.  If I had to pick genres, I’d say I like Science Fiction (standard for technical people), horror (the likes of Stephen King) and some fantasy, although that’s pretty much restricted to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.  I do also read some autobiographies and “self development” books, but that isn’t the majority of my reading content.

I always try to encourage our children to read, but that increasingly seems to fall on deaf ears, as their time is split between demands for sport (thankfully) and electronics, such as the Playstation.  For me the ability to get engrossed in a story and believable characters is what reading is all about.

I’ve set up a page to list my recent books, plus a like to buy them on Amazon.  Much of what I read now is on Kindle and in some ways I feel saddened by the demise of physical copy.  However, in reality I rarely go back to a novel again; they sit on the bookshelf for years until the filtering process sends them off to the charity shop for recycling.  So check out the list and feel free to make recommendations!  I’m always looking for new authors and series to get into.

Filed Under: Books

Music

April 5, 2016 by Chris Evans

I’ve always been interested in music.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve sung along to tunes (much to everyone’s disgust) and I must be one of the few people who is happy to get up and do Karaoke without a drink.  The earliest song I remember singing was Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road (which you can find here on YouTube), which must have been when I was about 4 or 5 years old.

At the turn of the millennium I was co-founder of a music-based startup called Razorcuts.  We sold custom CDs and did digital downloads way before Apple was selling iPods.  Unfortunately the business didn’t make it, because we couldn’t get access to decent content.  Perhaps a discussion for another day.

I’m also a reasonable collector of music, although not as obsessional as some people.  I tend to stick to well known stuff and the more mainstream, although I don’t have a particular genre that I like.  This tends to mean I have lots of CDs and playlists from which I choose stuff at various times, depending on mood.  My MIL doesn’t think I listen to the hundreds of CDs littered around the house, which is true as I have them all digitised and indexed then available through iTunes.  It’s probably one of the only things I’m OCD about, other than perhaps filing and organising photographs.  I keep promising to systematically go through my CDs and play them, although that tends to fall by the wayside as I prefer to work without music these days.  So in the spirit of going back and getting best use, I’m going to start a series of posts with a weekly (or bi-weekly if I can manage it), review of a CD I’ve been listening to.

Now, you may ask why don’t I use Spotify?  Well, I’ve collected CDs (and before albums) for a long time and I like the feel of physical media.  I also don’t like the idea of investing every month into something I will ultimately never own.  Yes, it’s outdated thinking, but it’s what I do.

Look out for posts in the coming weeks!

Filed Under: Music

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