Making a career move

If you've arrived here via the @AvayaData twitter account, welcome!  :-)

After lengthy deliberation, last week I made the decision to leave my current employer (Avaya) and take-up an opportunity to evolve my career in a new direction.

This wasn't an easy decision to make.  My 'serious' career began back in 1994 when I joined what was then Northern Telecom, and which later evolved to become Nortel.  Following the demise of this once grand company, the division I worked for was acquired by Avaya at the end of 2009.  That makes 17.5 years of career evolution within essentially the same company!

The downfall of Nortel was a terribly sad thing to witness first hand.  The heady days of the year 2000 were cruelly cast into memory as the company shrank from almost 100,000 employees down to little more than 20,000.  The rounds of redundancies ran into the teens during the decade that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble.  As one of my colleagues put it, it was like working against a constant headwind, and don't get me started on the stock price!

What was so hard to square as an employee through all this was the fact - and it is a fact - that Nortel had excellent technology and innovation leadership in its markets, particularly in the data networking product line, on which I focused the majority of my time in the company (I'm glad to say that technology lives on and is evolving within Avaya today).  The technology was certainly never the reason for the demise.  Acres of articles have been written on this topic, so I'll leave it there.  Let's just say I remain very proud to have worked for that great company.

One of those oft-debated topics is how often one should ideally change companies.  17 years with the same employer is a rare thing indeed in this post 'job for life' era.  For me it's all about maintaining career development, and Nortel gave me the opportunity to make three step changes, from manufacturing support through IT and finally into presales. No wonder I stuck around.

Finally, I've had the privilege to work with some extremely talented, friendly, supportive and professional colleagues during my years at Nortel and Avaya, without whom the experience would have been much less enjoyable.  The people make the company, and to be honest it's a lot tougher saying goodbye to the people than it is the company.  Of course it's easy to keep in touch these days, and we have so many options for doing so, but we all know the reality is that it's never quite the same once you leave.  Ah well, so be it.  You've got to break some eggs to make an omelette.

So now the time has come to take a bold step from big vendor to small vendor, from large multinational corporation to feisty, ambitious niche player.  And it's also time to move my career on to its next phase as well.  For a while now I've been eyeing a move into Technical Product Marketing, and that's exactly what I'll be doing next.  I'll post more about that another time.

Once I've started in the new company I'll be setting up a new Twitter account as that's proven a powerful and enjoyable way to build a virtual community of people who share a common interest.  For those of you who've joined me on the @AvayaData journey (and there are 622 of you at the time of writing), please be assured I'll be handing that account to a worthy successor who I'm sure will keep things interesting.  I'd love you to join me at my new account if you've enjoyed my tweets.  I'm moving to another networking vendor, so it'll still be industry-relevant stuff.  Details will follow in a subsequent posting here.

I'll close with a quote from a 'Congratulations' card I received from my Mum.  It's by a lady called Helen Keller...

"Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing"

Cooking Challenge

I'm the first to admit it - I'm no fan of cooking.  Allow me to draw an analogy.  I love riding my motorcycle, tipping it into corners, accelerating around obstacles, the sense of freedom.  What I enjoy far less is tinkering and fettling the bike.  Don't even get me started on the topic of cleaning the damn thing.

And so it is with food.  I LOVE food, the eating of it and even the rituals associated with it.  Almost all kinds of the stuff.  Love it.  What I really DON'T enjoy is all the preparation, the faff, the constantly having to wash my hands, the mess, and the inevitable clearing-up required afterward.

In my defence, at least I do actually cook real food - no ready-meals in this house, thank you very much.  However, my lack of love for the preparation of a 'proper' meal means there's quite a lot of repetition and focus on quick and simple, often to the detriment of nutritional quality.

Lately I've been trying to establish ways to improve said nutritional quality, although at my ripe old age old habits do die somewhat hard.  Visiting websites and Likeing nutritional writers on Facebook does not, I'm reliably informed, constitute 'doing something about it', even though there are some good sites, like this one I stumbled across: Engine 2 Diet

A friend of mine has a thing about including all the colours of the rainbow in her diet, and takes great pleasure in lambasting the lack of variety in mine, so I can't say I was hugely surprised when these items were handed to me in a gift bag as a belated birthday gift last night...



My challenge, it appears, is to take the item on the left and use it to do something creative with the items on the right.  My first instinct is to stick the whole lot in my smoothie-maker (excluding the book, silly) and fabricate something approximating to soup, but to be quite honest with you, I don't even know how to make that!  Unimpressive.

In other words, my selection of the word 'challenge' above was quite deliberate.  The challenge is only exacerbated by the fact that - so I'm told - the items on the right will not wait indefinitely for me to figure this stuff out.  The horror!  Time to open the book and quit procrastinating by writing a blog post, methinks.

In closing then, two questions for you, dear reader:

1. What would you do with the items on the right?


2. What are your favourite nutritional dishes involving minimal preparation?

Please share your thoughts via the comments.  Oh, and wish me luck!  :-)

Twitter tips

Last week I created version 1.0 of Simon's Guide to Twitter, a short presentation for my colleagues at work, designed to evangelise Twitter, encourage an increase in their use of the service, and to provide some guidance for those getting started.

One of the slides contains a list of tips which I thought made a good starting point for the newbie.  Some I made up myself, and some I 'borrowed' or were shared with me after an initial request for contributions.

I thought it might be worth sharing here, and also using this opportunity to ask for your thoughts on what should be included.  If you're new to Twitter I'm keen to know whether you find these helpful and encouraging, and if you're a seasoned pro, I'd like to hear your thoughts on how this list can be refined.  The aim is to get the 'top tips' onto a single slide, so it's certainly not intended to become an exhaustive list.

Please have a read-through and share your thoughts in the comments.

• Have a theme you tweet predominantly about


• Mix professional and personal* tweets


• * not too personal :-)


• Ensure your bio describes you and what you’re about


• Try to tweet at least 2 or 3 times a day


• Reach-out by sending ‘@replies’ – aim to increase conversations as % of tweets


• Use your real name in either ‘username’ or ‘name’ - eg. My username is AvayaData, name is ‘Simon Tompson’


• Use a photo of yourself (nobody follows an egg)


• Alcohol and twitter do not mix


• Consider anything you tweet will be public in perpetuity


• Use a #hashtag to join a conversation about a specific topic


• Don’t feel obliged to follow people who follow you


• Use Twitter search to find people covering topics that interest you and who may be interested in you


• As the number of people you’re following grows, use Lists to categorise


• Beautiful 20 year-old women who follow you are 99.9% guaranteed to be spammers

Facebook experiment ends, but...

OK, so last month the experiment ended.  To be very honest, I didn't miss Facebook at all during the break, but did begin to miss interacting with a select few people who I know very well will probably never look at another social network.  Everything I wrote in my last post still applies - Facebook is still, in my view, not a very appealing or attractive social networking site, but there are a couple of reasons why I decided to re-activate my account.

First-up, I'm human.  A couple of good friends of mine gently nudged me with 'we're missing your updates on Facebook' comments, and when one of these came in a Christmas card I thought perhaps I should get back on there and begin sharing again.  It's not like it's going to kill me.....right?

Secondly, my interest in social media (especially for work) is growing fast and the reality is that if you're going to be interested in something, you need to be actually, you know, using it.  The ever-increasing ease of sharing and the ever-improving tools for doing so mean that a Facebook account is worth having, even if it's not your primary network.

Almost immediately after I de-activated, Facebook introduced a number of changes which sought to address some of the major criticisms, and also the much-discussed Timeline.  Having gone back in I'm still not sure I like the overall feel of the place.  It's a bit like being forced to use a Windows PC when you're a Mac guy (like myself).  Sure, it works, but it's really not that pleasant a place to be.

Last, but most importantly, I decided that if I was going to go back onto the site, I'd address my number one criticism from my last post - noise.  One of the things which made it such a huge time-sink previously before was feeling obligated to 'friend' every human being I'd ever so much as met since the day I was born.  I've had the good fortune to know a lot of cool people over the course of my lifetime, but I've come to the conclusion that life is an ever-evolving and changing process, and as part of that process people come into your life, and then at some point they go out of your life again.  It's no reflection on them whatsoever, but they're simply no longer part of my contemporary life, and it's safe to say that will be for a reason, assuming I wanted to analyse it.  The bottom line is that I don't much care to read all the trivial updates from their lives, or have them know mine.  That all seems rather pointless to me now.

So, I decided to purge all these 'friends' who are no longer in my present-day life and just use Facebook for family and the friends who I am still actively engaged with in some capacity.  For the most part I've also discarded people who were only 'friends' because I happen to work with them.  If I wouldn't go out of my way to go for a drink with them, then I'm unlikely to be too interested in whatever their baby barfed all over them that morning!

So, taking all those 'friends' out, and bearing in mind several of my friends aren't on any kind of social network at all, I'm left with around 30 people (compared to around 110 previously).  Much more manageable, and a fair bit more intimate too.  I like the fact I'm just talking to, and listening to, those people who I see from time to time in the real world.  It also means I won't have to think quite so broadly about all the people who will see what I post before I do so.

I'm still mostly tweeting and having those sent to Facebook, but I have started toying with other mobile apps which can post directly to Facebook, and of course I can now interact with posts which others put on there.  I'd still rather everyone were on Google+, but I suspect that's going to take a while, and with the average age of my friends/family may happen never!  You know what they say, you can't teach an old dog new tricks!

My Facebook Experiment

I've decided to take a break from Facebook. Whilst not quite ready to totally obliterate all my data and settings from the site, I've taken the step of 'deactivating' the account, which essentially just makes me vanish from the Facebook world.

So why? Why take this seemingly drastic step? Must admit, I do feel a bit like a counter-culture maverick, flying in the face of all contemporary logic, so I think it's only fair I set out my personal reasons for going down this route. My guess is that, as a minimum, you'll empathise with my reasoning, or perhaps you'll even agree with everything I say. I'm genuinely curious to hear your thoughts, so please add a comment below. OK, here goes :

Reassessing my definition of 'friendship'.  Just like everyone else, I have friends and I have family.  If I take a step back from Facebook and ask myself who are my friends, my list is going to be a subset of the 100-odd 'friends' I've accumulated on the site.  I'd say a third of the total, at most.

So what do I mean by a 'friend', or more to the point, what do I want the definition to be (remembering the old cliché that we choose our friends, unlike our family)? Well, for me, a friend is someone who I am still actively engaged with - ie. someone who I see, visit, call, text, email or IM on a regular or fairly regular basis.  They're the ones with whom I can pick up where I left off, no matter how much time has passed.  They're the ones who don't need a status update on Facebook to tell them what's going on in my life, and vice versa.  It's not that all the other people don't have some meaning for me, more that they are part of my past.  Why should I continue to engage with my past if I have no intention of actually seeing those people anywhere outside my computer screen?  So, my decision is partly based on a wish to focus on family and the friends I am actively engaging with in the present.

Too much Social Media noise.  I've been on a drive to simplify my life in 2011.  Somewhat challenging my efforts has been the explosion in hype around Social Media, forever encouraging me to sign-up and share.  It all gets a bit overwhelming.  I don't remember ever posting a status update on Facebook.  For a long time now I've been finding the brilliant simplicity of Twitter suits me far better, and so I simply instructed Twitter to send my tweets to Facebook as status updates, so I didn't have to do both.  Twitter wins because it's a fantastic networking tool and the 140 character limit (pure genius) ensures it is easily digestible.  I like it so much that I have two accounts - one personal, and one professional, and am constantly fed useful information about what interests me.  Compare and contrast this with Facebook status updates which I'm forced to receive from all my 'friends'.  De-friending, the equivalent of un-following on Twitter, is mired in all sorts of etiquette complexity, so it ends up being like family - the friends you didn't choose.  See where I'm going here?

The irony is that the first thing everyone pokes fun at Twitter for is the status updates where people describe what they had for lunch, but I'm more likely to see that kind of thing on my Facebook feed (wow, puns all over the place).  Tweeting what you had for lunch is Twitter for beginners.  If you use the service more constructively it's capable of so much more, and again, you choose who you follow with much greater freedom to stop following than you'll ever feel with a Facebook friend.

So that's Twitter.  Then there are the other social networks that serve a purpose for me.  LinkedIn has proved a simple yet powerful tool for collating the professional contacts I've made and continue to make.  It's also very handy for keeping an eye on what other employment opportunities are out there, should my current employer no longer tick all my career boxes.

And finally, there's the new kid on the block, Google+.  I fear in time it may end up much like Facebook has become, but right now it feels like a lighter option, and crucially, one which I feel properly in control of.  So when I want to post more than 140 characters, Google+, or indeed here on Wordpress, will be the place I turn.

Facebook is simply at the bottom of the pile.  Not without its uses, but the one that's easiest for me to drop.

Facebook Irritation.  Do I need to spell it out?  I think you know precisely what I'm talking about.  For as long as I can remember, there's been something or other irritating me about the site.  They change things - all the time!  I've become accustomed to rapid change in the internet age, but if it's confusing change which forces you to go and re-check your settings and wonder where things have gone, then it's change going backwards.  It perpetually feels like beta software.  Facebook always gives me this nasty feeling that something isn't set the way it should be, so I don't feel in control of what's on there about me and who is seeing it.  I don't feel I can trust the company with all that data.  18 months after the iPad launched there's STILL no proper client.  I don't know.  I'm rambling.  But Facebook has a way of making me feel like a mouse being continuously experimented on, a commodity.  Let's be honest, Facebook users ARE commodities for that profit-making business.

Facebook is NOT the Internet.  I'm old enough to have seen the whole genesis of the Internet, and experienced the thrill of the wild west, as I and others learned of the limitless potential of this network of networks.  To this day I am still regularly reminded how truly awesome the Internet is - possibly the greatest invention since the Gutenberg press.  What I love about it is that, in essence, it all boils down to a computer network running standards-based protocols which anyone can use as they see fit.  Now along comes this phenomenon called Facebook.  It aspires to somehow become  the Internet.  A portal beyond which you never need venture.  All your communication needs are covered, so why go to any other site?  As a child of www, I'm not at all happy to see advertisers using, for example, facebook.com/brandname, rather than www.brandname.com.  In essence, I don't want to see one huge corporation making the World Wide Web irrelevant.  The freedom of the Internet has led to strong competition and rapid innovation.  It's not difficult to guess what will happen to those benefits if one company subsumes all in its path.  No thank you.  I don't want to be part of that future.  The Internet is a public place with limitless potential, not a closed proprietary garden the great Zuckerberg designs for our 'benefit'.

Privacy.  I've left this one till last, though for many it would be their first issue with Facebook.  The truth is, I don't have that much to hide (at least that I'm aware of), and I'm not that bothered about people knowing me fully.  I guess I'm comfortable in my own skin.  The mere fact I'm happy to stay on other social networks should attest to that.  But let's assume I was more 'normal' and actually quite concerned about maintaining my privacy.  Well, this flies completely in the face of the whole Facebook ethos.  Zuckerberg wants us to share our entire lives online and sees no reason why any of us should hide anything.  Indeed, the site is about to launch Timelines, encouraging us to go back to our birthdate and fill in as much detail as possible about our lives.  By doing so, we would be simply feeding the Facebook machine with more and more ammunition to use for its financial gain - enabling more and more targeted advertising and more and more delicate social situations.  Just imagine!  Not for me, thanks.  It just doesn't sit well in my stomach.

OK, I've gone on long enough.  A lot of the things I don't like about Facebook can be ignored or overcome with a little effort, so it would be wrong to discourage others from using it if they're comfortable or enjoy doing so.  Hell, I may even return myself at some point, but for now I'm going to experiment with life outside, the way it was just 7 years ago, and see how it goes.  No doubt I'll miss some fun stuff.  No doubt I'll feel a bit of an outsider.  But for now, at least, it's time to take a break, and something tells me I'll survive just fine without it.  In the meantime, you can find my Twitter feed and Google+ details over on the right of this page.

Please share your thoughts and reactions - I'm interested to hear what you think.

RIP Audio Cassettes

Inspired by several blogs (like this one and this one) on the topic of downsizing, I decided a long time ago to gradually digitise all the media in my house - Vinyl, Audio Cassettes, VHS Cassettes, DVDs, CDs, Photos. The advent of enormous hard disks makes this achievable, although it's no mean feat, believe me.

I'm pointing out the obvious, but the issue is that all the analogue stuff (all but the DVDs and CDs) has to be digitised in 'real time', which means playing every record, every cassette, every videotape and turning it into ones and zeroes as you go. No big deal for the odd few here and there, but when you're talking about a lifetime's worth of accumulated media it's nothing short of a marathon task.

Today I finally finished the audio cassettes, and I think the task has taken on-and-off around 2 years to complete (believe me, there's only so much of this you can do in one go without going bonkers). Each file was ripped to MP4 (a bit like MP3, but better) and now sits amongst the countless thousands of other files in my iTunes Library. iTunes tells me there are 144 cassette recordings, constituting 3.8 days of continuous recording. That's quite a big chunk of my free time, and remember, I had to be on-hand the whole time to flip the cassette over, start and stop the recording and label each file before I forgot what it was.

What a palava! Why am I bothering? Well, it's all in the name of downsizing the amount of crap stuff I own, which over my brief time on this planet has accumulated to suffocating proportions. This is a much wider topic which I'll cover another time, but that's the incentive behind all this.

So, today I hurled the last batch of tapes into the dustbin and kissed goodbye to a media format which has been in my life for more than three decades. Of course the reality is that I won't miss them much now they're gone, but there's no escaping the fact there are countless memories bound-up in all those miles and miles of magnetised tape, and it's amazing how clear the flashbacks are associated with each and every one of them. There were the ones from the 70s, compilation tapes which my Dad created, himself recording from vinyl to tape in real-time. Each was meticulously labelled and every song therein noted down on a little piece of paper slipped inside the case. There were the pre-recorded ones that survived (I swear most were designed to self-destruct after a few plays), like Madness' Absolutely, Yazoo's Upstairs at Erics, The Cure's Faith. In some cases I can actually recall moments when I was playing those cassettes and where I was at the time. In the case of the Madness cassette it was on one of those very early Sony Walkmans - this exact one in fact, and I was standing on the platform of Ipswich station, waiting for a train to Bury St Edmunds.

Then there's the eponymous MixTape. Creating a mixtape for someone, a collection of favourites for a relative, or a collection of meaningful songs with subliminal (but more often rather more overt) messages you wanted to convey, was truly something special. A gesture with meaning, personal, thoughtful. Even more special, in the days before Skype, the tapes where your girlfriend recorded her own voice, interspersed with a few of her favourite songs. It's hard to get much more personal than that.

I was always a Japanese tape manufacturer kind of guy. It had to be TDK, Sony or Maxell for me, and sure enough, every one of those cassettes stood the test of time and held their contents reliably over the decades so that one-day, totally unforeseen when they began their journeys in life, they could be played for one last time and fed into a computer where they would take up 0.00002% of a hard disk about the size of 4 tape cases!

But back to the memories, and here's the BIG problem with digital media, there's simply no way a file on iTunes can evoke memories the way one of these lovely old formats can. If I'm lucky my strange but remarkably effective memory for useless information will recall the cassette and then the memory associated with that cassette when I listen to those files. However there's no tactile experience, nothing unique about each file apart from the order and quantity of ones and zeroes. There's no soul. I remember thinking the same when CDs came along and displaced vinyl LPs. Lost now is the pleasure of putting a record on and sitting back with the album cover to read and enjoy the artwork and sleeve notes. In a way it's sad that the younger generations who've grown up in the digital era will never be able to attach memories to the unique carriers of their music, since there are no unique carriers anymore. The closest they have is which model of iPod they were using when they heard this song, or that song. Progress?

As I write this I can hear the reader asking - so why get rid of all these memory-prompters then? Well, it's a question of weighing-up the pros and the cons, and about a wider philosophical reasoning to do with letting go of the past and lightening the burden of 'stuff' we carry through our lives, but again, I'll save that for another post.

For now I just want to mark the day the last audio cassette left my house, and left my life. RIP Audio Cassettes.

Day trip to Hastings

Celebrating my bike's 2nd birthday, I decided to make the most of the glorious (and very un-April-like) weather and ride down to the coast.  After a look at the map, the place that jumped-out at me was Hastings, which I'd not visited before.

So, off I went, having packed less 'bikey' clothes to change into on arrival.  My route took me down the A22 via East Grinstead and Polegate, a rather dull route due to all the low speed limits and town traffic.  Before long I hit the coast at Norman's Bay, just west of Bexhill.  Arriving at the coast I was greeted with the cooler, fresher air you'd expect, and the usual sight of Brits turning varying shades of red.  Here was a thin strip of beach huts, basking in bright coastal light with tantalising glimpses of the sea beyond.

A little further on I finally arrived in Hastings after an uninspiring, slow ride along the uninspiring sea front, which goes on a long way.  My usual approach is to ride the full length and then turn round to return to what looks like the best part, but this tactic doesn't work so well when there IS no discernible best part, and so it was in Hastings.  Instead I was greeted with a very long row of tired buildings with fading paint and rusting metalwork, car parks full of seagull-crap-covered cars, and the occasional ice cream van.

I eventually parked at the eastern end of the town, at which point I realised I was slap-bang in the middle of the bucket-and-spade quarter.  All around me were the bright colours of visitor 'attractions', the noises massed-groupings of Brits make when at the seaside, and a disarmingly high number of scooter boys.

What is it with scooter boys?  What is it about scooters?  Can't say I'll ever understand why quite large, ageing men would choose to ride miniature motorbikes more akin to hairdryers, with tiny wheels and tiny horsepowers.  Bizarre.  A reminder that we live in a very diverse world.

Clearly Hastings is not a wealthy town.  Certainly, the east end looks like an abandoned building site with bizarre multi-storey huts, crumbling shacks and scattered rusting boats on the shoreline.  And then you stumble on a sign like this...

 



 

Sometimes words are simply not enough to explain ones reaction to what one sees!

Some sustenance was called for, and after walking past at least a dozen seafood outlets and tourist eateries, I spotted an interesting looking corner cafe.  It turned out to be a Turkish place and I was immediately drawn to their 'hot and cold meze'.  A very good choice that was - delicious and with flavours which immediately transported me off to that part of the world.

Duly refuelled, I headed off up the steep hill behind onto what's known locally as the West Hill.  I was hoping to get a look at the castle there, but it was mysteriously closed with locked gates and no explanation as to why I couldn't go take a look.  Well, it was gone 5pm by this time, so I guess it had closed for the day.  Ho hum.

In any case, the climb up the hill was more than worth it for the fabulous views I was rewarded with.  It's not hard to see how this place had such significance as a defensive position, with its excellent views out across The Channel towards France.  I've no doubt our Gallic neighbours would be clearly visible on a clearer, less hazy day so we could blow our noses in their general direction from the castle parapet.  Sitting on the edge of the hill, quietly overlooking the touristy town below was this man and his dog...



 

If ever I needed a reminder of why I want a dog so much, this was it.  They looked so bonded, sitting quietly just watching the world go by.  Certainly different to the dogs I grew up with (Irish Setters), who had an innate inability to sit still for more than 3 seconds!

After that it was back down the hill and back to the bike for the ride home.  I have to say I wasn't hugely impressed with Hastings.  It's clearly a place with a lot of potential for a great day out, but it's sorely let down by dirt, litter, and many of the visitors who really bring the place down.  It feels cheap and a bit tacky, which is such a shame given the historical significance of the town.  Can't say I'll be in a hurry to return, but I'm glad I went and took a look.

The run back up to London went smoothly and progressively, along the A21 up to Sevenoaks and then around the M25 in the late afternoon showers set off by the heat of the day.  The bike's now done well over 10,000 miles and has certainly earned its big service.