an online war...

Recently, I realised that my stress levels are creeping up...you know, to the point where whacking someone seems like a good idea.  I used to play RPG games to let of some steam, but have not bought a new game in probably 10 years. Always enjoyed a bit of strategy, so after some searching found Evony, a massively multiplayer online game. And, it is free! Play is browser based, and it is really light on the network, and your resources keep building while you are not online.  The play pace is of such a nature that you won’t waste hours and hours sitting behind your PC, more a bit FaceBook, check in a couple of times a day, pace.  I joined an alliance of newbies and we have a lot of fun playing together and fighting together...

Maybe this gets that urge to wring someone’s neck down a notch...will keep you posted...

Thomas

and now, a blog post...

Wow, it has been a long while since I posted something on my blog! The pace of life is an amazing thing…we just seem to get sucked into it J I have finally got my Web 2.0 life under control. With using Trillian Astra and Flock I now have all my services and IM accounts under relative control. Now just waiting for Flock to start using the new 3.5.1 version of Firefox, and away we go!

Business has been good recently, with Solution Blox closing a number of deals and bringing a new Systems Engineer onboard. Hennie Marais joined us from Imperial Online, and we are certainly expecting great things from him. Welcome aboard Hennie!

We do have a number of challenges ahead of us, we are assisting Dorado Software in the development of a driver for the HP ProCurve switch platform, specifically to support HP 3500, 5400 and 8200 series devices. Quite a challenge…

With the global economy being so tight, it is amazing to see how people show their true nature. Ethics and good manners go out the door when deals are scarce, and we have been bitten by some local companies in this regard. If nothing else, it at least shows that we still have heart, and that we are still on the moral high ground…

On a much lighter note, we recently helped the Limpopo Jewellery Cluster to implement a Wifi HotSpot and Internet Café in Polokwane, South Africa. Using software from Antamedia we were able to lock down some public access PC’s and provide pre-paid WiFi access for this development project. These guys are funded by the European Union and SEDA, and provide a incubator for SME Jewelers and a training facility for previously disadvantaged individuals from the Polokwane area. Thanks to our friends Wynand and Tonie Brits from Lexion Systems and NetLogix, we were able to supply a PepLink load balancing unit, capable of providing Internet access via ADSL with a hot 3G backup, and a high capacity Internet Access account. They were fantastic with their service and support, thanks guys!

I’ll update our company website over the weekend, as we have added some great new vendors to our portfolio. See you online soon!

A great quote ahead of our elections...

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.   What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.   The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.   When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.   You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
 
~~~ The late Dr. Adrian Rogers , 1931 to 2005 ~~~

 

People ruining your day

To say that I am upset is an understatement. In my previous post I mentioned that we have someone owing my wife money. Well, reason did not prevail and now we face the unpalatable process of suing a guy for the money he owes us. So, now the question becomes, how much good money are we throwing after bad money? I have no faith in the ability of this process to get us cash in hand, as the more likely scenario seems to be (according to close friends and business associates who’s been through this in the past) is that we’ll get a successful judgement, but that we the verdict comes, the guy will throw his hands in the air, claim poverty and the worst that will happen is that he’ll have a default judgement on his credit record for the next few years. And getting to this point can cost us as much or more than what he currently owes Mari! It makes my blood boil, as there seems to be no justice in the world...how is it possible that a guy can bring a small company, who for the love of their cause do a lot of good, to the brink of collapse, and put my family under financial pressure, and simply get away with it? I’ll admit to having pondered the possibility of getting some guys to pay him a “visit”, but what will that achieve, and more importantly, what will that say of me as a person? If you have any ideas, let me know...

 

Thomas

An update on some posts...

It’s good to be back home after travelling to Dubai recently. Many hours not sleeping on a plane gives one the chance to reflect, and to decide which course of action to take. So, with regards to the guy owing us money, he’s getting a very serious letter in the morning, informing him of pending legal action ASAP. Several meetings with his staff and one with himself went nowhere. We extended the olive branch, forgave trespasses, discounted, credited etc...no joy. So, due to the amount owing we are being forced to take action in the High Court. Not a pleasant situation to be in, but reason did not prevail, and we cannot just walk away and lose the cash.

In the other matter where I received a rude email, a cool head did after all prevail. A civilized discussion was held, and fences mended. But, that being said, there is now a level of distrust in the relationship that will not be overcome in the short term...

Moral challenges...

I have a sticky situation at the moment...My wife is about to lose around R 120 000.00 due to a Christian Pastor not paying her company for work done. What to do? The guy is busy building a profile to obtain influence in the political arena, and clearly using his “Christianity” as a way of building trust. His actions are very different though...he intends riding the gravy train hard and fast. I am proud of being a Christian myself, but instead of harping on about it, I hope people can see that I am a child of God in my daily actions. Sure, I fail miserably and sin often, but my moral compass is not broken. The big question is...do we extend an olive branch and hope Mari’s company get paid, or do we publicly expose this guy for who and what he is? We own the Intellectual Property to a project he wanted to run, and have ownership of the domains and Facebook groups. We could just publish an online version of the debacle, and hope when people search for his name that our site comes up... I am torn about what to do...I am seeing our corporate council in the morning to discuss our legal options, in the mean time, does anyone know a really bad ass debt collector?

Ode to a half Scotsman, half Irishman

My dad has a favourite saying about partnerships. He says "a parnership is a sinking ship". Dad, glad to say that this time you are wrong. When I first met Dave, his wicked sense of humour immediatly had me at ease. He's tight with cash, which suits me fine as I'd spend all the doh in a flash. Most importantly, Dave has supported me every step of the way over the past year, offering advice, support and not afraid to pick the odd bone with me. When the chips were down due to our family drama with our premature baby boy, Dave never flinched, taking as much of the load and stress of me as possible. Dave, you are an awesome guy, thank you for being my business partner, I know we are going to have a rocking year mate!

Email as business communication

Last night as I quickly checked my email, I found the most rude item in my inbox. Why? Because a short email sent to one of our vendor representatives, was a) unethically copied to one of our competitors/distributors and b) read completely out of context. The result is a lot of name calling (judging by the date and hour, I now suspect the author may have had a couple of toots before typing up this email) and it will certainly lead to a distict lack of trust from my side when dealing with said company. Channel conflict is never pretty or productive, and it leads to unnecessary complications in what would previously have been a straight forward deal. And I know better than to expect an apology from the culprits. How deep does the rabbit hole go? Who knows...So, what next for us with this vendor? Do we write off our investment in kit and training, or do we try and mend fences and move forward? Time will tell...

On a related topic, we are also in the doodah with another vendor. One division in the vendor company responded to an RFP and provided normal list pricing to the potential customer. Due to geographic challenges, another division was asked to complete the engagement. Division two had a look at the deal, and promptly decided that due to the size of the customer, the nature of their business and their geographical location, that they will take a chance and try to sell said technology at almost 5 times the normal price. And here's the kicker, division two did not know or realize that division 1 had already provided pricing. So the customer started looking around for a new supplier. When we highlighted this issue to the vendor, we where treated like lepers. The major issue? The division two vendor rep had already informed everyone that the deal was done, at the inflated price without a purcace order from the customer! Luckily this kind of issues come up rarely, as I do not have the energy or inclination to deal with this kind of nonsense on a daily basis.

Minor network issues and their impact on application performance

One of our goals is to improve the underlying performance of the network, to clean up any underlying issues, before we directly start addressing application performance issues. Unfortunately we see customers all the time who suffer from poor application performance, and then spend days working with server and application guys to try and find the issue, while they have no visibility into the basic health of their network. The time and material bills add up, while the poor customer is no closer to a resolution of the problem. In a recent case, we found a customer complaining bitterly about the performance of an ERP system across an MPLS WAN environment. The ISP has checked the MPLS settings a couple of times, and the ERP vendor had been on site for days, trying to find the issue. Performance on the LAN was patchy on a few systems, and overall not what was expected. To make matters worse, a development environment was up and running, and performing 100% while the production system was just not cutting it. Deploying a network management technology allowed us to quickly find the issues. The WAN site router had a duplex mismatch on the switch port where it was connecting, impacting performance for all applications across the WAN, with the production server also having the same issue on its port, affecting LAN users. Some desktops had the same issue, and some VLAN’s where segmented. In less than 24 hours the issues were identified and fixed. System performance is vastly improved, and the overall stability of the network environment too. This customer is now buying a managed network management service from one of our reseller partners, who will be keeping an eye on their network, 24 hours a day. In this case, the cost of a managed service is miniscule in relation to the cost of business productivity lost due to poor performing mission critical applications. None of the issues found onsite where major network breakers, but their collective impact was enough to cause major frustration.

 

The way we connect to the world...

So, I took the plunge and signed up for Twitter as well. That means that I am now connected via LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook and Twitter!!!! Does anyone know of a way to simply integrate all these technologies in a single interface? I would love to have a single page where I can make changes and via an API, all these social networking sites and technologies are updated in a single go. Keeping all of these update will be  challenge once we really start getting back to work on the 12^th of January. Buzz me if you have ideas!