Hello strangers :)

So firstly, hello and welcome back; please forgive the cobwebs and dust - it's been a while..

So where have I been? Mostly seat 11C on Lufthansa flights to/from Düsseldorf, or BA flights to Milan - but mainly in meetings and working daft hours...

But, and here's the good bit, occasionally I get let out of my day job (well given I now have 3 employers this actually isn't very often) and I get to experience something really very good. So here goes...

A long time ago a great group of friends got together and decide that at least once a year we'd all get our posh togs on (or I'd at least shave and wear a suit) and dine out at a high quality restaurant to sample their fine food, wines & service.

This year it was my turn to sort it out - don't laugh! Sometimes I can actually  organise things in advance, and of an OK fashion - so this year I thought we'd go north, to the lakes and stunning Cumbria... So, here's a tale in picture form...

Space is a premium in Cumbria :)

Trying not to get too distracted we wondered around the local area, but a clue to our specific location

Until we found 'our house' for the weekend

Wonderful building full of charm & style

Until off we strolled into the village...

The Kings Arms (not my picture) for a light lunch snack - great beer & food (Aspen chips & beef sandwich fully recommended!)

The Kings Arms Cartmel

We then managed all of 50yds onto their sister pub Royal Oak Inn (not my picture)

The Royal Oak Inn

With beer courtesy of Hawkshead Brewery I full recommend the Windermere Pale as a gentle supping pint whilst watching the day go by :)

Finally after a brief refresh and smarten up back at 'our house', we walked 250yrds and
said hello to our real destination - 2 Michelin stars, 10/10 Good food guide, #2 in UK...

And on to the menu - yes there are no choices, just
 a full 17 course tasting menu (excluding the cheese, port & whiskies courses) to work through!

Oyster pebbles - meringues filled with an oyster mouse. Taste of the sea that dissolved deliciously. Complete with  Oyster Leaves to nibble. Just don't try and eat the real pebbles in there as well!

Cockles and seaweed - a seaweed cracker (like a prawn cracker) filled with a delicious cream with juicy cockles...

Smoked Eel with ham Fat - possibly one of the nicest starters I've ever tasted.  Crispy skin simply dissolves to leave juicy ham with eel - perfect! If they did take-outs or on-line orders I could live on these...

Squid with Chicken - a squid ink cracker with dots of oil, crispy chicken skin and a pate, delicious...

One of the most original presentation styles I've seen in a long time - pottery 'sacks' full of  "Crispy potato with Coddled Eggs". Perfection...

Cod yoke, sage cream, radish, salt & vinegar. Pea shoots with baked salt & vinegar rice.  

The taste effect is one of posh fish, chips & mushy peas :) Utterly brilliant...

Swede, turnip in a light but strong cheese sauce - delicious

Fresh warm three types of bread

The most superb Venison tartare with amazing candid balls tasting of pernod - a sublime mix of tastes and textures that I could eat again and again

Artichoke and truffles - purée and crispy fried, strong flavours done well 

Scallops and chard - delicious and I don't know what they do to the ruby chard but it's sublime 

A whole new meaning to beetroot and ox tongue - delicious

Plaice with mussels & leeks with celeriac  

Suckling pig belly pork and veg :) Sublime...

Sea buckthorn, buttermilk and squash - sweet & bitter deliciousness...

Quince, lemon verbena & hazelnut all done to look like rocks - fantastic!

Blackberries, plum, malt & stout

My kind of cones for dessert - Pear, Calamint & Sweet Cheese

Biscuits for the cheeses

A small selection of local cheeses that we made a good dent into, accompanied by some fine ports

The finest chocolate pudding ever according to the good Mrs F...

We sat down to our table at 7pm and left at midnight, the restaurant atmosphere was relaxed and welcoming - not overly formal like some, and happily accepted a variety of casual smart to formal dress codes. The staff were friendly, witty, well informed, discreet and professional - just how it should be.

Our stay in the house also included full breakfast the next morning, so at 9:30 we found ourselves back in the same restaurant at the same table enjoying a 4 course breakfast including full-English. Needless to say we left Cartmel very happy, with full stomachs and well rested and refreshed.

So finally on to some contacts for those people that made it possible :-

@Simon_Rogan  Owner and uber-Chef
@Lenclume the restaurant team
@MarkDBirchall  Head Chef
@rjwbex Superb front of house

L'enclume restaurant itself can be found here
http://www.lenclume.co.uk/sr/

We stayed in L'enclume House http://www.lenclume.co.uk/sr/rooms.html and can recommend it fully appreciate the fine service from Franck and the team.

The local cheese shop that supplies L'enclume and is a great place to spend an hour on Sunday morning browsing superb cheeses and nibbles :-
http://www.CartmelCheeses.co.uk/

Will we be back? Oh yes definitely!

The Bar

So I thought I'd do a quick summary of the drinks in the home cellar / bar - wine list will be added when I find time :) http://www.grumpystorage.com/p/bar.html

Happy New Year

So I guess it's time for the obligatory 'Happy New Year' blog post...

Out with the old year - as frankly speaking it's pretty worn out now, and it's been a fairly mixed year with it's fair share of ups & downs both professionally and personally. Change is always good, but some losses are never good - John & JP you'll both be missed RIP.

But now we look forward and the bright star studded sky ushers in the new pristine year, which I guessing could be a pretty intense one given that it goes up to eleven :)

I could make lots of predictions, promises & resoltuions, but the only certainty among them would that they'd be wrong and broken! However given that I'll have finished my IT infrastructure tenders early in Jan 2011, I will try and update this blog much more often, and most definitely on IT Infrastructure related topics. Oh and of course I'll aim to be at each months #StorageBeers, and the other 'peer only' validation forums we'll be working on...

Right, I'm off to relax, have a take-away and a drink with family & friends to welcome in 2011, so I'll leave you with Nollaig chridheil agus bliadhna mhath ùr and spare you my rendition of a classic song...

Amazon Kindle v3 - Really Rather Good :)

So when I arrived home yesterday from my most recent week travelling abroad with work, as well as a happy wife and bouncing excited children, there were 2 new parcels from Amazon for me to open. (Well actually there were 4 parcels but that's about a normal week for me, and 2 new pairs of headphones for work aren't that interesting)

One contained a shiny new Kindle v3 WiFi+3G
The other contained it's Orange Leather Cover

Things I really like :-

1. Packaging - there's a feel of value / quality about the simple cardboard boxes (not the usual Amazon wrap-around boxes), the internal packaging is clean purposeful, elegant, appears recycled (in a good way) and contains no clutter. Somebody has clearly though a lot about the feel, appearance & impact of the packaging as well as the environmental impact (no unneeded cable twists, or plastic bags, of marketeering pamphlets etc)
2. The fact that it's pre-configured and setup with your own personal account before you power it on. This really was a surprise and a great customer touch, when I switched it on it already said "Hello Ian", was named "Ian's Kindle" and had the four books I'd ordered from the web site already available on it. Its a small thing, but shows a company totally focused on user experience - imagine if your next new phone already had all your contacts, settings, ringtones and applications on it the first time you powered it on without you having to do anything at all?
3. The multi-platform seamless integration. With reader applications all running on my Kindle, NexusOne Android & PC - all showing the same content, reading locations and annotations etc. Shows how a proper 'cloud service' should work - mix of devices and always there synchronised content.
4. Purposeful use model - in the same way I like and respect my Blackberry 8707 for clear and focused usability and design, the Kindle has that same brilliant focused feel, no clutter no tat no spamware just useful. In short it has engineered in simplicity & usability that many other products should rightly be envious of.
5. Naturally you'd expect a world-leading retail merchant like Amazon to focus on the ease of content purchase & management, and they certainly have here. It's a 'one click' process to purchase content and it arrives effortlessly on the Kindle.
6. Rapid nature of purchase & delivery - it's an almost real-time purchase from the web site (or device) to delivery of the content on the Kindle.
7. The E-Ink screen itself - I genuinely thought the text show when it opened the box was printed on a transparent film, the clarity & contrast really are that good! It really is very easy on the eyes and as clean to read as a paperback book.
8. The combined WiFi & 3G option means it's networking is always on & accessible, and downloads / purchases made have arrived perfectly - in the same way TonTom Live uses networking in a transparent and seamless fashion, Kindle makes the technology transparent.
9. The power adapter - it's very very small, uses the normal USB cable to plug-in and connect to a tiny power plug. Just aesthetically nice :)
10. The power off screen is a great touch - showing different images of relevant people / things each time it's powered down, I spent 10 minutes just power cycling it to see different images!

So what are the only down-sides so far?

a) The nice lady guide shown in the advert didn't actually get shipped by Amazon, disappointing for me but I guess my wife is rather happier about this :)

b) There still seems to be a minor 'gotcha' when loading many (ie 100s) books / files onto the device at the same time - in that the inbuilt search system then goes into index update/rebuild mode. This is totally a background process and doesn't impact any functionality or usage - except the general web consensus is that it drains the battery a lot quicker, and that some parts of the software platform are a little 'fragile' whilst this is going on.

c) The black-white-black millisecond screen flash when changing pages could be better if it were reduced or removed, but it isn't anywhere near as irritating or distracting as I thought it might be.

d) There is a minor mental / emotional frustration that I'd like to be able to see all the physical books I've purchased from Amazon available on the Kindle free and immediately, but I understand the content rights owner issues behind this.

Now I'm going to be interested to see :-

• How quickly Amazon's recommendation platform moves me over to recommending eBooks rather than physical books
• That Amazon list all of the physical books I've purchased over the years from them, and make it easy for me to obtain the Kindle eBook variant of each book (preferably at some discount price given I already own the physical medium)
• If Amazon will buy MediaMan and really start to exploit the 'making metadata available to customers' as a differentiation and business opportunity (eg the obvious case of inventory listing for insurance purposes etc)
• If Amazon will ever release a loyalty based reward scheme...

So the end of day 1 rating :-

• Would I buy the same one again? Yes
• Do I like using & reading off it? Yes
• Have I downloaded content? Yes
• Have I purchased new books? Yes
• Has my wife looked at it and said "that's ok"? Yes

Recommended.

Some interesting web sites I've found relating to Kindle v3 topics :-

       http://www.kindleminds.net/

       http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=140

Still here!

Just a very short message to say that I'm still here, I've still got over 90+ blog posts in draft waiting to be completed and published, and still fighting the cause for transparency & honesty with IT vendors.

But that at the moment with my new role I'm very very busy right now working on some key programmes, and a number of critical infrastructure standards & strategy tenders (no if you don't already know about them you can't be added etc).

Hopefully I'll get some proper content published in the next week of so, in the meantime you can catch my ad-hoc, odd time rants on twitter @ianhf

LiveScribe - Review and RFE

It's not often you'll see me do a product specific review or comment, but @JoeBaguley introduced me to a technology that has been really very useful and has no become part of my day working live in a positive way.

Both Joe & I were at a conference and started the first sessions taking notes, me on my tablet PC and Joe on his LiveScribe pen (http://www.livescribe.com/) - needless to say 4 hours later my tablet battery was flat but Joe's solution kept on going without faltering for the entire day (and the next one for that matter). During a lull in the second day (and whilst my tablet still had it's new battery life that day) I went online and ordered my own LiveScribe setup.

I'm now starting to see people use these in many meetings (@mikiSandorfi being the latest) - everybody I show it to 'gets it immediately' and wants to know costs and where to buy it from, so here's the list of LiveScribe equipment I purchased :-

Mini Leather book
     http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00264GKXE
Pen
     http://www.amazon.co.uk/Livescribe-4GB-Titanium-Pulse-Smartpen/dp/B002DJTMSW
A4 Ringbound Notepads
     http://www.amazon.co.uk/Livescribe-A4-Notebooks-4-Pack/dp/B0035XOD5W
Pen Refills
     http://www.amazon.co.uk/Livescribe-ARA-000008-Medium-Black-Cartridge/dp/B001AAOZV4

Review

• Great product, it just works
• Simple to use - naturally being male I've never even opened the manual, let alone read it...
• Love the variety of notepads - current I make the most use of the A4 sized ring-binder pads, feeling very natural in size, format and usage. But I also carry the mini leather notepad with me permanently in my jacket pocket
• Makes maintaining an electronic version of your notes & records trivial
• Battery charge lasts for ages and so it would appear does the 4GB memory
• Its great to be able to sync & recall the audio directly against the areas you've written

So time for some Request For Enhancements (RFEs) :-

• Gel nibs - it would be really good to get some replacement gel nibs rather than ballpoint
• Coloured writing - it would be great to be able to 'set colour' of writing in electronic copy (ie select different pen colours when handwriting regardless of the nib's actual ink colour) - and have the electronic version show these colours
• Re the desktop application :-
• Need to have settings for the directory locations for data storage (at least I've not been able to find how to manage this)
• Option to backup/recover data files used by the desktop application
• Whilst the OCR search is great, it really does need a built in, and decent, OCR conversion to MS office formats
• It would be useful to have integration with MS OneNote
• The desktop desktop application really needs to be working via corporate firewalls and proxy servers

Overall? Sometimes even something so simple and basic as a pen & paper can be improved to a dramatic level that makes something so much more suitable to revised work requirements. Would I buy it again? Absolutely without thinking!

Quickly catching up on recent announcements

So as those of you who follow my @ianhf twitter feed may have noticed I've been a little busy recently so sadly haven't had much chance yet to review & comment on the various (non)announcements from conferences etc

However just digging through my inbox I found one video release that really caught my attention, it appears to be an early NDA draft of some EMC, VMWare or HP R&D labs skunkworks project to move from IT hardware into more interesting engineering... The specific details are sketchy but it has all the trademarks of an IT presentation, and the hallmarks of a conference keynote speech...



A rapid searching of the interwebs & wikipedia lead me to this clarification...

Leaving... or just a wider circle of work colleagues?

Ok so this isn’t a blog entry I wanted to write, nor is it one that feels good but…

My long term manager @nicsut is leaving our company today in order to work both in a different company and country. The thing is that this location and new role is fantastic for Nick & his family, both personally and professionally - so you have to be happy for him no matter how sad you might feel.

Now over the years Nick hasn’t just been a colleague, then manager, but he’s been a mentor to me on both a personal & professional level. Certainly, and by no means least, Nick’s been a good friend, confidant, very very tolerant of my regular rants - I've certainly learnt something from him every day.

If you are lucky enough to meet or work with Nick, spend some time with him, listen, learn and enjoy – it most certainly will be worth your time!

So Nick, just remember, Paris is only a quick phone call or train journey away for me to ask for your advice, as your shoes really are very big ones to fill…

Bon Voyage, le vin est pour moi la prochaine fois!

ps Do you think below might be an acceptable excuse for me? :)

"StorageBeers On Tour" Motorsport Event?

Ok so there are a few motorsport fans follow this blog - so my thought is that we could have an informal "StorageBeers on Tour" camping, beer & cars meet at one of the following events :-

1. Le Mans - 12-13th June 2010
2. Goodwood FOS - 2-4th July 2010
3. Spa F1 GP - 27-29 August 2010

For Le Mans we normally plan to arrive on the Wed or Thurs before the race, and return on the Monday morning - driving there & back and staying in Maison Blanche.

For Goodwood FOS we normally arrive Thurs night or Fri morning and lave on Sun evening - staying at a local campsite a couple of miles away (with electricity).

These are not a football/stag-do events, but rather relaxed weekends, camping, cooking dead animal, hunting decent coffee, watching cars, sharing beer & whisk(e)y into the night.

So if anybody is up for something please let me know and I'll work out the costs etc :)

Update to add some cost estimates (very estimate - and assuming 2 people per car) :-

SPA
Camping & Ferry etc £169
Race tickets (Bronze 3 day) £160

Goodwood
Camping (3 nights - 2 people per pitch) £35
Passes (3 day roving) £100

Le Mans
Camping (MRI in Maison Blanche) & Ferry etc £165
Race tickets (not grandstand) £70

Add petrol, beer & food, speeding fines etc :)

Which is the preferred car event?

OT - UK Winter Wonderland

Well as no doubt anybody seeing the news will have heard that the UK has suffered a couple of snow-flakes in the last few days, and as a result there is mass reporter hysterial, panic buying & shops, road gridlock, trains running hours late (if at all), schools shut and little work attendance.

So whilst walking to drop my son of to nursery this morning I took a few pictures of where we live :-

The intrepid explorer himself


And it was this pic above where my foot went through the frozen lake ice - gave me a little shock but no harm done.


Might go to the ski challet later to find Gluwine :)



Think I'll be staying indoors as much as possible with a nice warm cup of coffee :)