Most internet start-ups these days don’t manage their own hardware, unless they’ve got several hundred million dollars in funding and some fairly specialist needs. Pretty much everyone is working just fine on rented virtual machines, dedicated servers, and utility-pricing-model ‘cloud’ services. This doesn’t mean that they don’t need a sysadmin, or ‘ops’ team. However, just [...]
After a pleasingly brief period of unemployment (where I mostly applied for jobs online and watched The West Wing), I’ve managed to land myself a job with PickLive, who are doing cool and interesting things with live event pool betting. They’ve even announced it on their blog, which is kinda cool. I’m going to be [...]
I got to spend the first five months of this year working for an awesome start-up – Source Rail. The vagaries of start-up life mean that I’ve had to move on, and now I’m looking for another awesome gig. Since several people have identified me at meet-ups as ‘that swearing guy off of Twitter’, I’ve [...]
We recently tried an experiment in selling stuff on the internet. It was a bit of a departure from our normal area of expertise, so it was definitely heavy on the ‘experiment’. I’ll say it right at the start: it was a complete and unmitigated failure, but not in the way I was expecting at [...]
I have a mortgage with Northern Rock, a UK bank which collapsed (triggering the first run on a UK bank) a couple of months after we got our mortgage. It’s a bit of a nightmare, and one of the (many) things that I lie in bed thinking about at 3am when I should be sleeping. [...]
Sometimes, this industry confuses me. For example, HP’s DL140, which is a perfectly nice 1u rack server, costs just over £600 (including VAT – we’re not VAT registered) here at Insight. On that same page you can see the cost of adding in a second matching processor. Just under £600. By their logic, the entire [...]
