Friday April 29, 2005

Product of the week Portmeirion china

This tableware is the best in my opinion. It is tough, attractive and seems to survive in a dishwasher well. The series we have above is called The botanical garden.

The reason we started buying it was we only had a five place 'starter' china set. I remember being upstairs and heard a crash. I shouted down "what have you broken?" to my wife. She replied "a dinner plate" then said "hang on, too many bits, two plates!" Having lost nearly fifty percent of the dinner plates we started buying the Portmeirion stuff. When I look at it it sort of reminds me of when we visited the Portmeirion village where they filmed the The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan . It is an amazing village in a very attractive part of Wales.

Sunray at home object of desire...

After a prolonged delay caused by the company I bought my Cisco router with VPN from, I am up and running with Sunray at home. I took my bundle of Sunray, country kit and router home last night. I just about managed to force myself to have dinner before playing with it. Never has a piece of hardware from Sun developed such an interest and expectation from me. Ever since we first tried sunray with two users on a single Ultra5 I dreamed of taking this technology home.

I had to program my firewall at home to do DHCP for the Cisco router and then I plumbed it all in. It came up like magic. A quick utswitch -h to get the sunray onto our servers and bingo my session from work was on the screen and as I had left it an hour ago. I have to say this is awsome. It is fast. It is so quiet in our study now that I can hear the blackbird singing outside. After the sunray worked I did an init 5 on my ultra5 desktop to shut it down and power it off. I am going to get really annoyed when my wife comes in and switches on her PC. This is so cool. ( and it will be in the summer..) I don't have to think about upgrading my home machine or system admin on it anymore. If the sunray stops working I just bring another one home. It is a zero boot time access to my desktop. It is going to reduce my electricity bills. If our work building has power problems I just drive home and work from home. ( as our servers and the internal network are on UPS/Gen sets)

Demand it from your IT specialists, you will never look back...

Final thought. A big thank you to Ian who sorted out where my missing router had got too and Tony who is from our internal support team in Sun who quickly programmed the router up and showed me how to do the plumbing. Thanks guys.