Family ride following cycle hire at Wadebridge then onto the Camel Trail to Padstow. We spent the day in and around the harbour area before cycling back to Wadebridge to return the bikes.

A 10K plus run along and around the beaches of Newquay. Slower than normal thanks to the combination of running on sand and me admiring the view. Nice that the Garmin maps show me running on the ocean. Unfortunately I twisted my knee the following day as I gracefully fell from a surfboard and I wasn’t able to run again in Cornwall. Fingers crossed I will be out running again in London next week.

Acton & Ealing 12K by ealingcomedy at Garmin Connect

via Hamster 6.5K Tempo by ealingcomedy at Garmin Connect – Details.

via Ealing 10K by ealingcomedy at Garmin Connect – Details.

moooooooooo

Riding cattle class on the London underground every day makes you feel like you are part of the herd but today my usual jaunt along the Central Line was livened by some amusing fake cows. Charity activists were out in force and dressed as cows in a bid to raise awareness of rainforest-free food as organised by Friends of the Earth. I did not really notice the cows in my carriage until I was getting ready to depart at Bank and I noticed what looked like a guy wearing a comedy cow hat further down the carriage. It wasn’t until I removed my headphones that I heard a low “mooooooooooooo” from all around me and realised that there were several people dressed in body size cow outfits. I thought the cow standing still reading the Mootro, with headlines and text consisting of “mooooooooo”, was a very nice touch. Thankfully the cows were very well behaved and were just holding out small business card sized information text for those that wanted to find out more.

Subsequent articles then appeared online thanks to the Farmers Guardian, the Docklands 24, and Left Foot Forward. Various pictures are available on all three sites and it proves I must invest in an ever so slightly more modern phone so I can take pictures of cows on the underground if they ever appear again.

A Room with a View

Sitting back in the study admiring the clear blue skies with the cool breeze blowing through all the open windows. The neighbours tree is now in full bloom and looks fantastic framed against the cloudless sky. The petals will soon start to make the downward journey into our front garden and I will grumble each week as I sweep them into the garden waste bag but for the moment I’ll just enjoy the free show.

JKA

Saturday the 30th January 2010 saw us driving to Wellingborough for the first JKAE course of the year, a JKAE All Grades Kata Course. The courses were formerly for brown and black belts but now open for all grades and for £10 you receive 3 hours of tiring excellent training so it is well worth attending no matter what grade you are.

We had been warned in advance that the Wellingborough training location can be a bit cold, especially the floor, so we had added some extra layers just in case but thankfully the venue was perfectly climate controlled so we were soon changed into our gi’s and ready for action. The warm-up was conducted by one of the local sensei’s (apologies for not knowing the name) and we were quickly into a series of basics led by Ohta Sensei.We were eased through the basics but as combinations were added and effort increased, we were soon very hot and ready for training.

We have not been to a kata only course before so were looking forward to the unknown format as we were not sure what to expect. Following basics the groups were split by grade (kyu grades, brown belts, and dan grades) with each group being led through various kata. First up was Adel Ismail Sensei who put us all through Bassai Dai, which is a kata commonly taught to brown belts and is a requirement of grading for 3rd kyu, 2nd kyu, 1st kyu and is this most popular kata chosen for those progressing to their first dan grading. I am sure that most karateka would agree that the individual sensei personality can be just as important as the technical knowledge they are trying to impart and I always enjoy the relentless nature of training given by Adel Ismail Sensei. We were put through our paces performing segments of the kata, with the familiar cry of “one more time” from sensei, before moving onto the application of certain key sequences.

The hour seemed to be up very quickly but after a quick drinks break we were back under the tutelage of Roy Tomlin Sesei who took us through the kata Empi. Although we had performed this kata a few times previously in training, it was not a kata that we had spent any great deal of time performing. We both really enjoyed the time devoted to this kata and it was also the first time that we had spent under the instruction of Roy Tomlin Sesei. Again, the personality of the sensei goes a long way in the enjoyment of any particular training and we had a really enjoyable time under the instruction of Roy Tomlin Sesei.

We were then into the final hour where Gary Stewart Sensei led us through the kata Jion, which is a kata neither of us have attempted before so were looking forward to learning something new even though we were starting to feel very worn out at this point. Our final hour of kata was soon up, far too quickly for my liking, but I felt we had both really benefited from the course. We had both spent a good hour on the finer points of Bassai Dai, which will serve us well for future grading, and we had both enjoyed the time spent on Empi. MiniMe in particular enjoyed the challenge of learning and practicing Empi and really seemed to enjoy this segment of the course.

We both enjoyed the kata course and had both taken some key knowledge from the training. Thanks to the local hosts for their hospitality and to all the instructors who gave us their time and knowledge.

Oriental City was a shopping centre in London that began by specialising in Japanese goods along with an Asian based food court and widened to providing a wide range of Asian goods and services. We would often make a trek from Kent to Colindale so we could stock up on rice and food, Mrs danyul would raid the Japanese book shop, and we would eat from the fantastic food court. We continued to make the trek from Docklands before we then moved across to West London where a 20 minute car journey meant we would spend most Saturdays eating lunch at Oriental City. Unfortunately the site was closed in 2008, despite a very large scale protest to keep the centre open for the benefit of the Asian community, and the owners began to proceed with a plan to redevelop the site for housing and a chain store. The building remains boarded up and empty to this day while no further work on the site appears possible due to the downturn of the economy.

Tetote Factory at Pacific Plaza

Thanks to a tip off from Route 79 I was made aware of a blog entry from Will Eat for Money that a possible replacement for Oriental City had opened under the shadow or Wembley Stadium and was now open for business. We were visiting Japan at the time but quickly penciled in a visit for our return to the UK. Pacific Plaza opened in December 2009 and is located in a very unassuming location, somewhat sandwiched between a sofa store and a discount electrical store. In fact we had eaten at the wonderful Alisan Chinese restaurant in December so had parked in the same outlet car park without even noticing Oriental City. So we headed back and were immediately hit but the smells emanating from Tetote factory, which is a Japanese bakery located next to the building entrance. MiniMe was straight into the bakery picking out melon buns, cream buns, curry buns, and a tuna / cheese / corn bun concoction that we took home to share for dinner.

Doki Ltd at Pacific Plaza

Doki Ltd have setup a tableware shop downstairs, much like the small store that used to be located at Oriental City, and sells large range of bowls, plates, cups, and other Japanese and Oriental style kitchenware. We had a look round but did not buy anything since we are fully stocked in our kitchen although we will probably be back when Christmas time approaches again since my family would appreciate some of the items on sale. All the bowls and plates we previously purchased from the store at Oriental City are in good condition, which gives an indication of the quality of the goods they sell, and I am sure that we will be back whenever we need to replenish our stock.

Food Court at Pacific Plaza

The main draw for us was the food court where we hoped to see a return to the quality of food and the atmosphere of Oriental City. The seating area is smaller than Oriental City and a number of stores are either still vacant or have ‘coming soon’ signs but new tenants have been appearing every few weeks and there is a well rounded selection of food on offer. ‘China House’ dominates the far wall of the court and serves a wide range of dim sum and other Chinese food and there are stores providing Japanese, Thai, Korean,  and Malaysian food. We have sampled all the different stores and now have our own favourites that we veer towards on our weekly visit although we are always keen to try something new and so enjoy whenever a new little restaurant opens.

I am not going to go into a review on the food on offer but I heartily recommend a visit and taking a look for yourselves. The atmosphere or general mayhem of a packed Oriental City is not there yet but the foundations are in place and reviews and starting to pop up online:

• Will Eat For Money (article #1)
• Will Eat For Money (article #2)
• meemalee’s kitchen
• Randomness Guide to London
• Ferret Fabrications
• Tamarind and Thyme
• Pacific Plaza on flickr
• SeleraMu Malaysian Food

Telehouse West (February 2009)

When I first started my career in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry, I worked for a fledgling business ISP who had 2 racks of core equipment located in the Telehouse data centre in London Docklands. At the time Telehouse consisted of a single building, now known as Telehouse North, and although a prestigous location it was also slightly chaotic inside. These were days well before DSL, before all companies had a presence on the web, and back into the days when you needed a modem to connect to the Internet along with a dialup account that you had to pay for. The ISP Freeserve then came along and provided free dial-up access accounts and then it was not long before British Telecom started to roll out ADSL to the masses.

During these heady days of the Internet and the dot-com era we maintained 2 racks in Telehouse with various IT equipment and I would often be called upon to travel across London and install new equipment or connect new customer leased lines following a BT installation. Telehouse was much more informal during this time and, although security was still tight, you could pretty much run your own cables within your racks, between racks in the same suite, and between suites in the building. From a tenant perspective this was wonderful since you had the flexibility to install and connect when and where you wanted but in the long run this was a very bad thing indeed. In fact there are the ghosts of poor cabling practice still preserved around Telehouse North to this day. Huge over-tight cable looms still exist running through suites with large Telehouse warning signs on warning of a near death experience should you try and sneak anymore cables in; while some floor tiles have a disturbing wobble as they balance on packed cable runs under the floor. I would hate to think what would happen should your connection develop a fault but rely on something in that mess because you have no chance of tracing your specific cable.

Telehouse West (April 2009)

Thankfully Telehouse brought everyone into line with strict cable policies and then made headway into power usage since there was either no restriction on how much power you took per rack or Telehouse had no methodology on policing the power draw. Many of our customers were drawn to hosting in Telehouse because they knew that their power usage was not an issue, compared to the new breed of data centres that were very strict on power use and charged heavily, but there was a flip side to this: From time to time there will be outages in a data centre and those abusing the power policies would suffer the most. When your rack of 42 servers experiences a power related outage then it can be hard work getting all those servers back online since you cannot just power them all on at once. Conversely these were the very same customers who would bleat the loudest when their faulty server blew the power to the rack and then could not be powered on for a length of time because they had some much over use in the rack. I used to shrug my shoulders and say the same thing: We warned you that your rack usage and density was dangerous from a service perspective but you did nothing about it because you were happy to cram as much into the rack as humanly possible just to increase your profit margin.

Telehouse West (August 2009)

Telehouse completed the East building in 1999, which embraced controls over working practices and power management, and the demand for data centre space continued at break neck pace. The Docklands area is now littered with data centres; such as Global Switch, Sunguard, Telecity, and Redbus. Providing power to these facilities and providing premier hosting environments has become very costly and there is now a demand for slightly cheaper hosting space outside London (coupled with a need for disaster recovery space far from their primary hosting locations). We are now moving into the virtualised data centre arena as being pushed by BT but now I have digressed from talking about the new Telehouse building.

In March 2009 Telehouse announced that a new data centre facility was to be built on the existing side, to be named Telehouse West, and since I walk past the site each day on the way to work, I decided to take some photographs of the site as the building progressed. The first months went by with very little visible progress although work was very much underway on the foundations and across the whole site. I still pop into Telehouse occasionally so I would also check out the view from the bridge that connects the reception building to the North building. The building work put more restraints on the available parking at the facility but once the framework started to go up then the building progressed at a very fast pace.

Telehouse West (April 2010)

As a ‘key decision maker’ within our hosting business I was then invited over to Telehouse West for a tour as the first data suite was being primed for live active service. The site was still very much a construction site so boots and a hard hat were supplied and we started our tour by viewing the generator room, which is the smaller squat building on the above picture. The room was much like a large cavern at the time with generators primed along one side and a large empty space where more equipment was due to be installed at a later date. The lifts were not yet if full service and nor was the walkway from the reception building, so we joined the builders in using the stairways to make our way up to the first data suite floor. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to glamorise a data centre and if you have seen one room full of racking equipment then you have pretty much seen them all; everything tends to be grey, there are various power distribution units scattered around, and you have the gentle hum of the cooling in the background (plus the not so gentle sound of running IT equipment if the racks are populated).

The new building conformed to everything I would expect from a data centre although the unique selling point of this particular new building, which has been latched onto by the IT media such as Data Center Knowledge and Slashdot, is that excess heat generated by all the IT equipment will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. That is not so much of a draw for people wanting to host their servers but it’s an interesting idea and good use of excess heat in a time when data centres are under even more scrutiny to do their part for the environment given the amount of power they use.

My only minor observations from the tour of Telehouse West:

1. Telehouse will allow tenants to select their own racks and install them based on a footprint and power cost. My experience is that you have to be very patient to operate this type of service model and you have to police installation closely. My personal preference is to provide a standard rack only, which is based on a healthy size to accomodate most IT equipment, and everyone has to have the same rack. From an aesthetic view this is much nicer since the suite becomes uniform and there are no odd shape racks nor different coloured racks splattered around the room. Again, this is just my personal preference where I am sure potential customers would much prefer the luxury to install their own purple racks as recommended by their equipment vendor.

2. Car parking at Telehouse has become very tricky in recent years and the new building has seen a temporary reduction is space, which has been negated by a temporary car park being setup on adjacent land, but once everything is complete then the overall car parking will be reduced from previous levels. I hope that something more permanent can be setup with the current vacant land adjacent to the facility otherwise I am sure there will be queues of traffic outside the entrance gates based on a 1-out-1-in policy.