Still Biking – Well More Scootering Really

Vietnam, do they even have rules of the road?

To answer the question above, no, frankly they don’t have any appreciable road traffic rules at all. The traffic is heavy and it comes at you from every direction. Actually I lie, there is one rule. You ALWAYS give-way to the largest vehicle. Even if you are already on a roundabout doing your lawful thing just like the highway code taught you, if you see a car or worse a truck approaching the roundabout, you give-way. Because he is for sure going to pull on to the roundabout straight in front of you.

Vietnam – My Covid Year

There was only one place to be during 2020 and that was Vietnam. Whilst the rest of the world was being totally devastated by the Corona Virus, Vietnam remained almost untouched. Incredibly fast and decisive action on the part of the Vietnamese government meant that the borders were almost instantly sealed and the dreaded virus was mostly kept out. Indeed at the the end of 2020 the death toll stood at just 35. I’ll say now that for everywhere, Covid was a major game changer. I got to Vietnam in late 2019 before it all kicked off so I was lucky to have seen it before it changed.

I bagged myself another marketing award

I am very proud to have been awarded WatchGuard Marketing Person of the Year I am really proud of my new trophy. Here it is at home on my fire place mantel. I even like the way the red goes with our wallpaper 🙂 Recently I attended the WatchGuard UK Partner Conference at Twickenham Rugby…

Tuk Tuks, Taxis and Royal Enfields – Getting Around in Goa

So you’ve got yourself over to Goa. Even though it’s a fairly concentrated area, you still need to move around a bit. Taxis are fairly cheap. They have set rates which are ridiculously cheap, about 25p a km or hour wait time, but they never actually work for those rates. It’s the usual agree the…

Fear and Loathing in Goa – let the weirdness continue

It’s our first night in Goa. We’ve kicked the holiday off with a spot of weirdness at the airport on the way in – but that’s another blog post – and we’re at our hotel now (The Living Room) and things have settled down nicely. Right, let’s get off for a walk down to the…

Goa: Let’s get this holiday off to a weird start

So there we are having survived the ten hour flight from Gatwick to Goa courtesy of Thomson Holidays’ Dream Liner. Does anyone ever sleep on a plane? Do they even manufacturer enough Valium to make it possible? So we’re dragging ourselves out of the airport and we get to this rag tag sort of customs…

Are industrial control systems the new frontline for cyber warfare?

This article is my thoughts around how warfare is likely to evolve in the digital age. It has been edited down and published as two different articles on various sites around the net. Following is the full (long) version … Warfare down the millennia has always been about brute force, whether that be the hand-to-hand…

Diving the Thistlegorm – one of the world’s top wreck dives.

It’s great when you can combine two of your passions into one activity. Well I love vintage motorcycles and diving. What do you mean, incompatible? Not actually true. There is a dive site you can see 1940s Norton and BSA motorcycles, the wartime wreck of the British supply ship the Thistlegorm. It set sail from…

Will the Internet of Things enable your kettle to steal your car?

Following are some of my thoughts around the impact of the Internet Of Things on security and how it has changed the nature of what we consider to be an “endpoint”.   Will the Internet of Things enable your kettle to steal your car? Barry Mattacott, marketing director at security specialist Wick Hill Group, looks…

My days as a biker and born again biker

Waaay back in the day I started my working life as an apprentice aircraft engineer with British Airways. In those days BA would take in 300 to 400 apprentices a year. They moved us in from the provincial airport towns to Heathrow for training. I was (mostly) brought up in a small village in South…

Scuba Diving Cancun Underwater Museum (MUSA)

I am an unashamed holiday diver. If the water is cold enough that I have to wear rubber then I don’t want to go diving. Consequentially I have never dived in the UK. But I have dived in Egypt, Mexico, Tenerife and Thailand. If you are a holiday diver then you have the pick of…

Defending The Network From The Inept Dunning – Krugger Effect and its impact on Network Security

As you know, I work as a Marketing Director for a Network Security company. You’ll probably be relieved to hear that I don’t get deeply involved in the technology, I am more about what colour it should be. This is a piece based on my own observations that I published on my LinkedIn page some…