Do we really need competition in the electricity market?

Ireland has only relatively recently introduced competition into the residential electricity market. As a result a considerable amount of broadcast time on both radio and TV is devoted to advertisements from the various electricity companies encouraging household to switch electricity suppliers. Naturally, I took advantage of this situation to switch to a company who is providing me with cheapest electricity, but at the same time I am confused by what is the point of the exercise.



I am not an economist, but as far as I understand the reason why they recommend the introduction of competition into markets is because the competitive pressure to win market share will encourage the various companies involved to introduce innovations that will reduce costs and/or increase quality of service.



I can see how this works in the telecoms market. Some of the companies active in the market provide high quality services and premium prices and others provide lower levels of service, but at cheaper prices. In practice it can be difficult to find out the quailty level of the service you will get from a particular service provider (in fact it can sometimes be hard to find out the exact price they will charge you either), but in general the market works well with different service offerings appealing to different market segments.



The trouble with the electricity market is that the electric grid is designed to deliver exactly the same voltage of electricity to all of the customers. I know that some of the companies like to boast about the fact that they use a high percentage of renewable energy sources such as wind, but there is no way to tell that the electricity delivered to their customers' houses is from these clean source sand not from the dirty coal fired stations owned by their competitors. Likewise, if the wind didn't blow and there was a shortage of electricity, fairness should dictate that the environmentally conscious customers should be the ones subjected to the inconvenience of a temporary loss of supply - but there is no way to cut off supply to these customers while maintaining supply to the customers who chose to go with the less environmentally friendly company.



As far as I can see the only way that the electricity companies can compete with each other is in their billing system. This is hardly the area where the greatest amount of innovation is to be found. Am I missing something?

The importance of regular excercise

I am a big fan of getting regular exercise. However, instead of being intensively involved in a single sport I normally try to fit exercise into my normal daily routine. I normally only use Ben Hardill's wonderful Tracks2Miles application to upload my DailyMile records when I undertake a significant run/cycle. However, most of my exercise is accounted for by the fact that cycle to and from work when the weather allows. I also try to fit in a short walk at lunch time each day - I find that the fresh air helps improve my productivity in the afternoon.

It is surprising how few IBM employees at the site where I am based realise that there is a beautiful walk around the perimeter. The complete circuit is 4.5km, but several shorter options are also possible if time is limited. Although parts of the path can get a little bit mucky during the winter months it is really beautiful. Trees have been planted that obscure the view of the IBM buildings and at times you would find it hard to see the IBM buildings and so when you see the cows on the neighbouring farms, you would find it hard to believe that over a thousand people are working in high-tech jobs only meters from where you are walking in the middle of nature. It is very common to see hares sharing the track and even the occasional fox (probably looking to feast on the Hares).

View Lunch walk Around IBM campus in a larger map

Incidentally I am no longer mayor of my local gym. I have not been back since I was ousted from the mayorship at the end of March. It is not that I have been sulking it is just that it seems a shame to be indoors running on a treadmill when we have been experiencing a rare extended spell of sunny spring weather in Ireland.

My new job is offically announced

When people ask me what I do for a living I normally tell them that I am a software engineer. This is not entirely a lie, because I do have an engineering degree and I work in a software engineering related job. However, for over a decade my job has essentially been that of a manager. While I am proud to say that I have been able to keep up with the latest trends and technologies in software development - a very small proportion of my working days were spent writing software and a large percentage of my working days were spent doing general management tasks.

I have always believed that the work of the engineers in a high-tech company is much more valuable than the work of their managers. However, in recent times I had direct or indirect people management responsibility for over 100 employees. The vast majority of these employees were able to do their job with minimal input from me, but when you have responsibility for such a large team it is inevitable that you end up having to spend a lot of time 'managing' and hence have very little time left for 'engineering'.

Towards the end of last year I had career planing discussions with both my mentor and my own manager. It became clear to me that if I wanted to be successful while staying in the same career path I would have to devote even more energy to the management side of my role and hence reduce even further the limited amount of time I was spending on direct engineering work. This is not what I really wanted to do with my life and hence I decided that I would attempt to change my career path away from management and towards engineering.

It took a few months for me to find a suitable new role and to also arrange a replacement for my management position. However, I am delighted to say that the move has finally been formally announced and I am starting my new career this month.

I will still be part of the Sametime development team, but my new job responsibility will be to lead an imitative to simplify the way the product is installed and configured. Many of our customers have been telling us that they love the wonderful new capabilities of the most recent versions of Sametime, however they are less thrilled with the complex steps required to get the product installed and configured in a way that is compatible with their network infrastructure. It is easy to recognize that this is a problem we need to tackle, but it will not be easy to solve it.

One of the great things about working for a company like IBM is that it is possible to rise to a very senior level without having to be a manager. However, the more senior a person is, the harder it is for them to make such a dramatic career change. Because I am reasonably senior in IBM, it will be hard for me to make the change successfully, and still meet the expectations of someone at my pay grade, but if I postpone the move any longer it will only become more difficult. I have no doubt that it will be very difficult for me to become a high performer in my new role, but I am looking forward to the challenge and I know deep down that I am making the right move.

Update: I posted more information about my new role on my IBM internal blog.

The importance of play in successful organisations

As my friends know I am a great believer in the importance of taking time to ensure that I and my colleagues have fun at work. In fact "Have Fun at Work" was one of the official corporate values at Lotus when I first started in my current job. Unfortunately IBM does not have a similar corporate value, so it lapsed as partof the  take-over.

However, many IBMers do some great work to ensure that IBM is a really fun place to work. A large portion of the key leaders at the Dublin Software Lab are former Lotus people and as a result of this many of our employee surveys speak highly of how it is a really fun place to work. I think we need to be careful that we don't lose this culture because it is a valuable recruiting an retention tool.

I recently found this wonderful TED talk by a Primatologist named Isabel Behncke Izquierdo where she explains much more eloquently than I ever could why the human race could increase tolerance and harmony by learning from studies of how Bonobo society values play.

"Spousonomics" is not a word I plan to use

Some people use their blog to write reviews of books that they have read. However I am going to use mine to write about a book that I have no intention of ever reading.

When I visit my local library, I normally visit their "new arrivals" shelf to see if there are any interesting books. On my most recent visit I spotted an interesting looking book cover with the catchy title of Spousonomics. From reading the blurb the book seems to be about how you can use lessons from economic theories to achieve a happy marriage. Not surprisingly the authors are American and have a web site to go with the book complete with a Facebook page, a Twitter feed etc.

I can't be too critics of Americans because technically I am a US citizen - but one of the most laughable aspects of American society is a belief that all aspects of life are explainable by economics. I find this book title hilarious but, I have no intention of reading it and I think that it would probably be detrimental to my marriage to start quoting this rubbish.

A new Arrival in our Household

People normally use this phrase to announce the birth of a child. I don't love my gadgets as much as I love my children, but the arrival of my latest new gadget is a reasonably big deal.

I wrote before about how I needed to have my weather station constantly attached to a running computer in order to have the collected weather data instantly uploaded to my personal weather site on the internet. Since I don't want to waste power by leaving my desktop PC plugged on all the time, I needed to look for alternative options.

My initial thoughts was that I could use an Arduino device, but an Arduino expert that I met at the Young Scientist advised me that it wouldn't really be up to the task. I then decided to check out one of the new "plug computers". This is a newly emerging form factor for low power computers which look just like a voltage converter (see the picture of my new device beside a pair of sunglasses for comparison.

I looked at a few options on the Internet, before finally settling upon a TonidoPlug, which is an Ubuntu 9.04 based PC which comes complete with a specialised home server package installed upon it (which is optimised for sharing files and other things that you might want to do).

The device was trivially easy to set up. I had my home server up and running in about 5 minutes after opening the package. It took me a little longer to get the weather station installed and configured, but there were no major problems since I am already fairly familiar with Ubuntu, and now my personal weather station is being kept constantly up to date instead of having  to depend upon me remembering to manually upload data.

The device was not completely perfect. I had assumed that it would come with WiFi support but it didn't so I am going to have to leave it close to a network port until I get around to buying a new WiFi card for it. In addition I was hoping that I would be able to attach my 1 TByte USB drive to the Tonidoplug, but it seems that the USB ports don't provide enough power so I am going to have to make do with a 8 GByte USB card for now.

Cross Posting from MyTracks to DailyMile

As I wrote before, I find that the My Tracks application from Google is a very useful and easy to use utility to use for tracking my running training. Howver, I have noticed that many people I know seemed to be using an application called DailyMile to post details of their exercise activity on Facebook.

This integration with Facebook seems to be great fun and it allows people to give and receive motivational messages, so I decided to register for DailyMile myself to see how it worked. When I started using it first I was surprised shocked to find that people are expected to manually enter details of the routes that they run. It struck me that there should be an application to automatically upload GPS traces to DailyMile, but when I asked a few friends nobody knew of one. However, my asking sparked a colleague Ben Hardill from IBM's Hursley lab to take on the challenge of building such an application. It only took him a few days to get it working and he describes his progress on his blog.

He has not yet officially released the application, but he asked me to be one of the Beta testers. It works brilliantly, with one limitation which means that you must use a regular DailyMile account rather than logging into DailyMile with your Facebook credentials. This bug is caused by a limitation in Daily Mile's implementation of OAuth rather than a limitation in Ben's code and in any case doesn't bother me, because I don't have any significant Daily Mile history to worry about abandoning

The existence of this application provoked me to go for a run this morning before work just so I had something to use to try out the application. I am glad to say that it worked great.

Great Ireland Run

Today myself and my brother joined several thousand other athletes in the Great Ireland Run.The sunshine was glorious and it definitely was uplifting to see so many people of varying levels of fitness out in the open air enjoying themselves.

All credit must go to the organisers who did a great job - coordinating thousands of runners cannot be easy.

According to the record I kept on my phone,  I took 1 hour and 3 minutes for the 10km route. I started recording before I crossed the official start line, so my official time will probably be slightly faster. However, I don't think I achieved my personal goal of completing under the hour mark.

Why I uninstalled Lotus Traveller from my Phone

I recently enrolled in the Beta program for Lotus Traveler  on Android. A number of friends have asked me how I am getting on with  and they are amazed to hear that I have removed it from my phone. Therefore I thought I should write a short note to explain why.

First to explain that Lotus Traveler is a product which allows people to read Lotus Notes email from their mobile phone. The product has existed for some time, but only recently added support for the Android platform.

The product itself works very well and while a mobile phone is not an ideal platform for reading and replying to emails, it can occasionally be convenient to be able to check for urgent emails or have a quick glance at my scheduled meetings for tomorrow without having to open my laptop.

The only problem is with the IBM security policy which insists that any device which has access to our email infrastructure is protected by an automatic screen-lock that is secured by a password which is at least 8 characters long and contains a mix of upper-case lower-case characters and non-alphabetic characters. This policy is entirely reasonable and I have no problem in typing such a complex password to unlock my work laptop. However, the logistics of typing such a complex password on a small touch screen phone make it rather annoying - especially when I am simply trying to make a phone call on my own personally owned phone.

In addition I eventually decided that it was better for work/life balance if I didn't have constant access to my work email at all times and so I removed Lotus Traveler and reset my phone to use a simpler unlock pattern which is more appropriate to this type of device.

Perfecting my menu for "Come Dine With Me"

At this stage, I am giving up hope of being selected to appear on the "Come Dine With Me" show on TV. Nevertheless, I decided to have another practice run with friends this weekend. I tweaked the menu slightly this time.

The one think I was most nervous about in the new menu was the Pavlova for desert, because I had never cooked this before. However, I think it came out quite well as you can see from this picture. I thought I had done something wrong when the inside was all soft, but my sister who is a Pavlova specialist assured me that this was actually how it was supposed to be.

I cooked salmon-en-croute for the main course which was the same as last time, but I cooked Prawns-Pil-Pil for a starter. I forgot to take a picture of the Prawns, but I did take a picture of the home made brown bread that I baked to accompany them.

I took no short cuts with the pre-dinner nibbles either. I made a dip from soured cream and chives. I combined this with carrots and celery to produce a very attractive looking tri-colour platter.  The guests seemed to enjoy this, but I personally thought the dip tasted slightly bland. Maybe I will search for another dip recipe if I do get selected for the TV show.

Overall we had a great night. I even managed to get the Nintendo Wii working for the after dinner entertainment without having to call up on my daughter's hesitance to get it started. So, I am delighted that I entered the competition becuase I have had some great nights entertainment with the practice runs.