Who? What? Why? Where? When? and How?


Bring your own what?


Steve Rogerson’s round-up of last month’s news and events, including some that may have slipped under the radar


I


’ve never been the type of person who enjoys working for another company – the self-employed life is much nicer, no


office politics, no personnel department (and they became even worse when they started calling themselves human resources – made you feel like paper clips, or furniture, or other “resources”), nobody looking at their watch when you arrive five minutes late. However, I have been interested by a trend that has the potential to make office life a lot more enjoyable. I am taking about BYOD, or “bring your own device”. The idea is that rather then companies spending a lot of money on computing equipment, all their employees bring their own laptops and tablets and connect wirelessly to the office server when they arrive. With so much data being stored in the cloud, this effectively means they can work from anywhere with a Wifi connection. Workers enjoy it because they can work on devices they are familiar with, and it gives them more flexibility about when and where they work.


This is all well and good, but my evil, scheming mind started coming up with more interesting ideas when I first heard of the trend. You see, there is nothing in the abbreviation BYOD that says exactly what the device is that you bring. A radio- controlled toy racing car is a device, an X- Box terminal is a device, an IPod is a device, a robot cat is a device (I have one of those), and so on. The office would start to look like a toy shop, and that really would irritate those annoying human resources people. And as to vibrators and similar “devices”, maybe I shouldn’t go there.


That said, drop me an email (steve.rogerson@journalist.co.uk) to let me


know the most unusual device you have brought into the office. I may mention some of them in my next column. What makes you frustrated? And I don’t mean not having a certain device at work. I ask this, because a recent survey by Infosecurity asked 1000 London commuters that very question and discovered losing internet access was the answer. It came above not having television and even not having water! That means these people will happily sit at home with no television, unable to have a wash or a cup of tea but be nicely contented browsing their favourite web sites.


Some companies give their products catchy names but others opt just for a combination of numbers and letters, where presumably each number represents a certain feature of the device. The problem is that these names can get ridiculously long. Take Suyin, for example, it has released a two-pin DC jack, and it is small measuring just 13.9mm long, but its name is an astonishing 17 characters long, that’s longer than the actual product at the size of print in this column. I doubt therefore that the name


“040015FR003XX06ZL” is printed on the side, but if it is it must be so small as to be unreadable. Looking at the name, though, I think they should have called it Froxx. Finally, thank you to Mad as a March


Hare for sending me a press release announcing that Evesham in Worcestershire is to build a giant asparagus shaped building that will be even taller than The Shard in London. And the visitor centre at the top will contain an asparagus museum. It will be called The Spear, and the press release was dated 1st April.


Very rarely will you find a company putting a wooden spoon in pride of place in its trophy cabinet, but then again I wasn’t supposed to be there to see it. I was on my way to the opening of Acal BFI’s new customer service centre in Wokingham and a dozy taxi driver took me to the company’s warehouse instead. After somebody buzzed another journalist and I in on the intercom, we were left twiddling our thumbs in an empty reception area. A phone call later, and a car was dispatched to rescue us. I passed the time taking photos of the wooden spoon, which was for something to do with golf though all the Acal people I later asked about it denied all knowledge.


42 May 2013 Components in Electronics www.cieonline.co.uk


This is the first frame of a set of three that dropped into my inbox last month, but what, you may wonder, is it advertising. The answer is Eric, which stands for “Easy Radio IC”, a system on chip RF transceiver. So, how do you get from that frame to Eric? Well, Dotty apparently overheard the boss say the customers wanted serial packets. Groan! But well done LPRS for coming up with it. The full cartoon can be found on the company’s web site.


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