On Friday May 18 I took my business – CAS Netlink – to the first ever Australian Active Aim trade show. While numbers were down from what we had hoped for it was still fun and a great experience for those of us who have never done the trade show thing before.

Besides the opportunity to present my services there were a number of other good things that came out of the whole experience.

• Had some new, much nicer business card printed.
• Created a portfolio of my services.
• Had some brochure size cards printed.
• Had a large (2m wide) sign printed.
• Created a new service and fleshed out all the details.

For that last one – the new service – I had a lot of help from Belinda Pearl. We had a consulting appointment at The Church Retro Cafe and went over all of the details whilst sipping the best coffee (me) and tea (Belinda) in town! We sometimes miss some of the value in things that we do simply because we don’t give it much thought. So whilst the crowd may have been down I got a lot out of it personally in that it prompted me to get some things done that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of.

It was great to see how much stuff was there from the various vendors – people putting a lot of time and effort into promoting some of the best businesses in Ballarat! There was also the networking-with-other-businesses side of it which is always fun and some potential new customers that we spoke to on the night.

I’m sure some people expected it to be just like the Melbourne International Home Show and they probably would have been scratching their heads a couple of times during the evening. Heck – there was some stuff that even had me scratching my head .

The reality is that the idea of a trade show was spawned by Belinda about 6 weeks ago so there wasn’t a whole lot of lead time to tweak and change things. When you take into account the short lead time, the number of businesses involved, the fashion show, the music and everything else you would have to say that it was an enormous effort and a really fun night with a few surprises!

Besides that, it was great to see so many small businesses banding together and putting on a great display of a very broad range of products and services.

Photo by Tezza (Tezzazz)

Teckyhead - Where Gary Smith blogs...

This is the first post I’ve written from my iPhone. Whilst I’ve nearly always embraced new technology,I have to admit to being a bit of a late adoptee when it comes to mobile technology. Perhaps it’s a little bit of grumpy old man syndrome starting to creep in… I never really felt comfortable about being reachable almost anywhere at any time.

I remember wandering around the Melbourne art gallery and ending up talking an associate in the USA through restoring a MySQL database. My fault for not turning the phone off I guess.

Anyways, the iPhone looks to be a lot more fun than any of my previous devices

iPhone image by Tony Buser

Teckyhead - Where Gary Smith blogs...

I’m not much interested in politics but I happened across an open discussion yesterday with Stephen Conroy (Labor telecommunications minister) and Malcolm Turnbull (opposition telecommunications minister) and various industry identities.

It’s unfortunate that governments tend to be adversarial for the sake of being adversarial because between the two major political parties they could cobble together something worthwhile.

The national broadband network (NBN) that the Labour party are committed to rolling out is, in my opinion, a good thing for this country. Fibre optic cable to every home is going to provide us with a very scalable, low cost broadband infrastructure with, I would expect, a relatively long shelf life. The weakness in the Labour camp is the lack of a detailed cost analysis. The cost to taxpayers is in the order of 47 billion dollars. That’s a lot of tax dollars for a relatively small country. I do agree though, that it’s best for the government to maintain a degree of control over the core infrastructure. Telstra have shown time and time again that they will resort to just about every trick in the book to gain an advantage over the competitors that they provide wholesale services to.

The Liberal party have their own option and from a technical point of view it just doesn’t hold water. Whilst I haven’t spent a whole lot of time analysing their offering it seems that they think that wireless is ‘now’ and it would be better to keep us all on copper and/or wireless. The main issue I have with that plan would be that it is relatively short term. At some point in the next 5 years or so I think they would find that they would be back at the drawing board talking about the NBN again. Wireless is fairly limited on range and speed and copper wire also limits broadband speed. The further away you are from the telephone exchange, the slower it gets. I’m only around 1.5kms from our local exchange and whilst I am on a 20MB plan, the best speed we can maintain sync at is around 8MB. The Liberal party are doing everything they can to rubbish the whole idea of an NBN but I think there is one sensible part of their argument – and that is the cost benefit analysis. They have been (rightly, in my opinion) very critical of the lack of cost and cost benefit analysis that has been provided for the NBN. I think that when you are talking about such a huge investment of tax payer dollars then you have to be able to back that up with the numbers.

So, whilst I think the NBN is essential if we want to keep up with other tech savvy nations and future proof our broadband infrastructure, I also agree with the Liberal party – the minister has to back it up with some cold hard numbers.

Teckyhead - Where Gary Smith blogs...

It seems like that sometimes! If I had a few dollars for every blog I’ve ever created I’d be quite a few dollars better off!

I was thinking about my personal blogs and the four or five domains I’ve had them on (garysmith.gs, garysmithonline.com and garysmith.co just to name a few) and then it struck me that I’ve been using the name ‘teckyhead’ online for over 10 years – so perhaps I should forget about the whole ‘brand my name’ thing and just stick with teckyhead.

It adequately describes who (or what?) I am and it’s easy for anyone to remember (assuming they aren’t a spelling zealot who insists that it should be spelled like ‘techyhead’. I wanted that -really I did – but unfortunately someone had beaten me to it.

So with any sort of luck, this will be the beginning of a long, thrilling, engaging blog. I usually have plenty to write about so I hope you will drop by from time to time.

Teckyhead - Where Gary Smith blogs...