Well, yesterday got off to an unexpectedly interesting start. Over the long weekend one of our systems at work developed an unusual fault which, thanks to a combinations of factors, resulted in the generation of something upwards of 64 thousand email messages to a mailing list that I am on. It took about 90 minutes for my system to process, and then delete all of this.

In the meantime, our Prime Minister announced that she would be making announcements on the steps of 10 Downing Street later in the morning. There was a flurry of speculation on social media as to what sort of announcement might be forthcoming with some being ruled out as having precedent for being made in parliament or elsewhere.

While this was going on I was listening to a presentation by our sales and integration contacts from Hewlett Packard. We're reaching the point where the c7000 BladeSystems that make up the majority of our infrastructure will be coming up for replacement and HP are keen for us to adopt their replacement product - HP Synergy. It does look like an interesting setup, at least from the marketing pitch. The prime selling point is the management system (which exists for the more recent pieces of c7000 equipment, but as we have little of these we have not looked into using it yet) which looks to have a lot of features that will reduce the amount of piecemeal work involved in day-to-day management and operation of the systems, and has deep integration with HP's counterpart storage product - 3par - which we have been making increasing use of. I'm not sure if or when we will be likely to buy into it - technology being useful is one question, funding purchases of it particularly in the current political and economic climate (more on this in a moment) is an entirely different one.

So we returned from the presentation (complete with complimentary donuts) to find that Theresa May had announced that she would be pushing for a General Election to be held in a few weeks time on June 8th. The UK notionally has fixed term parliaments, introduced by new legislation introduced in 2010 to ostensibly prevent a Prime Minister from calling an early election on a whim. The act, however, has provision for an early vote in the event of a non-functional government or a vote in favour of a General Election with a significant parliamentary majority. It is expected the the Labour opposition will support such a vote in this instance, so we're off to the races.

The impression I'm getting from the papers is that this move has been taken by the Prime Minister in an attempt to strengthen her position against other factions within her party. Whether this is the case and whether it will work is anyone's guess. From my own perspective I'm not sure what would be a good outcome. I've got serious reservations about the Labour party but they might be the least worst result. The Liberal Democrats position seems to be rallying following the EU membership vote but how this will translate into parliamentary seats, and what they'll be able to do with those seats, remains to be seen.

In Scotland it will be interesting in itself, with the very real possibility that the SNP will take the entire country, but as we have seen since 2015, controlling every seat in Scotland actually gives them very little influence in Westminster.

As seems to be the permanent state of affairs - Interesting Times.

(591 words) 2017-04-19 0759