Cordwell.NET

I agonised over whether to use my surname in the company name or not. Would it sound stupid or narcissistic to use Cordwell in the name? Should I be clever and original and put an “e” or an “i” in there to make it sound hi-tech? In the end I opted to go for Cordwell Consulting Group because Cordwell is not a common name in Australia, I can abbreviate it to CCG when I want, and I like it. So why not? 

According to my Aunt Sue and her genealogical research, we Aussie Cordwells are descended from convicts. That’s not a bad thing – a kind of Australian badge of honour meaning that we’ve been around for a long time in Euro-Australian terms (around 200 years versus 20,000 years for Indigenous Australians – big difference eh?). Yeah, I hear you Poms citing lineage back to the Magna Carta but that is another world in another hemisphere for us – much like “Neighbours” or “Home and Away” is for you folks. Mind you, the first time I set foot in the UK I felt like I was home – bloody weird feeling for a boy that grew up in Sydney, loves Vegemite and knows all the words to “Advance Australia Fair” (but I did marry a lovely girl from Bristol (not Liz Hurley, but maybe if she called me?) and our kids are eligible to dual citizenship or at least working permits in the UK if they want…). 

Back to the Cordwell thing… I make no apology for owning both the Cordwell.NET and Cordwell.com.au Internet domains. I’m not greedy and not on an ego trip. If you have a good reason to take them off me I would consider it. If I could get cordwell.com from the cyber-squatters I would. I’d rather that the Cordwell name be preserved by people who have a vested interest in it for ethical reasons rather than financially expedient reasons. 

Perhaps over time I will buy more Cordwell domains to keep the idea going, while I have the motivation and can afford it. Or, if you are doing it for the right reasons, perhaps you could too?

After doing the APEC 2007 project, I returned back to my family at Christmas last year and took 6 weeks off work to re-acquaint myself with my wife and kids, do a few projects around the house, clear my head of all this APEC “stuff” and try to relax a bit. When I returned to my employer in February, I thought I wanted to be a good corporate citizen again and build upon my experiences. Turns out that something had changed in me and I no longer felt that I belonged where I was. Can’t blame anyone but myself - I’d moved on I guess. So I resigned from my employer and created a company called Cordwell Consulting Group Pty Ltd to provide IT architecture and consulting services to organisations and government agencies that can appreciate (or tolerate?) my style of operating. 

As of eary April I’m doing ok. I’ve got my first client, it’s an interesting and high profile project that should come off well in a few weeks, and some very competent subcontractors and client staff helping me deliver it. Actually, we’re doing it as a team - they’re not so much as helping me as we are helping each other - that’s how I like it. If all goes well, perhaps I’ll bore you some more with the details after the event is over… It might be unwise to jinx myself by bragging about it now.  

So what have I been doing for the past three years (if you care that is)? Well, a weekly commute between my family in Queanbeyan (near Canberra) and work in Sydney, and travelling around the country to deliver a series of meetings for the APEC Australia 2007 year of events. 

For my sins, I had the pleasure of being contracted to the Australian Government as the IT Manager for the APEC 2007 Taskforce and IT Director for the APEC Australia 2007 year of events. Although most people in Australia only saw the media coverage for the meetings in Sydney in September 2007 where we had 21 world leaders (and the infamous Chasers incident), the “great wall of Sydney”, and associated bad press, APEC Australia 2007 was a whole series of meetings around the country that started in January 2007 involving senior government officals, ministers and business representatives from the 21 economies in the Asia-Pacific region that comprise APEC. My team’s job was to provide the IT infrastructure and associated services to the Taskforce and to the meetings (or events) themselves so that those people who wanted or needed IT services could go about their business. We did it and we didn’t get any bad press - in IT terms that is a compliment… people usually only notice the IT team when things aren’t working. 

Wow, did I have some great guys and gals in my team! For privacy and security reasons I won’t mention their full names, but there were two guys who made this gig a success and I could not have done it without them. Dallas and Glen were the ones that it all hinged upon, they stood by me when things got tough, they worked way beyond reasonable limits, kept my ego in check and maintained a sense of humour. They were the “keepers”. There were a bunch of other folks in the team who I should mention since their contribution was invaluable so I will limit it to – Tim, Wally, Craig, Henry, Richard, Nicholas, Le, Juan, Vourneen, Tarun, Geoff, Patrick, Tom and Warren, plus a couple of ring-ins from an unnamed software vendor – Evonne and Craig. 

Yeah, APEC 2007 was a blast for me from early 2005 until end of 2007. It went well from a whole range of perspectives, took its’ toll on my family life and relationships which negates all the positives and I’ll never get those back. Hopefully we live and learn.

footnote: the APEC 2007 website was shut down in late 2007 but an achive is available at http://www.apec2007.org or http://pandora.nla.gov.au/apps/PandasDelivery/WebObjects/PandasDelivery.woa/wa/tep?pi=64638

Hi all - gee it really has been a long time since I’ve dropped in here. I’ve been keeping an eye on the site for the past couple of years to make sure the bad guys haven’t done anything nasty but I really haven’t had time to do any development or maintenance to make it useful to the family and friends who might stop by for a look-see every now and then.

Now things have sort-of settled down again, I’m hoping to have some time to look at Cordwell.NET so I’m open to any ideas you might have. 

Folks - I’m (sort of) sorry to say that the old Cordwell.NET is no more. In late August 2006, it was compromised by someone who used a known exploit of Joomla (the content system I used to use) to insert offensive messages and images in to various default pages. I doubt it was a targeted attack, probably just a bored university student scanning Joomla sites and happended to get lucky here.

All user logon accounts on the old Cordwell.NET site have been lost. People with a Cordwell.NET email address should still be able to send and recieve email just fine.

While I could revert to an earlier backup of the site, the somewhat intermittent usage by members didn’t really warrant having a full Content Management System. I’ve decided to use the incident as an opportunity to try something different, and so another Cordwell.NET is launched In October 2006.

This site now uses WordPress and is mainly intended for freeform writing and commenting. You can still register and post comments if you wish - infact I encourage you to. Make your own conversations with each other, I’ll just drop in occassionally, write some stuff, check that the site is ok and go back to doing other things.

cheers, Paul.