I wrote a post recently back about my near-death experience due to lack of sleep after being asked to lay off five people. The Wall Street Journal, right on cue, publishes an article entitled “Layoff Tactics Keep Changing, and the Blunders Keep Coming” (paywall). It seems that when Amazon decided to lay off 14,000 (!) […]
RSS Feeds
I remember some years back, hearing that one of my two readers uses an RSS feed of this blog. I’ve never actually used RSS, but out of curiosity I installed a reader. To my horror, my last article looked like this: If you’re not a network engineer and my generation or older, “ATM” means Automatic […]
ATM: The god that wasn’t
If you’re not a network engineer and my generation or older, “ATM” means Automatic Teller Machine. If you’re younger, you don’t know what that means because you’ve never paid for anything in cash. If you’re a network engineer of a certain age, ATM means something else: Asynchronous Transfer Mode. ATM was a potential god technology […]
AI and VibeConfiguring
While I’m talking about AI… (is there anything else to talk about?) I’m known to be cautious about AI and exactly what it can do. My skepticism is misplaced, you might say. After all, isn’t AI replacing thousands of coding jobs? It’s going to come for network engineers too! I’ve been playing with Warp, a […]
AI layoffs meet insomnia and cops
The flip side of my most recent post was covered by the WSJ (again, paywall) in an article from about Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who thinks that AI will wipe out tons of jobs–a prospect he seems quite happy about–joining the ranks of Mark Benioff in celebrating putting millions of people out of work. Since […]
Bubbles, dotcoms, and AI
Today the Wall Street journal published an article (paywall) asking if the AI-boom data center mania might be inflating a bubble along the lines of the “internet’s infrastructure build-out in the late 1990s”. Well, gee, ya think? I lived through that bubble. Right when I was graduating college, the Internet (I still use the capital […]
The joy of expertise
I’ve been working in the lab again, and I attempted to log in to one of my switches (IP addresses have been changed to protect the innocent): $ ssh admin@10.10.18.73 Warning: Permanently added ‘10.10.18.73’ (RSA) to the list of known hosts. admin@10.10.18.73’s password: Permission denied, please try again. Huh? I checked caps lock, and even […]
Dial-up Blues
I haven’t posted in a long time, partly because work has had me busy, partly because I haven’t been sure what to write. I have multiple drafts sitting unfinished for various reasons. The best way to get unstuck is to tell some old stories, as I like to do, and I was thinking this morning […]
Blog themes, again and again
My ongoing saga to locate a WordPress theme I like is killing me. I used a hosted version of WordPress (not worpress.com), which gives me a lot more control, but at the end of the day, I really hate WordPress. I just want a simple theme that’s easy to read. So, I’m iterating through a […]
Netstalgia: Y2K
Gather around while I tell the story of the great Y2K bug, how close we came to societal collapse until we were saved by Deloitte consultants who selflessly worked night and day to stave off this peril! In fact, the Y2K episode should serve as a reminder of the peril of “viral” thinking, panic and […]