Update: From Fred, who was the guy referenced in the first paragraph: Actually it was a white button with a router icon on it and “make cli great again”, I know this because it was me. It was June 2016. Needless to say in my view that did not age well. When I attended Cisco […]
The War on Expertise
Like many network engineers, I quickly fell in love with my field and worked hard to master it. I got into networking when I was working in desktop support. The behind-the-scenes stuff was way more interesting to me than the front lines. Back in the late nineties, I bought a library of books to learn […]
When it’s time to go
I’ve mentioned my first job as a network engineer several times on this blog. I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, the biggest newspaper in Northern California. I was brought in to manage the network as a Cisco-certified engineer, having just passed a four-day CCNA bootcamp. Right before the dot-bomb economic crash, network engineers were […]
Apple Certified…what??
I’m thinking of doing some video blogging and kicking it off with a series with my thoughts on technical certifications. Are they valuable or just a vendor racket? Should you bother to invest time in them? Why do the questions sometimes seem plain wrong? Meanwhile, a little Netstalgia about the first technical certification I (almost) […]
Product Management
It’s impossible to count how many people at my college wanted to be “writers”. So many early-twenty-somethings here in the US think they are going to spend their lives as screenwriters or novelists. My colleagues from India tell me most people there want to be doctors or engineers, which tells you something about the decline […]
Cleared for nothing
I wrote this post on Feb 20, 2020, and I always thought it was an entertaining episode. FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who features prominently in the post, has been in the news lately as he played a major role in the Twitter Files. I will stay out of politics, except to note that Elvis […]
On being a VOIP guy (not)
Well, the blog has been languishing for a while, as I’ve been extraordinarily busy with a new EVP, a round of layoffs, and many personal distractions. Here’s a little Netstalgia piece, not really technical, for your enjoyment. I’ve told a few stories about my years at the Cisco Gold Partner, where I did both pre- […]
Computers with Brains
A couple of years back I purchased an AI-powered energy monitoring system for my home. It clips on to the power mains and monitors amperage/wattage. I can view an a graph showing energy usage over time, which is really quite helpful to keep tabs on my electricity consumption at a time when electricity is expensive. […]
Plain Language
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in America our police speak in a sort of code language. Instead of saying “he got out of the car and walked away,” the police will say, “the subject exited the vehicle and proceeded on foot.” It’s not that their language is any clearer–in […]
Dear Diary
My blogging has been a little slow of late. First there was Cisco Live. Then there was the post-Cisco Live slump of not wanting to do anything. Then there was the Cisco’s fiscal year-end crunch along with some very hot projects. Then there was the departure of one of our key execs, and subsequent excitement. […]