Two articles (here and here) in my Netstalgia series covered the old bulletin board system (BBS) I used to operate back in the late 1980’s. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a Sysop (systems operator). How the BBS died is a lesson in product management. My BBS ran […]
Are coffee and networks the same?
I shall avoid naming names, but when I worked for Juniper we had a certain CEO who pumped us up as the next $10 billion company. It never happened, and he left and became the CEO of Starbucks. Starbucks has nothing to do with computer networking at all. Why was he hired by Starbucks? How […]
A night of vi
It was four o’clock in the early hours of one Sunday morning in 2001. I had been up all night sitting in our data center at the San Francisco Chronicle with our Unix guy. He was handing off responsibility for managing the firewalls to the network team, and he was walking me through the setup. […]
Blogging vs. Video
I must admit, I’m a huge fan of Ivan Peplnjak. This despite the fact that he is a major thorn in the side of product management at Cisco. It is, of course, his job to be a thorn in our side and Ivan is too smart to ignore. He has a long history with Cisco, […]
The Ghost of Jobs
A post recently showed up in my LinkedIn feed. It was a video showing a talk by Steve Jobs and claiming to be the “best marketing video ever”. I disagree. I think it is the worst ever. I hate it. I wish it would go away. I have deep respect for Jobs, but on this […]
Cross-posting on SubStack
I started this blog in 2016, and I never advertise it. Partly this is because I don’t really care if people are reading it. Partly it’s because I’m concerned some of my views might controversial in the industry and I don’t want to blast them far and wide. When I started this blog, my goal […]
The type A conundrum
An old theory of personality holds that people fall into two types–A and B. Put simply, Type A personalities are highly aggressive and competitive, whereas Type B are not. We all have seen this broad difference in personalities. Some people we encounter seem ready to walk over their own grandmothers to get ahead. Like all […]
It is the network
When I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, I started a project to bring Internet connectivity to a number of sites that had only limited mainframe circuits. To do this I decided to get DSL lines and run IPSec over them, a relatively new way of doing things for the time. It was a lot […]
Can you spare a quarter?
I’ve been thinking about the corporate world, how it operates, and the effects of corporatism on our lives. If you’re a network engineer and think this is boring, pay attention. Corporate culture, the influence of Wall Street, and the rise of a non-skilled management class have direct impact on your work and personal life. The […]
Consulting Gigs
In my years in the corporate world, I’ve attended many corporate self-help type sessions on how to or increase leadership, creativity, and innovation. There are many young consultants who are starting their careers off helping us to develop new skills in these areas, so I thought I would provide some helpful tips to get started. […]