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. […]
Art of Network Engineering
I’ve been a little busy lately, and frankly sometimes topics to write about come fast and furiously, sometimes they don’t come at all. Meanwhile, I had a chance to sit down with the team over at the Art of Network Engineering podcast. I was really enjoying their interviews with engineers around the industry and I […]
Back to Cisco Live
I haven’t posted in a while, for the simple reason that writing a blog is a challenge. What the heck am I going to write about? Sometimes ideas come easily, sometimes not. Of course, I have a day job, and part of that day job involves Cisco Live, which is next week, in person, for […]
Plungers and hard drives
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 […]