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 […]
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 […]