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. […]
My first Ethernet Network and Router
I’ve mentioned in the past how my first job in IT (starting in 1995) was as a “systems administrator” for a small company in Marin County, California. The company designed and built museum exhibits, and its team of around 60 employees was split between fabricators, who built the exhibits, and office workers. Some of the […]
The problem of permanence
Some years ago, I worked for a company with a CEO who had a background in marketing. It was 2010, and he decided to use his marketing skills to launch a huge new campaign called “Mission 10”. Our goal: to become the next $10 billion company. At the time I think I revenue was less […]
The AWS Outage
I have to give AWS credit for posting a fairly detailed technical description of the cause of their recent outage. Many companies rely on crisis PR people to phrase vague and uninformative announcements that do little to inform customers and put their minds at ease. I must admit, having read the AWS post-mortem a couple […]
Automation gone wild
As I write this, a number of sites out on the Internet are down because of an outage at Amazon Web Services. Delta Airlines is suffering a major outage. On a personal note, my wife’s favorite radio app and my Lutron lighting system are not operating correctly. Of course, this outage is a reminder of […]
Technical Confusion
How often have you learned about a new technology, and couldn’t understand it? How many trainings and presentations have you sat through that left you in a mental fog? It amazes me how many technologies we are supposed to master in our industry, and how many we never do. Let me give an example. When […]
Remote Access
As a part of my job at Cisco I’ve been looking into Zscaler and their offerings. It started me thinking back to the early days of remote access, and I figured it would make a good topic for Netstalgia. I wrote in the past about how bulletin board systems (BBSs) work, and in another article […]
A nauseating outage
When I worked for the Gold partner I generally serviced clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, but because we were a national partner I was occasionally called to other locations around the country. Being a double CCIE who had worked in TAC, I had a unique skill set among our engineers, which was often […]
For the love of wiring
We’ve moved into a wireless world, which is too bad for me because I love, more than anything, wiring. I miss the days of good old Cat 3 cable, T1 lines, and ISDN BRIs. I miss 66 blocks, punch down tools, cross-connect wire, and tone/probe kits. And butt sets. Especially butt sets. Now I just […]