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 […]
Theme changes
I mentioned several weeks ago I would be playing with the themes on this blog as my old one is broken and I don’t have time to fix it. Pardon the changes in appearance while I play around. I was getting tired of the tiles anyways, so maybe going back to a linear format will […]
Must we speak in meetings?
When I first started at Cisco (the second time), I remember being in a customer meeting where I had no idea what was going on. As is typical for vendor meetings, Cisco employees outnumbered the customer by 3 to 1. Someone from our side was presenting, though I don’t really remember about what. I didn’t […]
Painted into a corner
I’ve written before about my years at the San Francisco Chronicle, my first job which was exclusively network engineering. It was an interesting environment, as this was back in the years before the Internet totally displaced newspapers. We had printing plants to support, active newsrooms with reporters and photographers, and a massive circulation operation. When […]
Interviewing #3: Technical Assessment
We all have weaknesses, and one of mine is that I’m good at starting things and bad at finishing them. Two years ago (gasp) I had started writing a series about technical interviewing. I wrote two posts (here and here) on the subject and never finished. A recent commenter asked for me to keep writing […]
Theme Changes
I started this blog in February 2013. Amazingly, I’m closing in on ten years. It’s certainly turned out differently than I expected, and I haven’t written as much as I’d liked. In 2016, I hired a company to update the blog and design a new theme. Maintaining your own WordPress blog is a lot of […]
One big /8
I thought I’d take break from Cisco Live to relive some memories in another Netstalgia. Working in product management at a Cisco business unit, we are constantly talking about the latest and greatest, the cutting edge of technology. It’s easy to forget how many customers out there are nowhere near the cutting edge. They’re not […]
Memories of Cisco Live II – Berlin 2016
Getting a session at Cisco Live is not a given, even for a Principal TME. I started at Cisco in October 2015, and I certainly didn’t expect to present at, or even go to, Cisco Live Berlin in January 2016. Normally, there are three ways to secure a session at CL: Submit an idea during […]