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 […]
Memories of Cisco Live
The last Cisco Live I attended was in Barcelona in January 2020. As I was in the airport heading home, I was reading news of a new virus emerging from China. I looked with bemusement at a troop of high-school-age girls who all had surgical masks on. Various authorities told us not to wear masks, […]
How not to do Internet Connectivity
My first IT job was at a small company in Novato, California, that designed and built museum exhibits. At the time most companies either designed the exhibits or built them, but ours was the only one that did both. You could separate the services, and just do one or the other, but our end-to-end model […]
Netstalgia: Bad Timing
After I left TAC I worked for two years at a Gold Partner in San Francisco. One of my first customers there was one of my most difficult, and it all came down to timing. I was dispatched to perform a network assessment of a small real-estate SaaS company in the SF East Bay. Having […]
Why I don’t wear Airpods
I have written more than once (here and here, for example) about my belief that technological progression cannot always be considered a good thing. We are surrounded in the media by a form of technological optimism which I find disconcerting. “Tech” will solve everything from world hunger to cancer, and the Peter Thiels of the […]
Y2K
In 1998 I left my job as a computer “consultant” to pursue a master’s degree in Telecommunications Management. I was stuck in my job, tired of troubleshooting people’s email clients and installing Word on their desktops, and was looking for a way to make a leap into bigger and better things. That did happen–although not […]
Stay away from OOP
I’ve been revising my Cisco Live session on IOS XE programmability, and it’s made me think about programming in general, and a particular idea I’ve been embarrassed to admit I loathe: Object Oriented Programming. Some context: I started programming on the Apple II+ in BASIC, which shows my age. Back then programs were input with […]
TAC Tales #20: Crash, burn, and exit
I’ve mentioned before that, despite being on the Routing Protocols team, I spent a lot of time handling crash cases in TAC. At the time, my queue was just a dumping ground for cases that didn’t fit into any other bucket in the High Touch structure. Backbone TAC had a much more granular division of […]