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 […]
The tech industry and the worship of the new
“Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.” – Ogden Nash The book The Innovator’s Dilemma appears on the desk of a lot of Silicon Valley executives. Its author, Clayton Christiensen, is famous for having coined the term “disruptive innovation.” The term has always bothered me, and I keep waiting for the […]
Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System II
In my last post, I discussed the BBS and how it worked. (It would be helpful to review, to understand the terminology.) In this post, I have resurrected, in part, the BBS I used to run from 1988-1990. It was called “The Tower”, for no particularly good reason except that it sounded cool to my […]
Vintage DDoS
With Coronavirus spreading, events shut down, the Dow crashing, and all the other bad news, how about a little distraction? Time for some NetStalgia. Back in the mid 1990’s, I worked at a computer consulting firm called Mann Consulting. Mann’s clientele consisted primarily of small ad agencies, ranging from a dozen people to a couple […]