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...
Read MoreStay 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...
Read MoreTAC 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...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreBefore 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...
Read MoreVintage 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...
Read MoreCleared for nothing
I was working at Juniper when the CIO asked me to apply for a government security clearance. There were a number of hacking attempts on our network, and a security clearance would make me eligible for briefings from the...
Read MoreTAC Tales #19: Butt-in-Chair
This one falls into the category of, “I probably shouldn’t post this, especially now that I’m at Cisco again,” but what the heck. I’ve often mentioned, in this series, the different practices of...
Read MoreWhere does time go?
Two things can almost go without saying: If you start a blog, you need to commit time to writing it. When you move up in the corporate world, time becomes a precious commodity. When I started this blog several years ago, I was a...
Read MoreBefore the Internet: The Bulletin Board System
It’s inevitable, as we get older, that we look back on the past with a certain nostalgia. That said, I think that computing in the era when I was growing up, the 1980’s, was more fun and interesting than it is now. ...
Read MoreTAC Tales #18: All at once
The case came into the routing protocols queue, even though it was simply a line card crash. The RP queue in HTTS was the dumping ground for anything that did not fit into one of the few other specialized queues we had. A...
Read MoreInterviewing #2: Why do we interview?
In the last article on technical interviewing, I told the story of how I got my first networking job. The interview was chaotic and unorganized, and resulted in me getting the job and being quite successful. In this post,...
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