Midnight in Silicon Valley

The Setup

So there I was, setting up my “command centre” for the 15 hour flight from Sydney to San Jose via San Francisco. I had my Macbook and my iPad fully charged, as well as ye olde print book ready just in case. I idly flipped through the inflight entertainment guide to see what movie would be playing on the main cabin display.

“Midnight in Paris” ? What’s this rubbish? Oh… Woody Allen… right… yeah… that’s just what I need :(

Be My Valentines

Im not sure how many of you follow my wife, @MrsJanitor, on Twitter but we met 7 years ago today.

When I asked about our plans for today she surprised me with some information. Ever the romantic I decided to publicly share my love, and thus I present you:

And to show just how much she “gets me” her only reply was:

New Year, New Layout!

Well, now that we’re into February, I guess I should probably do a post about the new website layout I worked on over the Christmas break. Hopefully if your viewing this from my website, as opposed to via an RSS feed, you notice my new theme as well as the amazing new logo provided by Stijn from Studio Stayne.

I approached Stijn in November about some design ideas I had for a logo for the blog, asking very non-creative questions with some pretty broad strokes ideas of what I was after. Within a couple of days he had presented me with a handful of options that were all unique, yet still managed to meet my design “spec”. Im not good at making decisions, but after some ideas back and forth about the things I liked I received several more workshopped ideas taking the best bits of each design. The fact that I am not very creative is probably obvious given the layout of my blog for the previous two years, but taking some advice from Stijn and incorporating his selection of colour scheme into the theme I had been testing out really helped me make the right decisions. I cannot guarantee that the content of my blog posts will get any better, but it certainly will look a lot better while you’re here ;)

On the Premature Death of Spanning Tree and the Indiscriminate Killing of Canaries

I have a bee in my bonnet. After my last post full of love and bromance, this one is full of hate and vitriol - and I don’t apologise! We have all seen many presentations on each vendors latest and greatest “fabric” technologies over the past 18 months. It doesn’t matter which vendor, whether the presenter is sales or tech, or even enterprise or service provider focused - at some point almost every one declares that their solution is “the end of spanning tree”. It gets worse when they actively advise that you do not run spanning tree in your environment.

Mentoring your way to better career happiness

Yesterday was possibly one of the proudest days in my professional life. My very good friend Anthony Burke sent me a text message just after 9am to tell me that he had passed his JNCIA-Junos exam. This is a close tie with when he earned his place as a delegate to Network Field Day 4 back in October.

So why am I so proud about this? Well Anthony and I have become great friends over the past 18 months all through the magic of social media. One day for no reason (as is the way of things) we just started talking. Tweets became skypes and in January, even though we had only ever met face to face once, my wife and I drove the 10 hour trip to Melbourne to attend his wedding. (Sitting at table answering the question of “So how do you know Anthony?” with “Oh. From the Internet” was a humorous experience)

Pessimistic Engineering

I don’t know about you, but I am regularly told “You worry too much” or “You don’t need to worry about that”. Sometimes its “What are the chances of that ever happening?”. These are things that Ive heard from many people over the years and the best I can come up with is:

"That's what you pay me for! Im here to think of the worst case scenario and then mitigate against that.".

This is usually followed by confused looks from those around me who do not seem to grasp what I am getting at here.

Juniper Lab Experiences - My second attempt at JNCIE-ENT

As many of you know, I had the honour and good fortune of being able to take part in beta testing the JNCIE-ENT lab in August of 2011. The day completely wiped me out and I was walking around in a daze for the remainder of that week. While I knew the technologies I was unprepared for the time-management skills required to pass this lab. Needless to say it was no surprise when I received my fail-mail advising me that I was unsuccessful.

Of all good things...

Well it appears that I am well on my way to holding onto the title for two years running, and once again, I haven’t posted anything for a couple of months. There have been a lot of changes going on around here in the past few months which have really taken me away from my “janitorial duties”.

There are three key items that I would like to take the time to update everyone on:

SlackArse of the Year - 2011

Hey All,

I know I have kind of been MIA for the past 3 months. Ivan reminded me recently that I haven’t actually published a single post since September, so I wanted to give a brief “status update”.

The last couple of months have included the following:

• Network Field Day

• Meeting some of my “Industry Heros” (Read ‘Rockstars’)

• My wife spent 3 months living 12 hours away, teaching at a remote Aboriginal Community.

  Continue reading

Pin the taildrop on the NetDonkey

Hey everyone, this is just a short blog post to let you know that my good friend, Nick Ryce (@NetDonkey) has moved his blog over to taildrop.net. He has recently featured as a guest blogger with Juniper EMEA where he has written a post on his certification path towards his JNCIE-ENT.

Nick was my “Study Buddy” for the JNCIE-ENT lab preparation and we have been bouncing design ideas an strategies off each other for over a year now. Make sure you add him to your RSS feeds :)