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 ;)

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)

Shout out: Junos Firewall Filters by Robert Juric

In my previous blog post about Juniper Training, I discussed how Juniper Firewall Filters were quite interesting and new to me because I have been using SRX since I started with Juniper equipment 12 months ago.

Robert Juric (@robertjuric) has written two really good blog posts about this topic that provides a really good overview of the topic. Robert is currently studying for his JNCIA-EX exam and has written several articles about Junos configuration.