Etherealmind’s Favourite Posts of 2008

I have been going over the year and picked out some of my per­sonal favour­ites as well as some of the most pop­u­lar posts this year.

Humour

My top piece of humour for the year was a pictorial on the dif­fer­ence in per­cep­tion between Network and Server engin­eers. Note: humour is a rel­at­ive term since it is geek humour. Many people kindly said it was funny.

The Difference between Server and Network Engineers

Another favour­ite is the Lay of the Network Hero

A far more cyn­ical post is The Real Job Description for Network Architects, but it comes from my frus­tra­tion in explain­ing my value to man­age­ment. Which is def­in­itely a per­sonal fail­ing — must work on that next year.

Network Dictonary

The Network Dictionary con­tin­ues to be a favour­ite pas­time for me. Although I have been a little cyn­ical lately, I have had a lot of fun think­ing of terms that we use every­day but never take the time to think about.

Spinning Rust

Assonance

Fancy Ethernet

Server Hugger

Ciscotist

Human Remorse — my name for the Human Resources

Technical — Cisco mostly

Using IOS as a SSH ter­minal server An articel show­ing how to con­fig­ure an IOS ter­minal server to use SSH. With a fol­lowup art­icle Part 2

Musing: On Permananent and Ephemeral Knowledge and Exam Study

Anti-​​FCOE posts

I remain con­vinced the FCoE is a dead end tech­no­logy. While I can per­ceive why Cisco thought it would be a good idea for shift­ing the emphasis away from Fibrechannel switches to their product strength on eth­er­net, I sus­pect that most people will bypass FCoE and move to iSCSI because cus­tom­ers don’t see the value in Fibrechannel at all. (Except for exist­ing stor­age people, who increas­ingly sound like the Telephony industry before it was ground into meat by Voice Over IP).

http://​eth​er​e​al​mind​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​0​4​/​1​7​/​n​o​t​-​a​n​t​i​-​f​c​o​e​-​i​-​a​m​-​a​n​t​i​-​f​i​b​rechannel/

People against FCoE, its loud and proud — Part 1

Voice Mail and Phone Manners

This was the year that I dis­abled Voice Mail and this has improved my qual­ity of life tre­mend­ously. Now people send email or SMS, and my pro­ductiv­ity has improved out of sight.

Rant: I Loathe Voicemail, its dis­rupt­ive and inefficent

I have also stopped answer­ing the phone in meet­ings, or when talk­ing dir­ectly to people since it is pos­sibly the rudest and most insult­ing thing I could do to someone. Exceptions apply.

Certifications

I pos­ted a sequence of art­icles on the value of cer­ti­fic­a­tion, which has con­tin­ued to echo around the blo­go­sphere. These star­ted in response to a fel­low worker who claimed that cer­ti­fic­a­tions was a rip off (and had no cer­ti­fic­a­tions) but equally would not con­sider people for a job if they did not have at least CCNP. The first art­icle starts Why Certfication Matters, Experience Less So and con­tin­ues into a four part series.

Fundraising

I have now raised £62 for char­ity — and some more money will be com­ing in the new year. Thanks to every­one who sup­por­ted this. Next year, I will also be send­ing a por­tion of the money to a char­ity in a devel­op­ing coun­try to help those who are worse off than me. Once I have selec­ted a char­ity I will let you know.

Next Year

I am not sure what next year will bring. I am weary of work­ing and con­sid­er­ing an exten­ded break but the recent changes in the world make that a hard decision. I have some ideas on doing more blog­ging, but I don’t really have the time to do them. For sure, you can’t make money out of a blog for net­work nerds.

So best wishes to every­one, and look for­ward to see­ing you in the new year.

Addendum

You can see a list of all my posts in the Repository.

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