Before I get into the Wireless Field Day 2 posts coming up next week, I wanted to take a second and clarify the commenting policy I have on my blog.  That way there isn’t any confusion about comment approvals and such.

I have a pretty open policy when it comes to commenting.  If you take the time to post a comment, I will usually approve it.  I respect the opinions of those that read my blog and welcome any and all feedback.  If a particular post inspires you enough for you to take the time to put keyboard to phosphors and create a response, it is my duty as a blogger to make sure that your voice is heard.  It doesn’t matter if your opinion is different that mine or  if you are correcting misinformation.  I will publish all comments in my queue.  There are two exceptions, however:

1.  Spam – I detest spam comments with the fury of a thousand fiery suns.  I don’t need magic pills, Free*** devices (where *** is a ton of crap restrictions and offer signups) or SEO tips, thank you very much.  I have managed my blog so far without your help kind marketing people of the underbelly of the Internet.  I think I’ll make it a few more posts without you as well.  Comments that are definitely spam are approved to /dev/null and forgotten.  I will usually err on the side of caution when it comes to non-obvious comments.  I also go through the spam folder regularly and rescue non-spam comments.  I do see every one of them at some point, so the bad stuff is really bad stuff in my mind, not just a sorting algorithm.

2.  Hateful Comments – I don’t mind a good discussion, even a heated one.  Hell, I’ve even made a couple of pointed comments myself.  But, there has to be a point to the pointedness.  If you disagree with a particular position and can elucidate that point, even with some harsh or off-color language, I’ll likely approve your point of view.  If your comment is nothing more than “F*** off and die you stupid a**h***!!!!!111!!!”, I will delete it.  That comment adds nothing to the discussion and only seeks to inflame people into being dragged down to a low level of name calling.  When in doubt, remember that even during the height of the American Civil War, when states were shooting at each other, the members of Congress still referred to each other as “The Distinguished Gentlemen from [...]” even as they were yelling obscenities.  A little decorum goes a long way to ensuring your voice is heard, even if it is a bit antagonistic.

With that said, there are times when things slip through or are taken out of context.  While I approve every comment without (much) reservation, I also feel it is my duty to leave comments up and not delete them out of spite.  I will, however, agree to delete a comment should the commentor contact me with the request to remove a specific comment.  I want to be sure that the opinions and positions expressed are accurate for all represented parties.  In the event that a comment reply chain spirals out of control, I reserve the right to remove comments of both parties back to the point where the flaming started.  I’ll leave the original comments unless otherwise asked to remove them.

I’m not a journalist.  I’m not a celebrity blogger.  I’m just some random nerdy guy with a keyboard and some thoughts that I want to share.  Many of you readers out there want to share your thoughts on my thoughts as well.  This post just ensures that we’re all on the same page when it comes to what gets approved and what doesn’t.

I’ve always believed that everyone has at least one good story in them.  People have anecdotes about funny times in college or goofy stories about their kids.  Tech-oriented people have even more stories that usually revolve around technology gone bad or interaction with non-technical people.  From the amount of studying and learning that tech-oriented people do, it is inevitable that knowledge is accumulated and waiting to be passed on.  The trick with all these stories and knowledge is finding someone to share it with.

Blogging is my preferred method of getting the thoughts out of my head.  Most of my friends an colleagues do the same.  Some of us have established blogs that have been going for a while now.  Others are just starting out.  However, there are even more of you out there with stories to tell and things to share without a blog.  Maybe you have no desire to keep up with the day-to-day drudgery of maintaining a blog.  Perhaps you don’t think you have enough in you to keep writing day after day.  You have even avoided creating a blog because you couldn’t think of a catchy title.  Let me tell you that I’ve got a deal for you that will eliminate all those issues for you.

As many of you know, I’ve been a regular contributor to the Packet Pushers Podcast.  Recently, Ethan and Greg have redesigned the site and started blogging more and more there.  They’ve also decided to open up the doors and invite some guest bloggers to write content for the site.  This is wonderful for those of you that are worried about blogging.  You don’t have to concern yourself with writing once a week.  Or month.  Or even year.  Just write whenever you feel the need to put something out there.  The Packet Pushers will make sure that everything is spelled correctly and put it up on the site.  You can be sure that your post will be seen by lots of visitors, as the Packet Pushers site gets hundreds every day and several thousand a month.  And you’ll get lots of feedback and comments for sure.

How do you get involved?  Send an email to packetpushers@gmail.com with the subject line “I Want To Blog With The Packet Pushers!”  You’ll get an account on the website for creating your post and the rest will take care of itself.  I look forward to see some of you writing on Packet Pushers and sharing all you’ve learned.  Remember, Too Much Blogging Would Never Be Enough.

My last real milestone to hit just came up.  This blog has now been around for one whole year.  I’m shocked to say the least.  I never believed that having a scratchpad for jotting down my ideas about troubleshooting would blossom into this.  Those of you that have followed me for a while know that I tend to flit around technologies from wireless to security to switching and back to posts about Apple computers from time to time (even though I don’t own one).  To see that I’ve been able to keep this going for as long as I have is either a testament to my stubbornness or the large amount of cruft floating around in my head.

My initial ideas about troubleshooting hit a writer’s block wall pretty quickly.  I started posting some things about my CCIE studies and the occasional voice-related article.  It took a couple of months before I started writing pieces based more on opinion than fact.  I was afraid at first.  I’m normally the kind of person that keeps my opinions to myself.  However, it was interesting to put my thoughts and ideas down on “paper” and see what people thought of them.  Opinion pieces don’t require paragraphs worth of console output or exhaustive testing.  Of course, they can also be wrong or inaccurate and subject to debate or correction.  Other bloggers have told me that opinion pieces aren’t for them due to the possibility of angering their audience or fear of rejection.  My advice is to give it a shot on something simple first.  Put your thoughts out there and see what the reaction looks like.  Remember the old adage, “If people agree with everything you’ve said, you aren’t doing your job.”

I find myself spending more time commenting on current events in long form now.  I do get a chance to discuss things on Packet Pushers from time to time, but when something really juicy comes up, I can’t resist adding my voice to the din.  Some of these articles are interesting, others not so much.  I tried my hand at adding some link aggregation pages every week or so but found that I didn’t really keep up with new things like I thought I would.  I really spend a lot more time out in the field doing rather than learning.  I’m not one for going over simple things that are well-documented elsewhere.  I tend to talk about the more esoteric configurations or things that you just can’t find anywhere else.  Those posts are as much for my benefit as anyone else’s.  If I know that I’ve run into a particular situation and I write about it, I know I can always find it here as opposed to sifting through Google for hours on end.  I just hope my readers can get some use out of it too.

I still blog about the CCIE a fair amount.  It feels a little different commenting on it from the other side of the line, but people seem to like reading about all things lab related.  There are a ton of great blogs out there that detail the process that lab candidates are going through and the little gems of knowledge that they unearth from time to time, whether it be revelations about Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP) or alias lists or even TCL scripts.  I should probably create a CCIE candidate blog list just so those of you out there that hunger for my CCIE-related material can get your fix from them as well.  My CCIE posts tend to be more on the commentary side and focused on the details in the process rather than the content.  I think it’s more of a way to talk about the things that I see are important to keep in mind besides the ability to remember OSPF LSA types on demand.  A “forest for the trees” approach, if you will.

Once again, I’d like to thank all my visitors and readers for your time.  I appreciate your feedback and comments about everything.  You help me be a better blogger with every post.  It helps me to know that the things I post can be useful.  Tanner Ezell and I discussed the idea that people should provide help and support because they can, not because they’re doing it for fame or recognition.  I like helping people solve problems.  It just so happens that the most efficient way for me to do it is by writing a blog.  The more you wonderful people read it, the more popular and well-known it becomes.  While I appreciate that, know that I’ll still be here plugging away and talking about things even if I’m on page 30 of a Google search.

I’m not usually one for milestones on things, but I wanted to take a second for my 100th blog post.  In truth, when I started this thing back in September, I never thought I’d have a hundred posts in me.  I just wanted to get a few things off my chest that wouldn’t fit into 140 characters on Twitter.  I never expected anyone to take an interest in my ramblings about stuff.  But, for some reason, you all came to see what was floating around in my mind and it’s really taken off from there.  This blog has been more than just an outlet for harping on about NAT or being funny some of the time.  It’s also helped me to hear from vendors I might not otherwise talk to, get a weekend job running my mouth, and enjoy the fame and fortune of being a semi-famous technology blogger.  Still waiting on the fame and certainly the fortune, though.

Since making my very first post on September 23rd, I’ve taken 234 days to post 100 entries.  That works out to be a post about every 2.5 days, which is much better than the unofficial standard I hold myself to of trying to post about once a week.  I’ve had about 31,000 visitors so far, on average about 190 a day.  Not bad for someone that thought they’d be lucky to get 10 readers.

I thought it might be fun to revisit the most popular posts out of my first hundred.  I was a little shocked by some of them:

#5 – The Recertification Treadmill Aside from my huge Wall of Shame behind my desk, I get a lot of questions about certifications in the industry.  People want to pass the CCNA or the JNCIA and then run right out and get a job.  This post was a way to let people know that there is another side to doing nothing but taking tests all the time.  It was also my hope that certification organizations would perk up and start offering CPE-like credits for recertifying.  Eh, maybe next year…

#4 – Fruit Company Console: My Review of the Cisco Console Companion for the iPad/iPhone I really liked this one.  I got to review a piece of technology that people were curious about and put it through its paces.  I wrote a long article with tons of pictures and explanations about the inner workings of the cable and the software.  I even got the developer to leave a comment about upcoming features!  This post was responsible for my largest amount of traffic in one day, 523 page views.  It was kind of humbling to see that people wanted to hear my opinion about something.

#3 – Hooray for Bruno! My discussion of the addition of layer 2 troubleshooting to the CCIE lab and my summation of the Cisco discussion threads about it.  Not that big a deal when it came out, but it consistently gets hits from search engines each week.  My post right before it about the announcement of the addition of the layer 2 stuff was a little more emotional and perhaps a little over the top, but I think getting grounded back in the reality of things and posting a follow up with hard facts as opposed to screaming was a little better overall.  I guess CCIE candidates are still curious about what to expect inside that little room, and Google sends them my way for some reason.

#2 – God Help Us, We’re In The Hands Of Engineers Without a doubt, the post that really launched my blog.  Crafted because of a comment someone left on Jeremy Stretch’s blog, this post took off like wildfire.  I got tons of DMs about it from my fellow enginee…rock stars telling me they loved it.  My post was result of  my irritation at the idea that people in the IT industry can’t use the term “engineer” to describe themselves.  My comment leveled at P. Eng was my frustration at the fact people think it’s a title that should be put on a pedestal.  At the end of the day, I might have taken the troll bait, but I felt better about things, and from what I’ve been told a few other people did as well.  I still use the term “rock star” on here to refer to network engineers as a way to poke a bit of fun at this post.  This was the first post on my blog to reach 1,000 views.

#1 – CUVA Windows 7 64-bit Support To be completely honest, this is the most shocking thing I’ve seen in my first hundred posts.  I wrote this post when I was trying to get my old CUVA camera working with my new Windows 7 64-bit laptop.  I found the answers scattered across a Cisco forum and buried 6 or 7 pages into the thread.  I decided to clarify them a little and post them here so that I could find them again if I needed them.  This wasn’t an instant success like the Engineer or Console Cable posts, but it does receive the most consistent traffic stats each week.  I guess that there are enough CUVA cameras out there that don’t work with the new versions of Windows that people want to start searching the Internet to make them operational again.  This post only recently overtook the Engineer post as the #1 viewed post on my site, and at the rate it gets hits, I doubt anything will overtake it in the foreseeable future.

Those are the highlights of my first hundred posts.  How about the next hundred?  Well, I considering starting a sort-of weekly link posting.  I read a lot of stories during the week, and I discuss some of them on the Packet Pushers podcast, but I don’t get to talk about all the things I digest.  I figure by highlighting a few of them, especially the good commentaries, it will help share some of the things I encounter during my scouring of the Internet.  What else?  I’m really curious to hear what you have to say about when I’ve written.  More humor?  Less humor?  More technical deep dives into things?  More CCIE stuff?  Less CCIE stuff?  I write whatever pops into my head most of the time, but if I know there are things that my audience likes to read, I can focus more on those.

In the end, I want to thank each and every one of you that read my blog.  Committing thoughts to phosphors doesn’t really impact me one way or the other.  I would probably do it even if I had zero readers, as it kind of cathartic to be able to get this stuff out of my head and down someone semi-permanent.  But my readers take time out of their busy lives to read through things and post comments, discuss, and share my thoughts with others.  It goes without saying that my attendance at Tech Field Day and my regular spots on Packet Pushers would not have been possible without all of you believing in me enough to stick with me while I figured this whole blogging thing out.  Once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Stay tuned for the next hundred posts.  We’ll see what happens from here.

I’ve gone and done it.  I’ve moved my blog from its formerly cozy home at http://networkingnerd.wordpress.com to some fabulous new digs over at http://networkingnerd.net.  You’ll find, though, that this house looks the same as the old one in pretty much every way so far.  I just shortened the address a little.  Being one of those people cursed with a long last name and working for a company with a long domain name, I get really tired of typing things out and even worse trying to tell people where my blog is.  So, I’ve just decided to make a new name for it.  I’m still hosted through WordPress, so none of that changes.  In fact, the whole process was extraordinarily painless.  I even went to the trouble of setting up Google Apps with my new domain, which took all of half an hour to populate and start running.  That means that I’ve now got a complete presence in the cloud! It also means that I’ve got an e-mail address just waiting for questions and comments that you may not want to leave in public.  Just don’t go to all the trouble of signing me up for strange mailing lists.  I’ve got enough trouble with the ones I’m on now.  You can email me here:

Note that it’s a picture, so CTRL+X and CTRL+V isn’t going to cut it (ha!).  The old domain will still redirect here, so don’t fret about updating RSS feeds or subscriptions or anything like that right away.  You’ll still be able to get here whether you use the long way or the new short way.  Thanks for tuning in and staying with me as I figure out this blogging thing.  I hope my posts have been informative, useful, and above all else funny and snarky.  If there’s anything I can do to make your viewing and reading experience better, you now have a place to let me know.

If you’re seeing this post, it means that I’ve finally gotten started on a blog.  Or, months from now, it means that you’ve reached the end of my posting in reverse chronological order.  Either way, I hope will be (has been ) a fun read.

This is a place for me to condense thoughts and post things I might need to find later that would end up getting lost in the dark recesses of my mind.  Be warned that there are LOTS of things that pass through there on a regular basis, so you never know what’s going to end up here.

For the most part, this is going to be a technical place.  I’m a Cisco partner engineer, and I’m a CCNA, CCDA, CCNP, CCDP, CCVP, CCSP, and a whole host of partner specializations.  I’m also a CISSP, MCSE: Messaging, MCSE: Security, Novell Master CNE, VMWare VCP, and a litany of other things.  I say this not to toot my own horn, but to show that I’m pretty much all over the map when it comes to technical nerdage.  I work on a lot of things in my job, and if they call that ‘wearing many hats’ I should open a haberdashery.

I’m also on Twitter, so feel free to follow me.  I’m @networkingnerd.  This place will probably end up being a repository for my thoughts that run longer than 140 characters, but rest assured that the same snark that accompanies my tweets will probably leak over here.

So, look for more content to come.  Unless you’ve already waded through the content and found this last (first) entry.  In which case, start over again and make sure I’m keeping up with things.