Party like it’s 1993!

Posted on January 9, 2011 by networkingnerd

I was once told by a consultant that he could figure out whether a client needed his services after about 30 seconds at a router console. When I asked how he could be so sure after such a short amount of time, he consoled to a router in his lab and typed in “show clock”. The lab router returned the now-familiar string of Mar 1, 1993 (he’d just booted it). As soon as he showed me that one command, it all made sense. Keeping accurate time in a computer environment is very important to systems. Directory structures depend on an accurate clock to authorize logins and track audit events. Novell and Windows both utilize systems to ensure that the clocks of all the servers in the network are synchronized. And if those clocks drift out of sync, heaven help the server admins.

What about network equipment? In days past, the routers and switches were typically neglected when it came to clock setting. In fact, most older Cisco routers didn’t even include an on-board battery to keep the clock accurate. And when the router would reboot, the software clock didn’t have an accurate hardware clock to refer to, so it used 00:00 1 Mar 1993 as the reference point. But as systems have increased in complexity over the past several years, the need to have all the time on your equipment accurate has become paramount. When debugging a call hand-off on a voice gateway, an accurate router clock ensures that you can match the time the call was placed with the debug message output. If there is a security incursion into your network devices, you need to track the time the device was accessed in order to be able to accurately report the event to the proper authorities.

So how do we get our network clocks to report the right time? Well, the process is fairly easy, provided you’ve done a little homework about a couple of things. First, you need to know what timezone you are in and what your GMT offset is. In today’s world, it is far easier to keep the clock of your device synced to GMT, then apply an offset to show you what the local time is. That way, if you have devices spread all over the world, you never have to worry about a significant time difference because one clock was synced to local time and the other was synced to GMT with an offset applied. For the purposes of the examples in this post, I’m going to assume the router is located in the central United States and is in the Central Time Zone. The fact that I myself am in the Central Time Zone and therefore would not need to do any additional thinking to write my examples is purely coincidental.

In the case of my example, the central United States is in the Central Standard Time Zone (CST). CST is six hours behind the GMT clock (GMT -6).

When you first connect to the router, you will either see the default time of 00:00 1 Mar 1993 (for older routers), or if you’re on an ISR or newer router, it may be synced fairly close to the actual time. Starting with the ISR, Cisco started keeping the time synced more closely when the router was shipped from the factory, and the battery keeping the hardware clock time when powered off seemed to last a lot longer.

At this point, we need to set the router’s timezone with this command:

R1(config)# clock timezone <name> <GMT offset>
R1(config)# clock timezone CST -6

Once you’ve done that, the system should update with a message telling you that the current time zone has been updated. Now, the router should know what time zone it’s in and adjust the clock offset appropriately. You should also set the daylight savings time conditions as well. For those not familiar, DST is a law that many countries have adopted that force sleepy engineers to reset the clock on the microwave at 2 a.m. on two days during the year. Just when we had it down, they went and changed it a couple of years ago. Hence the reason that Cisco doesn’t hard-code the DST settings on their routers. They are more than happy to let you do it yourself. In this example, we’re using the U.S. standard of the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November:

R1(config)# clock summer-time <name> recurring <week number start> 
        <day> <month> <time to start> <week number end> <day> <month> <time to end>
R1(config)# clock summer-time CDT recurring 2 Sun Mar 2:00 1 Sun Nov 2:00

And just like that, your router will perform just like every other smart device in your house and reset the clock for DST when necessary. Now, if I could just get my microwave to do that.

Now that your router is in the right time zone, it’s probably a good idea to sync the clock to some kind of external time source. That’s why Network Time Protocol (NTP) was created. It allows distributed systems to sync their clocks with a time source directly connected to an atomic clock (the most precise kind). NTP form as a hierarchy through use of strata. Stratum 0 NTP devices are directly connected to atomic clock sources, usually through RS-232 or other cabling. The are not connected via a network. Stratum 1 NTP devices are connected to Stratum 0 devices via a network connection. These are the systems that are usually referred to as time servers. These are usually the devices that you will sync one of your clocks to. Why just one? Well, while having all your devices synced to external time sources is a great idea, there are two issues that can arise. First, having that much NTP traffic exiting your network isn’t exactly optimal. There is no reason for 20 routers to each poll an external NTP server when one router could do the same thing, and the other 19 routers poll the synced router. You can even designated your NTP-synced router as a Stratum 2 or 3 device if you’d like, then have it start serving time to your other devices. The second issue with using all external NTP servers deals with security. Some people are uncomfortable with the idea that all their devices are being told how to manage their clocks by an external device over which they have no control. By configuring your devices to sync to one clock in your network that you control, there is more consistency and less reliance on systems outside your control that may be overloaded or unreliable. For more info on what happens when someone starts abusing an NTP server, check out what NETGEAR did to the University of Wisconsin’s NTP server here.

For the sake of your sanity, it’s best to set the clock to something close to the actual time before you set the NTP server. The reason for this is due to the propensity for NTP to look at your clock and declare it insane if you are too far drifted from the actual time. I usually try to get my local clock somewhere in the neighborhood of one hour from the actual time, but the closer you are and the faster NTP will sync. You do this with the following command (note the context)

R1#clock set <HH:MM:SS> <1-31> <Name of Month> <Year>
R1#clock set 01:00:00 10 Jan 2011

You must manually set the clock in enable mode, not global config mode. Once you’ve gotten the clock close to your time, you can set the NTP server. If you want to sync your router to an external time source, using the NIST Time Server list is always a good start. If your router is capable of resolving DNS, a better idea is to use the NTP pool service. This service is a cluster of NTP servers around the world that is served by round-robin DNS query, so no one server can get overloaded. If you don’t feel comfortable syncing your clock to a server in France or Japan, you can always narrow down the focus of your query by using narrower DNS entries. Check out their site for ways to do this. Once you’ve figured out how you are going to connect to NTP, and whether you are going to use external or internal servers, the command is pretty easy:

R1(config)# ntp server <name or ip>
R1(config)# ntp server 10.1.1.1
or
R1(config)# ntp server 0.pool.ntp.org

Yep, that’s it. Simple once you’ve gotten all the planning down. You can check your NTP sync status with the command show ntp status. You can see which time servers your are polling with the command show ntp associations. The commands have a lot of good info, but can be a little cryptic your first couple of trys.

Once you’ve gotten your clock in sync, there’s just two more commands you need to use to ensure that all your logs and debug outputs are using the right clock. By default, logs and debugs use the system uptime for their output, so you could get a log message that says “1w3d” instead of the real time. And if you have to start doing math on your debugs to figure out when a call was dropped, you’re going to be a cranky rock star. From global config mode, go ahead and type in these two commands:

R1(config)# service timestamps log datetime msec
R1(config)# service timestamps debug datetime msec

The “MSEC” keyword on the end tracks the message down to the millisecond level, which I’ve always found very handy when trying to figure out sub-second error messages. It also helps better match error logs which are all part of the same event, but spread out over multiple messages.

Now, your routers are all in sync and your logs and debugs are all outputting the correct time. If a consultant tries to access your devices, you will appear to be one cool customer that doesn’t need any help on your networking devices. You’ll also be able to troubleshoot faster and get all the fame and wealth appropriate to your station as the Network Miracle Worker.

For what it’s worth, I did a lot of searching about why the default time on a Cisco router without a battery backup is March 1, 1993. No one seemed to have a definitive answer. According to the Internet, the only really exciting thing that happened that day was George Steinbrenner being reinstated as Yankees owner. I doubt anyone in San Jose is a Yankees fan, so I didn’t think that was it. It also didn’t correspond to any neat numbers in the Unix Time Epoch. 1993 was the first year that Cisco acquired a company, but that happened in September of that year. The only thing that happened early was the release of IOS 10.0. I guess that Cisco decided that “10” was an important enough number that they wanted to start basing recent history sourced from this date. The other possibility is that it was just an arbitrary date chosen by IOS engineers so that the router clock didn’t cycle all the way back to 1900. MS-DOS had a similar functionality, wherein it would see the system BIOS clock set to 1900 and assume that the BIOS had to be wrong. It would then set the clock to the earliest date it could (January 1, 1980). Maybe Cisco just decided that 1993 was so early that if they noticed a router clock stuck on that date, it would just be assumed the the clock was not set. Either than, or they were really big fans of this song…

I’s and T’s and Crosses and Dots

Posted on January 5, 2011 by networkingnerd

My name is Tom, and I’m careless.

Yep, I admit it freely. I’m the kind of person that rushes through things and gets the majority of the work done. Often I leave a few things undone with the hope that I’ll go back later and fix them. For me, the result is the key. Sometimes it works out in my favor, sometimes it doesn’t. More often than not, I find myself cursing out loud about this unfinished job or task months down the road and threatening to find the person responsible, only to later determine that I should be kicking my own butt for it.

One place where this particular habit of mine has caused me endless grief in inside the unforgiving walls of Cisco’s Building C lab in San Jose. Yep, I can honestly say that at least one lab attempt was foiled due to my propensity to miss the little things. I’ve previously written about some of the details of the lab, but I wanted to take some time in this post to talk about the details themselves. As in, the details in the questions that will kill you if you give them the chance.

Let’s get it out there right now: there is NO partial credit in the CCIE lab. None. Zilch. If you fail to answer every portion of the question with completeness, you get zero points for that question. Unlike the old days in elementary school, you don’t get points for trying. This shouldn’t really come as a shock to anyone that’s taken a multiple choice test any time in their life. On those tests, there is exactly one set of answer(s) for a particular question, and if you don’t select the proper repsonse(s), you don’t get the points. The same thing goes for the questions you find in the CCIE lab exam. Just because the questions may or may not have multiple parts doesn’t excuse your need to answer them fully. Old Mr. Hollingsworth used to tell me regularly, “Son, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” Since I don’t play horseshoes and my hand grenade supplier mysteriously dried up, I guess close just won’t cut it any more.

You might end up getting a question in the lab that says something along the lines of “Configure OSPF on R1, R3, and R6 according to the diagram. Do not change router IDs. Rename R1 to ‘SnugglesR1’.” You could build the most perfect OSPF lab in history. You could spend an hour optimizing things. If you forget to rename Snuggles the Router, you will receive no credit for the question. All that hard work will get flushed down the toilet. You’ll get your score report at the end of the day and wonder why you didn’t get any points for all that time you spend making OSPF sing like a soprano.

In order to prevent this from happening to you, start training yourself now to read carefully and consider every facet of the questions you’ll see. Remember that the questions in the lab are carefully constructed by a team that spends a ton of time evaluating every part. There are no unnecessary words. Candidates have pestered proctors over the meaning of single words on a question. The questions are written as they are to make sure you take into account a number of factors. They are also designed to slip in changes to tasks and additional configuration with a word or two. And if you are careless, you’ll miss those phrases that signal changes and negations.

Surely, everyone has taken a test that has a question that says “Which of the following was NOT a <something> <something>” Your job is to evaluate the choices and pick the one that is not something. That single word changes the whole meaning of the question. And for those that are careless or the kind the skim questions, the NOT might be missed and cause them to answer incorrectly. Questions in the lab are the same way. Skimming over them without reading critically can cause nuances to be missed and lead to incorrect solutions. After 5 hours of staring at words on a monitor, things might start blurring a little, but attention must be paid to the last few questions, as those might be enough points to buoy over the passing mark.

I’ll be the first to admit that the pressure to get everything done in the allotted time may cause the candidate to want to rush, but you must resist that pressure. Many CCIE lab prep courses and instructors will tell you to carefully read the questions before you ever start configuring. I agree, with some additions. I always take my scratch paper and write the task numbers down the side. After I’ve accounted for Task 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, and so on, I then go back to the questions and make marks next to my list for any questions that may have multiple parts or tricky solutions. That way, if I find myself rushing through after lunch the marks I made early in the day force me to pay attention to the question and ensure that I don’t miss something that might cause me to tank three or four points. Those points add up over the course of the day, and more than a few careless mistakes can cost you a nice expensive soda can.

If you are serious about the CCIE lab, it’s worth your time to start working on ensuring that you pay close attention to each question and don’t make any careless mistakes due to reading too fast or missing important configuration requirements. Your day is going to be stressful enough without the added pressure of fixing mistakes later in the lab as a result of forgetting to enable OSPF authentication or a typo on a VLAN interface. You want to remember to dot every “i” and cross every “t” for each and every question. That way, you can walk out of the lab and use that freshly-dotted “i” when you spell you new title as a CCIE.

The Nerd’s Going to Have a Field Day!

Posted on January 5, 2011 by networkingnerd

Guess who gets to go to San Jose for something OTHER than the lab for once? That’s right, THIS GUY <—–!

Thanks to the wonderful folks over at Gestalt IT, I have been invited to be a delegate at Tech Field Day 5! This is a tremendous opportunity for me to get involved with the sponsoring technology companies and hear about their products and strategies for the coming months. Tech Field Day offers engineers and technical people the chance to hear about these great things in an environment conducive to learning (i.e. no sales pitches). I’ve read the coverage of the previous Tech Field Day events from some of my other blogging brethren (and sistren) and found the information that they’ve given the community to be quite valuable. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to spend some time listening to the best and brightest that will be in front of the delegates, and of course I can’t wait to pick their brains about technology!

Disclosure

What would an event be without some kind of disclosure? In this case, the TFD sponsors are paying for my travel costs and lodging costs during my stay in San Jose. That being said, they are NOT putting any limitations on what I say about the information I receive or the feelings that I have about the conference, other than to respect any information that might not be public knowledge or embargoed (which I would have done anyway). I can assure you that any and all opinions expressed about the content of TFD are mine and mine alone. I want to give you the unvarnished truth behind what I see and hear.

How Do I Get Involved?

Gestalt IT is always keeping an eye out for TFD delegates. I’ll admit that while I have wanted to be a delegate for a while now, I never thought I’d be one until I was asked. There are some things to keep in mind:

1. Read the TFD FAQ and the Becoming a Field Day Delegate pages for more information on each. Those pages are the best source of information about the process and criteria for TFD and its delegates.

2. Understand there isn’t some kind of strange conspiracy or secret machine driving this. These people look for independent critical thinkers that aren’t afraid to voice their opinions about subjects. Don’t be afraid to show your independence and be sure to speak about technical subjects.

3. Ask questions. Anywhere and everywhere. You never learn if you don’t ask questions. I question things all the time. And if you have any questions that you’d like me to ask at TFD, please let me know in the comments. I’ll be making more posts as the list of presenters becomes final so that you know who I’ll be interacting with.

Be sure to follow @TechFieldDay on Twitter for more information about TFD 5 as the date approaches in February. You can also follow the #TechFieldDay hash tag for updates live as the delegates tweet about them. For those of you that might not want to see all the TFD-related posts, you can also use the #TechFieldDay tag to filter posts in most major Twitter clients.

For more information about sponsors and delegates, head on over to the TFD5 page on GestaltIT.

The Nerd Presents: Tips for Presenting

Posted on January 3, 2011 by networkingnerd

Everyone in the world has at least one good presentation in them. It doesn’t take much to put something down in a few slides and talk about it. For most people, the hardest part is getting up in front of a group and actually speaking. Once you get over that, the rest is easy. However, in my job I get to listen to a lot of presentations. I’ve had a lot of time to look beyond the content to things that tarnish your image when in front of customers or learners. I won’t profess to be an expert when it comes to the art of presentation, but I think most would agree with me that looking at these tips will help out in the polishing department.

– Close down Outlook and turn off your mail notifications. As professionals, we are all married to Outlook/Thunderbird/Entourage. No matter what it seems impossible to escape it today with the ability to load it on our desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. However, when you stand in front of me to start pitching your software or tell me about a new technology, please turn off your mail client and notification system. Think about it like this: you don’t leave your cell phone ringer on when your presenting because of the distraction. Why would you leave the new mail popup in the corner? At best, it causes me to shift my focus from the content of the slide deck to whatever new message you just received. At worst, I may be privy to inside information from your company, sales targets and customers, or in rare and somewhat ironic cases, end of life notices for the very product you are trying to sell me. Ask yourself this question: If you were listening to me tell you about how great my Project Foobar is and I receive an email from my lead product specialist with the subject “Inability of Project Foobar to Address Basic Business Needs” would you still be interested in hearing my pitch?

– Shut down instant messengers. For that portion of the crowd that thinks email is so yesterday, there is the instant messenger (IM). People use a variety of clients, from the tried-and-true AOL instant messenger to newer things like Trillain or Pidgin or even Cisco Unified Personal Communicator. Guess what? Shut it down before you start talking to me. All of the reasons above still apply to IM conversations. In the case of IM though, people are a lot more informal. So conversations may not start out with simple hellos. You may get something more pointed or perhaps a greeting too salty for the taste of the group your are presenting to. Imagine a co-worker sending you profanity laced tirade during a speaking engagement with a Catholic school. Or something leaning toward the more delicate and personal from your spouse when you are speaking to a prospective customer. The ability to embed pictures in IMs makes this prospect even scarier. And before you say “I can just set myself to away” think about all the times that an “emergency” has come up and you’ve been pinged on IM even when your away. Chalk that particular one up to most people assuming that “away” means “I’m sitting right here and I just don’t want to talk to you right now”. Better to just shut yourself off from the IM cloud for a while and not take any chances.

– Change your desktop wallpaper to something bland. I’m guilty of this one, so allow me to start casting stones. I like wallpapers. Generally something abstract or landscape oriented. I do have the occasional cool picture of something fire and ice related. But for the most part, I tend to avoid pictures of people or animals or quotes. Especially if they could be construed as the least bit offensive. But even my conservative taste in wallpaper can be distracting when presenting. You say, “But no one is going to see my desktop if Powerpoint is up the whole time.” True enough, but how many times are you only using Powerpoint? What happens if you have to switch slide shows? Or look at a document on your desktop? Or switch to a web browser to load a live video? There are a variety of reasons to jump out of Powerpoint, and if you don’t think ahead of time, you might just find yourself showing a picture of your last trip to Cancun to all of the members of your church group. Even in the case that it’s a picture of your newborn daughter, your presentation focus will be lost as people start cooing about how cute she is, how old she is, whether or not she’s sleeping yet, whether or not you’re sleeping, ad infintium. In my book, it’s best just to change your wallpaper to basic black and move on.

– Collect all your documents related to the presentation in one folder on your desktop. Most of my presentations are loaded with technical content. Many of them, however, don’t have the density of the documents I used to put them together. Making my slides into eye charts won’t help my audience understand my topic any better. But if I mention that there is a document that includes more technical depth to this particular subject, invariably someone is going to ask to see that document. Or ask about a fact or figure from it. That leads to me needed to go spelunking through my file system to find it. Call me somewhat old-fashioned, but I don’t really like people staring at my file structure and folder contents. Especially if those folders contain competitive information. What might happen if my customer sees a document named “Juniper ASA Comparison and Debunking.pdf”? Sure, if I’m presenting one of those products it shouldn’t really matter, right? But what if the other product is one that the customer has never heard of? Yeah, if you’re researching firewalls and you’ve gotten to the point of hearing a presentation about one, hopefully you know about the other. But in my mind, just the presence of that document could derail your presentation with questions that might not be pertinent to the discussion at hand. Better to copy all of the relevant documents that you have sourced from your presentation into a folder labeled “Presentation Documents” and put it on your desktop so you don’t spend precious minutes searching for it. And while you’re at it, consider changing your browser’s homepage if you shell out to the Internet during presentations. Google is a good safe bet. Your sports book? Not so much…

– Don’t read the slides back to me. Pet. Peeve. Number. One. Don’t read your slides back to me. I’ve walked out of presentations that I’ve paid for the honor of attending for this gaffe. If you are reading the slides back to me word-for-word, it tells me you’ve done no research on the topic and you have no depth on knowledge on the subject. Marketing people are the worst when it comes to this. They just assume that what has been printed on the slide is the definitive answer to everyone’s problems and just start reading it to me like gospel. Guess what? I can read too! As you’re outlining the contents of that slide, I’ve already glanced over it and picked out the most relevant pieces of information that interest me. If you then start at the top and read the bullet points to me, I going to guess this is all new to you too. I treat my slide deck like I would treat a stack of 3”x5” index cards that I use for notes. I expand on each of the bullet points in my slide deck with additional discussion topics. That’s also one of the reasons I print my slide deck ahead of time and make it available to the people that I speak to. That way, they can jot down the notes I speak about and reference them against the printed slides. The way I see it, you came to see me speak, not look at my fancy multiple-build-slide transition heavy corporate approved 100-slide deck. If you want me to read the slides back to you, it’s going to feel way too much like circle time in my son’s kindergarten class.

Many, many moons ago I was an intern at IBM in Rochester, MN. My first-line manager decided that the other intern and I needed to get some practice giving presentations to clients/customers. She therefore decided to make us present some Windows 2000 tips to a group of users that had recently received new Thinkpad T20s (how’s that for dating myself?). After I had put together my slides, my mentor told me that I needed to go grab a brand new laptop from the laptop pool and use it instead of my personal machine. What I questioned her reasoning, she told me that by using a fresh laptop out of the box, the usual cruft that come along with my personal machine would be absent. I wouldn’t need to worry about some of the things I’ve listed above, like Outlook (in this case Lotus Notes) or my desktop wallpaper. I could concentrate on my presentation. And while I won’t say that her advice made my presentation into something that changed the fabric of the IT culture at IBM, it was successful because I didn’t have any technologically-enhanced blunders.

If you don’t have the opportunity to give yourself a new laptop every time you need to present, you could always have a clean virtual machine that consists of a basic OS with a PDF reader and presentation software. That way, you don’t have to worry about getting any unnecessary things popping up inside that VM. Just make sure to keep it updated from time to time to ensure your machine won’t pop up with a Windows Update restart prompt every 15 minutes during your slides.

Just some things to keep in mind when it’s time to jump up in front of a hostile crowd and start talking about how this information will change society or how your product is the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you don’t have to worry about some of the more mundane things in the background of your presentation, you’ll knock their socks off with the content in your slides. Just be sure not the mention Gartner. That tends to get the natives restless.

2011 – Looking Forward

Posted on January 1, 2011 by networkingnerd

I almost wrote an end-of-year recap for this particular blog post. I thought back to all of the things I’d accomplished over the past year. It didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t really keep track of them as well as I should. The other thing that changed my mind was Greg’s great post about looking forward. I’ve only been blogging for about 3 months. I’ve really only had an online presence for about half the year. So recapping what I’ve done wouldn’t really do much to help me take stock of what’s been going on. But I’ve been trying to codify some things that I’m looking forward to in 2011 and I thought that putting them down in print would be a great way to make me own up to them. So, without further ado, here’s what I’m looking forward to for the next 365 days.

1. Passing the CCIE R&S lab. We are quickly getting to put-up or shut-up time when it comes to my CCIE lab. I know that I’ve only failed when I decide to quit trying, but the trying is really starting to smart. I’m in a unique position amongst some of my peers, in that my employer has been very gracious in allowing me to keep attempting the lab. But I’m starting to feel like I’m imposing on their goodwill. I’m starting to see a lot of RFPs being released that are requiring CCIE credentials to design what are essentially enhanced layer 2 networks. I realize that these RFPs have been crafted in some degree to lock my employer out of consideration in the bidding process. My pride tells me that I want to pass the lab for no other reason that to fly a big middle finger to them, as if to say “Ha! Guess what I did?!?” In the end, I want to really succeed here because I’ve never let any test beat me, save one. And I’m not about to let the CCIE become the second.

2. Upgrade my VCP to version 4. The other thing that I do a lot of at my job that doesn’t revolve around networks concentrates on VMware. I work with it more than I do with the actual OSes that get loaded to it, and I think it’s about time I made the move to getting certified on the current version. There are some interesting possibilities that await should I manage to get there, including the idea of getting the VCAP4 – Design. My job focus is quickly moving on toward building networks and systems on paper rather than physically, so some more designed-focused learning would do me some good. But first things first. I’ve got to get with the now.

3. Start looking at the CCIE Voice. Heh, compared to #1, this one looks kind of silly. Why start looking at another CCIE track when you aren’t even done with the one you started with? If the truth be told, I’ve stuck with R&S as long as I have because of my stubborn streak. I don’t work with BGP or MPLS in my every day job. I doubt I ever will unless I switch roles and/or employers. But I deal with voice every day. It’s not what I started out to do, but I find it interesting. And so I’m thinking that I might consider looking at some of the Voice courses and whether or not they appeal to me. Who knows? Maybe Voice will be an easier lab for me?

4. Wikify my documentation. I’ve been putting this off for a lot longer than I should. I need to take all of the information that I’ve gathered that resides on my laptop and put it into a form that other people can use and edit easily. I want to have all of my knowledge in a place my peers can get to so that they might find the information they need quickly. I want to clean up my haphazard note-taking style and make it readable. I also want to be able to disappear for a few days at a time without getting ten phone calls and tons of e-mails. I want to be able to pass the Bus Test.

5. Start teaching more. Part of the reason that I started this blog was to collect all the random things that I come across and write them down in a place that I could easily find. As an ancillary objective, I hope that other people might benefit from my research and study so that they could avoid the mistakes I’ve made. I’ve considered bringing that into something a little more formal. Some of my old college professors have talked to me about speaking to student groups. My boss has discussed having me train user groups and train-the-trainer type scenarios. I look at it as a two-fold opportunity. I get to disseminate my knowledge, but I also gain the ability to tighten my presentation skills and put a little polish on my approach. I don’t want to end up as a curmudgeon that sits behind a keyboard all day and loses all social ability. I figure that forcing myself to get out and speak to people might just do that.

I figure five things should be a good list to work on. Especially since #1 is going to consume a lot of my time. I hope to look back on this in 52 weeks and check off a few things. I also hope that I can add a few more items to the list as I go. Because surprises are always a good way to keep your edge sharp.