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 https://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.