Goodbye My Lover

Today is my last day in San Jose. Tonight I have to fly to the next destination: Sydney, through Hong Kong and Singapore in transit. It’s going to be a long flight. I will be in the plane for about 24 hours, and even my flight from Singapore to Sydney will use the new big bird Airbus A380 but it will still consume all my energy.

I have spent 16 days in US and it’s been an unforgettable experience. This is the place that has broaden my view to see the world from different perspective. This is the place where I met the love of my life. This is the place that offers me new purpose. Even San Jose and the surrounding cities are a bit too quite for me but I spent most of my spare time enjoying San Francisco, and I must admit I have fallen in love to this city.

During my journey in the past several years, I have traveled many cities in different countries. Based on preferences, San Francisco and Sydney are my most favorite cities. And my love is waiting for me in both places. Amsterdam comes next, but unfortunately the closer city where I can see her is Brussels. If somehow I can't move to those cities, and when all hopes seem fail, I still can go to Dubai. I may not see my love so often from there, but at least I can go back to my old habit snowboarding in indoor snow park.

So the question is: what should I do to get my true love?
Architecture. Learn more and more deeper about the architecture. Hardware architecture, software architecture and the protocols architecture. Then get more experience in deployment. Not only to configure and to troubleshoot, but to make proper design and to integrate as well. Last but not least, I need to start learning how to automate a process so I don’t have to manually set something up.

I have to fly tonight. And I feel really sad.
But one thing for sure, I know what to do next.













Goodbye, San Jose. Till we meet again.

Is This Love?

I think I’m falling in love again. I saw her today and I could feel my heart beat faster. This is what I call love at the first sight. She was standing tall in front of me, up and running, and blowing out the air to my face. She is a CRS-1 16-slot multi-chassis system, with several line card chassis connect to a designated switch fabric chassis, distinguish herself from the 8-slot and 4-slot single-chassis system.

Is this love? Is this love that I’m feeling?
Is this the love that I’ve been searching for?
Is this love or am I dreaming?
This must be love.. (by Whitesnake)

This must be it. This must be the dream.
A dream worth fighting for.


















(Taken from Cisco CRS-1 lab, somewhere in San Jose)

Gimme a Reason

Give me a reason to take another CCIE lab.
In Cisco, pass another CCIE means hard cash. Yes boys, Cisco pay money straight away for an employee who passes CCIE lab.
But that’s all. I mean once you join Cisco, it doesn’t matter how many CCIE you have passed. What really matters is your performance in delivering your job. In fact, since I joined Cisco I never introduce myself to the customer: Hi, I’m H from Cisco Advanced Services, and I'm a triple CCIE. And I guess even I did this, my customer would look at me and say: So? Who cares? Just fix my network! :)

So anyone can give me a good reason to become quad CCIE?
To join an elite club of few guys who have four or even five CCIEs? Interesting and very tempting indeed, but do I need to take another CCIE just to be proud of myself?
To learn new technologies, in this case Voice and Storage? Yes, it’s true. But those won’t help me in my current job, or even with the future job where I want to be specialized in Service Provider technologies. Voice means Enterprise Voice. And Storage is more related into Data Center. They can drag my focus away from SP core technologies such as MPLS and NGN stuff.
To compete with Scott Morris? Dude, I believe he’s considered as one of the respectable networking geeks not because he has 4 CCIEs, but because of his extensive experience, his commitment to continuously upgrade his knowledge, his willingness to share the knowledge to the community, he knows many other products not only Cisco, and obviously because he has a very cool lab in his basement.
So I’m not in the same league with him.

As I said in my profile for this blog: I wish to become an expert one day, and my greatest fear is to become a guy without any specialties. By taking another CCIE lab, I will drag my focus away and that for sure will not make me specialize in anything.
However, passing another CCIE is important if I want to become network solution architect, since this kind of job requires me to know all the technologies plus the way how to make them work together.

So unless someone can come up with a very good reason, it looks like it’s time for me to start drilling down to a particular technology area to focus my expertise. And I still have two more weeks in San Jose to find out which one. And please allow me to share my picture enjoying sunset in San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge ;)