NANOG

Today I traveled to Philadelphia PA for a networking convention (NANOG 53).  So far it has been interesting. I was able to continue my stellar record for ontime plane rides by taking a flight that was not only on time leaving the terminal, but arrived early to PA.  Being early I tried to check into my room so I could relax before going to the first tutorial. Unfortunately my room was not ready yet so I had to lug all my stuff with me. I found a nice empty area a few floors up to put down my stuff and video chat with my wife and daughter.  It was good to see them and amazing how much more you miss them when your not close by. I had only been away from them for about 5 hours at that time but was missing them like I had been gone for a week.

I got my hands on a LTE mifi from Verizon and am very impressed with it so far.  I was able to play a round of Left 4 Dead 2 with my friend with very little latency (40ms ping)!  My performance was less then stellar since I was lacking a mouse at the time (buried in my bag). I got called by my companies CTO to go grab some lunch which made me very happy since I was getting quite hungry.  I had a great lunch with fun conversation which just made me know taking this job was the right decision.

At about 2pm I was finally ready for my first tutorial presentation at NANOG (You know, the whole reason why I came here).  I didn’t get more than a couple minutes into the tutorial when I got a page from work because the person on call missed the first page.  Of course I was close to figuring it out but missed a word in my command so I only messed it up more. Sever coworkers responded to my escalation but only to let me know they were not available to help.  Finally, the CTO who I had lunch with earlier popped online and fixed the problem. What was very nice though, he then took several minutes to explain to me what the problem was, what he did to figure that out, what he did to fix it, and his thoughts on the situation.  Yup, he is an awesome guy.

That bring us to the current time where I will (hopefully) enjoy this second tutorial.