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Crossroads revisited
By stretch | Monday, February 23, 2009 at 12:00 a.m. UTC
Thanks to everyone who voted in last week's poll, especially those who left comments! I love getting feedback on the blog as it often helps me pursue projects and directions which benefit the majority of my readership. Unfortunately the poll results are still pretty murky, with no clear majority rule. Guess that means it's up to me to decide. =)
As for the comments, my humble thanks go out to everyone for their kind words. Lately I've been inundated with errands and busywork ancillary to having moved to a new home and gaining new employment, so the motivation really helps. However I would like to address a few points brought up in the last week.
Foremost, Packet Life will not die. It may transform or slim down in some respects as I won't have as much time to dedicate to its maintenance, but at the very least I'll work to ensure the content on the site remains available indefinitely.
Regarding my new employment: yes, I have a new job in the Washington, DC metro area as a full-time network consultant. I'm actually living in Fairfax, VA now so if any readers are in the area, shoot me an email if you'd like to meet up some time (beers are on me). I can't go into much detail regarding my new job yet, simply because there are so many unknowns remaining. However it is more than likely I will be blogging and producing other public content (unrelated to Packet Life) in a professional capacity in the near future, which has me very excited!
Several people have suggested, in the comments and via email over the past few months, that I begin accepting guest articles on the blog. Initially I rejected this idea simply on the thought of receiving a dozen articles about subnetting every week. But faced with the reality of having less time to write myself, it's a possibility steadily increasing in its appeal. I have a number of considerations to weigh, but I'll admit that it does seem like a neat way for people without independent blogs to gain some recognition for quality work, if they're up to it. I'm not promising anything at this point, but as always I'm open to your thoughts.
And lastly, for those of you who could really care less what I do with myself outside of blogging, thanks for your patience, and I promise regular technical articles will return shortly.
Posted in Announcements
Comments
February 23, 2009 at 7:27 a.m. UTC
Congratulations mate,
I'm guessing some type of government job :P
February 23, 2009 at 9:49 a.m. UTC
Glad to hear things are going well for you Stretch, looking forward to future articles.
Matt Gee
February 23, 2009 at 11:15 a.m. UTC
First: congratulation for your rl success
Second: I don't see a practical way to maintain two qualified blogs on he same subject by the same person over a longer period
Third: the idea with you reviewing and posting articles from others sounds very interesting, I trust your expertise in choosing the right ones and think you'd be able to define good playrules... and it also sounds like your potential employer could benefit from the additional input, too
Forth: does anyone know if there maybe already is a (non-commercial) blog with such a concept around (regarding networking)? I'd like to know if/how such a concept could work =)
February 23, 2009 at 11:53 a.m. UTC
It sounds like things are moving forward quicker than normal. Good luck to you in your chase for the bigger fish.
I'd love to have a beer with a mind like yours but being in Australia makes that tricky. You can be sure I'll have a beer as a toast to change.
Cheers for the update.
February 23, 2009 at 3:10 p.m. UTC
Congratulations!
If you do indeed start writing for someone else please let us all know when you do, I would love to read it. You really do have quite a skill with the technical narrative.
ps: grats on your R&S written.
February 23, 2009 at 7:55 p.m. UTC
I hope to see more of your quality work, and especially those tasty cheat sheets. If you can't dedicate time to more cheat sheets perhaps an open source community driven cheat sheet system would work best. perhaps the masses could create something similar to your previous work :)
Congrats on the job, i hope you get a fancy government ID that looks similar but not identical to an FBI badge.
February 24, 2009 at 1:26 a.m. UTC
Be an Editor give out topics and let us submit articles
REAL topics
- Troubleshooting a STP Loop Storm
- Proper DMZ traffic, traffic goes from DMZ into Corp what about AD DNS Virus WSUS SQL SAN SMB
- How to fight a Broadcast Storm
- I am under attck where do I start
- Stop a DDOS attack on edge router
- MPLS BGP router is advertising routes but not routing them
- Lan 2 Lan VPN behind a NAT Firewall
- Best way to design a Redundant Network from DUAL NICs all the way to the core
- BGP take full routes or partial
- Enterprise Network who should pass out IP's Why How
- Best way to apply VACL between inter-vlan routing
- How to create a Default starter Config
- Portsecurity plus auto recovery
- Self Healing Network standards
Or STRANGE outages or situations that they had to troubleshoot or fix Share the problem and Fix
Maybe some Big Project
Give us a problem let us submit fix Call it If It Were Me
I want something REAL I can either use or enjoy
The Real Deal
February 24, 2009 at 3:04 p.m. UTC
Sounds like we have a lot to look forward to. I hope you stay and continue to write for packetlife as I love your writing style and your clear and easy to follow explanations, but I also think it would be interesting to see Chris's idea implemented. Getting some more people involved would really add to the site, so long as you stay as at least an editor. I hope that if you choose to go that route we'll still see regular articles from you as well, if not less frequent due to your fun new job.
How are you liking the DC area so far? I live probably about 2-2.5 hours south east of there and drive by once in a while.
February 25, 2009 at 1:03 p.m. UTC
Congrats on the job, I am actually considering a move to Alexandria right now!!! If I do move there, I'll shoot you an email, but beers are definitely on me :)
Second, I don't know about allowing others to blog. I think what has made Packet Life such a hit is your ability to explain things so clearly and concisely. It is great to have consistent postings, easy to understand. What makes blogs so great is the people writing them. I can think of a number of other blogs similar to this, none of which I will ever visit again, primarily because you have so many different people posting and nobody checking technical accuracy.
At any rate, if you do chose to allow others to blog, I would strongly suggest that you review the postings before they are published.
February 25, 2009 at 8:23 p.m. UTC
Glad to hear you have a position lined up. It's a heck of a time to be looking for a job! Don't sweat the posting schedule. Post what you want, when you want, and we'll keep reading.
February 25, 2009 at 11:20 p.m. UTC
How the shit did you manage to get a consulting job? Usually that requires a good amount of field experience...