Lessons and observations of the past week, from Interop to today

1) I've seen the words "convergence" and "converged networks" all over the place. "See our new twenty four port 10/100 unmanaged switch, for today's converged networks." Why on earth would anyone want to plug PoE devices into a 10GE switch?

2) Foundry makes one bigass switch. Have you read the specs on the best of interop winner? 3.84 Terabits per second, up to 4,000,000 routes, 1,000,000,000 packets per second.

3) If you fly Delta, you can experience the joy of having peanuts served to you as a snack. This time they're honey roasted.

4) High definition video conferencing. Lifesize had a demo featuring an employee in their Texas office (I think it was Texas) doing magic tricks on a large HDTV. I find something quite disturbing about introducing a new technology with magic. Still, the image quality was extremely good. I was standing about two feet away from a 40 inch display (give or take a few inches), and noticed very little if any artifacts. Polycom had a side by side demo of standard definition and high definition conferencing. The Polycom HD product won't be out for a few more months. The downside is that HD conferencing requires a whole megabit of bandwidth. I don't think HD conferencing is going to set the world on fire anytime soon. It's a great improvement, but the bandwidth costs are a bit high for today's WANs.

5) No DC power converter shall enter my household without first being labeled. I have three orphaned wall warts, and don't know what they go to. Everything is being labeled from now on.

6) Replacing a four year old wireless access point and three inch antenna with a brand new access point that has dual 6.5 inch antennas will increase your wireless happiness. Also, any program or configuration tool that has the word "smart" in it, isn't. Thank you, 'Smart' configuration tool from an unmentioned consumer wifi card manufacturer, for handling the wifi configurations instead of just letting Windows XP do it. Fortunately I figured out how to install the wifi card driver without installing the smart config utility, thus saving me from a constant cycle of system crashes.