This summer my family and I spent a week in Panama City, Panama. [Beware: there’s a Panama City in Florida, which is not the same as Panama City in the country of Panama – I came close to making an embarrassing mistake when booking tickets…] The highlight of our vacation (at least for the kids)… Continue Reading
Network Ops
Troubleshooting Tango: When the Best Dance Partners Come Together
Most of the time, I enjoy troubleshooting. It’s a logic puzzle where you gather evidence, test your theories, and hopefully reach a satisfying solution that leaves everyone happy. But it’s not always like that. Sometimes people get in the way. My least favorite experiences are typically where you end up with representatives from multiple different… Continue Reading
Red cards and regrets: keep your eyes on the prize
I recently watched highlights of a soccer game between the US Men’s National Team (USMNT) and Mexico where the contest became a little heated, resulting in 4 red cards – which left both teams playing with two fewer men by the end of the game. It’s a pretty ugly sight – some hot tempers and… Continue Reading
Analog Networking: I met my team in real-life!
Award Consulting is a remote team. Very remote. Since I started the company in 2016 the only team member I had seen in person was Stephen Denny. That’s one person (5 years ago) out of a team of eight people. That’s… not great. But that all changed on May 18 when (almost) the entire team… Continue Reading
16 days without 911, and a $227k fine
If I’ve learned one thing in my 18 years of working in telecoms, it’s that people don’t like outages. And they especially don’t like outages that impact 911 service. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened for subscribers in four counties in West Virginia, for a 16 day period in April 2022. Apparently the local ILEC, Shenandoah… Continue Reading
Crashing and burning: what can we learn from the SpaceX explosion?
I imagine most of you have already heard that SpaceX attempted to launch a huge rocket on Thursday last week (April 20, 2023). According to Elon Musk, this was a great success – he tweeted, “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!”. Check out the video below and see for yourself –… Continue Reading