Eulogy for my Mother

My mother, Joyce A. Grier, recently died. As her son, I was honored to give the eulogy. I had so many requests for copies of what I wrote, that I decided to share it with the world. This eulogy was delivered by me at a small Catholic church in New Hampshire on Tuesday, July 24th, 2012.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am not a people person, which is the polar opposite of my mother who was the most gregarious person I’ve ever met. I do love an audience though, so please indulge me a bit while I tell you of my mother from my point of view. My view may not be the same as anyone else’s, but I promise that it is an honest view from where I stand. In many ways, my mother helped define me as a person. I don’t think she set out to mold me in any way. I think she was simply who she was, and it was up to me to see the example. What follows, is nothing more than a small list of those examples.

My mother was a positive person. Now, there’s a joke in there about how my mother was always positive that she was right, but I figured that it wasn’t appropriate for a eulogy.

<laughter – ad-lib: “Judging from the laughter, I don’t think that I need to say anything more on that subject.”>

It has been said that the average person lies on their death bead, lamenting the things they’d wish they’d done. In fact, the average person (myself included, just ask my wife) likes to complain about a lot of things. Read More

Arista Warrior

Arista Warrior BookI am proud to report that I have finished the first draft of my new book, Arista Warrior. With the tagline, A real-world guide to understanding Arista switches and EOS, this will be the first published book about Arista switches that contains all original information. It should be available for purchase by November of 2012. (Edit: now available for pre-order from Amazon.com!)

If you’re not familiar with Arista switches, I urge you to give them a look. I discovered them while doing a vendor comparison study for a client, and believe it or not, I only found about them because the other vendors kept mentioning them. After visiting their headquarters and meeting the people behind the technology, I was impressed. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m not easily impressed, so I figured there was something special going on, but it seemed like the world hadn’t yet caught on. I immediately contacted my editor and proposed the idea that has become this book. Roughly a year later, here we are. Read More