I 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 »

The Visconti Traveling Ink Pot is the solution to a problem that many people, myself included, didn’t know existed. Namely, how do you fill a fountain pen while traveling? For me, the answer has always been to use cartridges. I greatly prefer bottled ink over the ink found in most cartridges and I had accepted the compromise of lesser ink in favor of portability. All of that changed when I bought a new pen that did not support cartridges, or even a converter. How was I to use my wonderful new pen during one of my many business trips? Was I to be forced to bring a bottle of ink with me, or worse, leave my new pen at home? read more »

I’m excited to report that the second edition of Network Warrior is in the final stages of production and should be hitting the shelves of your favorite bookstore soon.

My goal in writing the second edition of Network Warrior was to make the new book even better than the first edition. I wanted to include as much new stuff as possible, but I also wanted to refine the original material to make it more current and accurate. I didn’t remove much information, except to replace it with newer or better examples.

What’s new in the second edition of Network Warrior? Here’s a bulleted list: read more »

I am honored to have been asked by Ricman to write up a bio for Peenut Guy, the main character in a comic he’s been drawing. Peenut Guy can be seen on his webpage over at PeenutGuy.com, and for you guitar-lovers out there, the strip is posted daily on TheGearPage.net.

Who is Peenut Guy? He is you and me. He’s every one of us who’s had a bad day. He is every one of us that’s ever made a mistake or a poor decision. There is one defining characteristic of Peenut Guy that separates him from most of us though:

Peenut Guy never lets life get him down. read more »

I would like to thank all of my readers who responded to my original Cozy Tales Preface. Most of the comments were very helpful, and as a result I decided to abandon most of that preface.

The following text, entitled Introduction, is an edited form of the original opening chapter for Cozy Tales. I think it conveys the spirit of the book better than the preface. I posted. I look forward to reading what you think. As with the last example, I encourage you to either post on the forum where you saw this, email me, PM me, or contact me in any other way you deem acceptable.

Cozy Tales – Introduction

In the life of every dog lover, there is one special dog. For me, Cozy was that dog. Cozy was a 160 pound Newfoundland who, as a puppy, chose me to be her companion in life. My wife, Lauren has always said that Cozy and I shared a special bond. The logical part of me says that Cozy just saw me as her Alpha male. I’d like to believe that there was more to her affection than simple canine hierarchy though.

read more »