Where have I been

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I thought this was cute.

Right now, I am in San Jose, CA. Its a nice place; I could live here quite comfortably I think.

I'm in San Jose to be at a training course for Foundry Networks. I'm being taught by a guy that I'll just called Tom, along with about 10 other people.

We're doing the Advanced Switching and Routing course, which covers Spanning Tree Protocol (both 802.1 and 802.1w) which was invented by a very smart woman working in a man's world called Radia Perlman who I had never heard of before. She seems to be highly important in the networking world, and me being a systems side geek I just had never heard of her - but it seems she is super smart. Certainly STP is just mindblowingly cool once you find out how it works.

The course also covers OSPF and BGP4. OSPF was reasonably straight forward and BGP4 is finished off tomorrow, though I don't think we'll finish the labs.

The great thing about the course is that it is heavily hands on. Tom likes to say 'More labs, less blah blah' and the course is exactly that. That's not to say that Tom doesn't blah blah - he does - its just that usually his blah blah is there just to keep us from drowning in the practical aspects. So, you get a brain dump of all the cool stuff he knows about this stuff and you're reasonably entertained as well. I really feel like I've learnt something at this course and am walking away from it armed with knowledge that I'll find useful in the future.

I guess that's the idea.