Rob Pickering

I'm not sure where to start this post. 2019 has been difficult for everyone in the United States, I want to say 2020 will be better...so I will! 2020 is going to be great! This year I focused on expanding my personal horizons and reading books that would push me to be a better person overall. I found that I didn't read a lot of entertainment as a result. It therefore felt like I read fewer books than I might have otherwise, but I found I read almost twice as many as 2018. So, I'm hapy with that progress. I set a goal on GoodReads to read 20 books in 2019 and fell a bit short. In 2020, I'm...

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What a year. My family moved from Cupertino to San Jose, where we purchased a new home (don't even get me started on housing prices). I started in a new role at ServiceNow in Customer Success and Deb took on a new position at Cisco. My son started 2nd grade in a new school, which has helped him immensily, though I worry that this is now his 3rd school in his young life (I was in 9 schools by the 9th grade). We're staying put for the forseeable future. As I reflect on 2018, I spent a lot less time reading, something I truly missed. In reviewing the books I read this year (9 titles, down 60% from the 22...

My family and I just returned from a week in paradise, in Ko'Olina, Oh'au, Hawaii. Why Oa'hu? Because in Ko'Olina there is a relatively new resort, Aulani, that was built by Disney and opened to guests on August 29th, 2011, just a few months after my son was born. Since that time, my family and I have gone to several Disney properties, including both Disneyland, after moving to California, and Disney World, last year, as well as a Disney Cruise. This was our first time trying a Disney resort without an attached Theme Park and was a compromise between my wife and I (I wanted to go to Hawaii, she wanted to do something everyone would enjoy, which usually means...

This afternoon I was doing some network maintenance around the house. While inspecting all of my wireless clients, I happened to find a host that I didn't recognize (I name all of my hosts with Aliases in my Ubiquiti network and this guy stuck out like a sore thumb being named with just a MAC address). Usually I can figure out what host it is by looking at the Manufacturer (the first 24 bits of the 48-bit MAC, or the Organizational Unique Identifier (OUI)). In this case it was A8:1B:6A which maps to Texas Instruments. Ubiquiti Device Information ScreenUnfortunately, Texas Instruments doesn't tell me much as they're a common manufacturer of NIC cards for all kids of IoT...