Rob Pickering

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...

As most people who know me and lots of my readers know, my son has Down syndrome.  Down syndrome "also known as trisomy 21, is a genetic disorder caused by the presence of all or part of a third copy of chromosome 21. It is typically associated with physical growth delays, mild to moderate intellectual disability, and characteristic facial features" (wikipedia).  So, in essence, he has three 21st chromosomes in all of his cells, hence the selection of 3/21 as a day to drive awareness across the world. Today my family celebrated by all of us wearing "silly socks".  This came about as an initiative as part of the ''Lots of Socks'' campaign begun by an organisation called Down...

Recently I was invited to participate in the World of WarCraft, Battle for Azeroth Alpha Test. I know you're thrilled (I was too!). However, in order to install the game, it required 40GB of free Hard Disk space. I only had about 30GB free, so there was no way to install it. I have a 1,000 GB hard disk, but 200GB are partitioned for other operating systems, I have over 300GB of Music, and then all my other files take up quite a bit of space. However, I've been running low on space for a while, so I decided to see if I could fix the problem, install the game, and learn something about the Mac along the way....