MPLS SOS?

Anyone who has fiddled with IP VPN or Cisco MPLS knows it’s a bizarre beast. No PVCs, the network’s magically fully-meshed, and you need special routers.

So how do you back up an IP VPN connection? Traditionally, if you got a, say, a frame relay T1, most places settle for an ADSL, ISDN dial-on-demand, a 56K dialup line, a fractional T1 or even a second T1, depending on how much bandwidth and functionality you needed in a backup situation. But these things won’t work out in VPNe La-La Land.

It’s simple: to back up an IP VPN connection, you use a second IP VPN connection. If you have an IP VPN T1, for instance, you can run a second VPN T1 or go for a cheaper IP VPN ADSL link. Keep in mind the ADSL link will have a lower MTTR, and will be less reliable.

Depending on your service provider, you will probably have three kinds of diversity. For the cheapest way, just have both your primary and auxiliary connection go to the same provider edge router. For a bit more added protection, you can have the two connections go to two separate PE routers. If you’re the belt-and-suspenders type of person, you can go all out and have these two connections go to two separate PE routers housed in to separate COs.

Avast, a safe harbour

Despite this author’s cleverness, I doubt his theory that Canada’s CDR tax levy (Backstory: in Canada, a portion of the price of every CDR, DVDR, cassette tape and other media goes to pay royalties for Canadian musicians) makes Canadians exempt from RIAA-style witchhunts that are currently going on. I doubt his theory will hold much water in court, and the CPCC is the Canadian version of the RIAA, so you can bet they have tremendous lobbying and financial powers.

Interestingly, just like their American counterparts, Canadian musicians have seen little of these “royalties” paid to them. However, the CPCC did seem have enough money in 2002 to take its entire Ottawa office to France for an anti-piracy symposium.

In other words, just because they’re screwing us already, it doesn’t mean they won’t resort to suing grandmothers and 12-year old girls in public housing here. (Although hopefully we have decent people here too when that time comes)

Oh, and yeah, we are heavily taxed here, thanks for noticing. 15% total on goods and services here in Ontario. Coincidentally, we have less homeless sleeping in our parks, and nobody worries about losing a life’s savings if they are diagnosed with a serious illness.

MS vs. my company

Just some brainstorms.

  1. We don’t eat our own dogfood. We push embedded wireless devices and Voice over IP, and yet we stick our people with cheap 4-year old cellphones and use a plain ol’ PBX to route calls.
  2. We don’t have a progressive technology plan. Half the organization uses WindowsNT. The other half uses Windows 2000. Some enjoy local administrator rights to their PCs, others don’t even get CD-ROM drives in their computers. Some are standardized on Outlook XP and IE6, some have Outlook 98 and IE5, and the rest of the company waddles on with Netscape Communicator 4.7. Office versions range from Office 95 to XP.
  3. We don’t stay current. Users are actually discouraged from using Windows Update. Some users are still using NT4 SP3 and Netscape 4.7. This caused many PCs to bite the dust when the Blaster worm made its rounds.
  4. We don’t maximize the potential of the tools we already have. Take how MS uses Outlook. If you are looking for someone, a receptionist can personally pull up their shared Outlook calendar and peruse their schedule. If you leave voicemail for someone, he/she can listen to it from their computers as a WAV file. Employees can check email any PC in the world with just a web browser. It’s not magic, it’s Outlook Web Access – a product Bell we currently sell as part of our Hosted Exchange business solution! Except even we don’t use it (see #1).
  5. Perhaps before we ask for more, we give some more. Imagine if we offered free snacks and beverages to their employees. Expensive, you say? But if a $1 can of Coke makes an employee work longer, harder and happier on any given day, wouldn’t you say it’s worth it?
  6. We make it hard for people to stay in touch. Salespeople typically carry around a cellphone *and* a pager, and play phone tag with their office phone. In London, we cannot even forward out office phones to our cellphones. We don’t use PrimeLine or SimRing. Most people don’t have their mobile numbers published in the employee directory. We lack a form of realtime communication – workers are not encouraged to use SMS or instant messaging. This translates to long lead times and mistakes – you leave an email or voicemail, and hope that the guy heard you right and calls you back before the end of the week.
  7. We don’t shout out own name loud enough. A building’s lobby should have a big colourful Sympatico High Speed Internet access kiosk and an ExpressVu driven TV set. Salespeople should be given the latest Mobility gizmos to give our products free public exposure. We should be giving out free Sympatico dialup CDs and QuickChange calling cards. Managed routers and other networking equipment should be given big, bright Bell Managed Solutions branded stickers, not scribbled-on tiny white Avery labels.

Everyone sells

This article pretty much sums up the wonderful world of so-called industry reports. And it doesn’t just happen in arcane techie matters – PR agents are trying everyday to twist the worldview to their particular political, religious, or commercial interests. Once again, it is always important to think clearly and consider all options.

Final days


We took a quick look at the Museum of Flight – probably the only place we’ve been to that actually accepted the Microsoft Primeline discount card.

Afterwards, we drove around Mercer Island, trying to see if we could find Bill Gates’s house. I’ve only seen it in a photo in a coffee table book called Above Seattle. It’s grey, L-shaped, and along the shore. It’s actually fairly sedate and spartan looking from the outside – even the swimming pool is just a simple rectangle. Alas, we did not see his abode in person, although there were some amazing mansions there. The road is winding and narrow, and I can’t figure out why Allen, Ballmer and Gates could tolerate that every morning, but I guess it’s a moot point since they have chauffeurs.

The spa

After loitering around MS, we went to the Pro Sports Club just off the campus.

It has three Nautilus exercise rooms (one dark, which I found pretty novel – it’s for shy people) and five indoor pools. The locker room was actually two floors. The lower floor contains a lounge with TVs, and four whirlpools in a Roman bath style.

Membership fees could be $1,000-$2,000 a year, although I’m not sure – all Microsoft employees have access to the health club and spa, free of charge.

I don’t think I’ve been this relaxed all year.

All I got was this lousy blog entry

DigitalPostcard.JPG

Hello from the Microsoft Museum! It’s a pretty funky place. More importantly, they have lots of flat panel PCs for Internet access. I’ll probably hang around here, go look for the “Walk of Fame”, and then head back to downtown Seattle.

I’m impressed by the infrastructure here. MSN Internet kiosks in every lobby, parking garages at every building, free shuttles across the campus (and each one is complete with a bucket of sweets). It’s refreshing to see a company that is progressive to do whatever it takes – even if it’s pool tables or arcade games in the lobbies – to make their employees as comfortable as possible, and ergo, as productive and loyal as possible.

Shell got a 19″ Trinitron in her office, and they’ll be replacing that with a LCD flatscreen and adding a TabletPC. Sure, MS works their workers to near-death, but at least they get free pop to drink…

Two princes

Today, I saw the two corporations that keep Seattle alive – the first one being the Boeing plant in Everett, where all the Boeing 747, 767, and 777 aircraft are built. No photos were allowed, unfortunately.

As you may have heard, all three assembly lines are housed in a single building. It’s a big building – apparently the largest one by volume in the world. So large, in fact, it has no heating nor air conditioning. Seattle’s temperate weather keeps its cavernous innards comfortable, but if it gets too cold, they turn on more overhead lamps. If it gets too hot, they open the bay doors. It helps considering each door is three football fields large.

The tour was only an hour long, and actually only consisted of a short walk through a maintenance tunnel to the observation gallery, where we got to see the first half of the 747 assembly line and the second half of the 777 line. Then a quick drive to the painting shed and plane parking lot via coach bus. The airlines show up with their own crews, and fly them right off the lot.

The second one being the one well all love so dear to our hearts, Microsoft Corporation.

What struck me was, compared to snooty banks and consulting firms, the Microsoft campus was a pretty spartan, functional environment. It looked like a university campus, but cleaner. No marble floors or fancy sandalwood furniture. Even on Bill’s floor, the upper part of Building 34, just a series of small drywall offices.

I decided to pay a visit to Elminster, Silverlotus’s old Asheron’s Call chum, who is now doing testing for a new RPG for Xbox. She was dismayed that the latest build removed a cutscene after defeating a certain boss; instead of a “really cool sequence” all I got to see was a popup window with the words “Awaiting technology”.

I also paid my respects to an old university classmate, now a program manager for Outlook 2003. He still keeps track of the Leafs and even has a giant Canadian flag tacked to his wall. He laughed when I mentioned how expensive food was in America. “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes I drive up to Vancouver and pick up some groceries.”