I was pretty exhausted Tuesday morning. With two young kids at home, I run on a minimum of sleep already, and all of the activity of CLUS pushed me over the edge very quickly. When the alarm went off Tuesday AM, I had to make a command decision – I knew I was not going to be able to keep up the pace set at the start without recharging my batteries, so I reset my alarm and went back to sleep.
Yep, I was a rookie at CLUS, this year, and I’ll try to be better prepared next time. Unfortunately, that means I had to miss my morning session “Fog Computing at the World’s Largest Copper Mine”. Which it too bad, because I spend a lot of time in mining and we have been looking into Fog Computing a lot lately.
The presentation is missing from the link above, but thankfully the session video is there. Funny that the first thing presenter Francisco Soto says is “Thanks for waking up early for this.” Now I feel terrible.
Rowell, Rob, Mitch, and I had a meeting setup before lunch with Jerry Olla from Ekahau. I was stoked to be meeting some of the Ekahau crew! Jerry sprung for coffee, and that coupled with a little extra beauty rest meant I was having a pretty good start to day #2! Thanks Jerry!
Jerry answered some of our nagging questions about using Ekahau Site Survey. ESS is indispensable in the WLAN design stage for helping to develop real requirements and turn them into actual channel plans, power settings, antenna coverages. Without a tool like this, many people are just “eyeballing” WLAN design. Jerry also showed us a neat little project he had been working on using an ODROID C2 to build a custom iPerf server.
Jerry is awesome. We may have thought that there was some potential to abuse our new insider relationship with Ekahau to get our hands on some sweet, sweet swag:
Buoyed by the warm reception from Jerry, and our unrequited love for Ekahau, we weren’t ready to part ways just yet, so we headed over to WoS to meet the rest of the Ekahau crew!
Jussi Kiviniemi is well known in the Wi-Fi community, and an excellent representative of the Ekahau team. I was excited to meet him in person he is all class! The whole Ekahau crew just has the right approach to being part of the community. For example, Hannele managed to dig out some primo swag in return for some testimonials:
Maybe I was excited most of all for the legendary Finnish candy. I wear my Ekahau Polo to work all the time.
I may have gotten a little carried away:
Also this happened. No explanations will be forthcoming.
Big Kudos to Ekahau for their continued community support and participation. Also a well deserved shout out to Robert Bartz!
There were TONS of other badass vendors to meet!
Check out Smitty and the team at Acceltex. They’ve got a nice spread of antennas and even better some well thought out brackets and mounts for their own gear and the Cisco APs with internal and external antennas as well. Meru Mitch swears by these guys.
We are all pretty pumped this summer about the new Aircheck G2 from NETSCOUT, and meeting their social media manager Kendall was another highlight.Robb was doing his best to see if a Aircheck G2 could find it’s way to his home somehow (Kendall, he ended up paying good money for one – so you won that round!). I think Kendall probably saw more of us at CLUS than anyone would have wanted, but if anyone could handle these hosers, it was her.
That wouldn’t be the last Kendall saw of us…
Ok I did also squeeze in a session Tuesday afternoon. BRKEWN-3014 “Best practices to deploy high-availability in Wireless LAN Architectures with Patrick Croak.
- Patrick had some great advice regarding minimizing the number of SSIDs:
- And a good reminder about client based CCI:
Check out the presentation link above for all of the good stuff.
I was looking forward to the evening events on Tuesday, namely… the CCIE Party! Steve, Mitch and I were off to the Hard Rock Hotel for a beach party.
With Food, Music and Beer taken care of, it was back to meeting some familiar names.
Brian McGahan with INE, whose videos are in part responsible for me qualifying to attend this party. Brian was pumped about my tramp stamp.
Amy Renee is a well known ginger CCIE with a well known sparkly bat. My kids are gingers, so we cool.
I also had the pleasure of meeting and shooting the breeze with Fish herself. I’m confident that I learned something just standing near her.
I learned that Tom Hollingsworth is also a fan of the CCIE tramp stamp, and I was glad to meet one of the minds behind Tech Field Day. I’d love to participate in a TFD or better yet Mobility Field Day, so fingers crossed!
The biggest surprise though, would come from closer to home than expected, when I had the pleasure of meeting another fellow Canuck and Wifi guru @wirelessstew!
I was blown away when Stew said that, not only did he know who I was from my (very new) online presence, but that he had hoped to meet me and find out more about me and my mobility experience. Stew would turn out to be the final, and likely most influential of the hosers group of Canadians (Stew, Steve, and myself), and honorary Canadians, Robb and Meru Mitch.
Us Canadians were a bad influence on Mitch:
But the night was still young so we decided to brave the Vegas heat and check out some more of the CLUS festivities. It was only logical that we take our Canadianized Meru Mitch to the Cisco Canada party. Beer was once againMore beer, music and food, although we never did figure this part out:
So now I have to figure out how to introduce Mitch to poutine…
TL;DR: Tuesday was the meet/make friends/network day. CLUS is an amazing opportunity to make connections and I have already benefitted from my new connections.
Also, I was glad I slept in.
Stay tuned, more shenanigans came Wednesday.
mroutedotca.wordpress.com 
It was great meeting you there! Wish I had joined you on the other events outside of the sessions.
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Thanks Rowell! I have a feeling we will meet again in the near future…
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