Pavel Stefanov’s Blog

Where It All Started

It was 2005 and I knew nothing about networking and very little about computers. My brother urged me to enroll in a Cisco Networking Academy. A year later, I was officially certified as a CCNA.

Then I took a month or so off networking and was thinking of enrolling again in the netacad for CCNP. As you probably know, it’s expensive when it comes to CCNP so my brother told me to study at home from books. I had to choose between BSCI and BCMSN. I went for BCMSN (switching). It got very, very interesting. In the meantime, my brother got his CCNP and started his CCIE preparation. He realized that about 50-60% of the material in the CCIE R&S track was covered in CCNP so he advised me to start preparing directly for CCIE because it was not worth spending $600 for exams (now it’s even more) just to get a professional certification. As I see now professional certifications, they are just useful if you want to get a good job or a higher salary. But when you are 16, this is not the case. Yet, I was hesitating BIG TIME. It looked quite daunting to me and I was more inclined to go for the CCNP first. I decided then to post in GroupStudy and get some advice (more here). There were different opinions and only 2 or 3 of the people who posted advised me to go for the CCIE. Everyone else either said I’d fail, I couldn’t do it, it wasn’t worth it or I’d trade my childhood for money. Despite that I went for it.

The Journey Began

I started preparing for the written exam. Don’t get me wrong by saying I didn’t prepare for the CCNP certification. I still covered the material in the CCNP track, but I didn’t take the exams and there is just some extra stuff in the curriculum that I did not need to know. So I read BSCI (without IS-IS) and BCMSN end-to-end.

As I went through the material, I encountered an enormous amount of unfamiliar concepts. It is a real struggle until you get to the point where you have enough knowledge to bind concepts together and build the whole picture. I was lucky my brother answered a lot of my question because I really had a LOT. It was 2 or 3 months before they officially announced the changes to the written exam blueprint. They added MPLS, DMVPNs and some IPv6 advanced stuff. Go figure what MPLS and DMVPNs are for in this exam, but I had to learn them. So I copy/pasted the blueprint in a doc file and made a plan. I didn’t make a detailed plan, it was just “topics covered, topics in progress, topics to be revised”, some deadlines and “GOAL: CCIE Written Passed”. Meanwhile, I got into a traineeship in one of the several Cisco Gold Partners in Sofia. There I was assigned a task of preparing a lab for the Cisco Gold Partner Audit. There was MPLS with VPNs and Traffic Engineering. I had no idea what MPLS was then so I read 3 books for a little less than a month and had some devices where I was labbing all day long. MPLS was pretty interesting to me, but as soon as I realized I didn’t have work to do, I switched back to my CCIE preparation. I decided that I should put pressure on myself and schedule the written exam in order to get the topics covered in a more timely fashion. I passed the written exam in October, 2007, about 8-9 months since the start of my preparation. I don’t regret taking the written exam early because I considered it a step I had to make. I wasn’t kidding myself thinking that passing the written meant anything, but I wanted to get it out of my mind and not worry about technologies only covered in the written. By the time I got to this point, I had already read the following books:

• Cisco Multicast Routing & Switching
• CCNP Self-Study BCMSN Official Exam Certification Guide, 4th Edition
• Cisco Press 2000 – CCIE Developing IP Multicast Networks (skipped some chapters)
• Cisco Press 2000 – MPLS and VPN Architectures
• Cisco Press 2001 – Routing TCP-IP Volume II (CCIE Professional Development)
• Cisco Press 2002 – Traffic Engineering With MPLS (skipped some chapters)
• Cisco Press 2003 – Cisco Self-Study Implementing IPv6 Networks (skipped some chapters)
• Cisco Press 2003 – MPLS and VPN Architectures Volume II
• Cisco Press 2005 – CCIE Professional Development Routing TCP-IP, Volume I, Second Edition
• Cisco Press 2005 – Cisco QOS Exam Certification Guide IP Telephony Self Study 2nd Edition
• Cisco Press 2006 – CCIE Routing and Switching Official Exam Certification Guide 2nd Edition (the Switching and the NAT part only)
• Cisco Press 2006 – Deploying IPv6 Networks (skipped some chapters)
• Cisco Press 2006 – IPSec Virtual Private Network Fundamentals (1st, 2nd and 7th chapter)

Some of the books I read twice because when you don’t practice the theory intensively, you forget it easily. Of course, I made a lot of labs, but they were just to get things tested how they work and to explore cases not mentioned in books. Almost everything weird I could think of, I labbed it. That really helped me understand some of the core technologies like OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, MPLS, IPv6, Multicast, QoS, etc.

The Extra Factors

The CCIE is a really long and lonely journey. I experienced it myself. I didn’t expect anyone to learn the things or do the dirty work for me. I’ve really had a lot of ambition, and most importantly I had the time, dedication, and commitment. Of course, not having a girlfriend gave me a lot more time than I would’ve had it been the other way around.

So the aforementioned things helped me, no doubt. But there were also factors that a lot of people would be influenced by. I can’t tell you how many times I met people who tried either to discourage me, didn’t believe I could do it, just didn’t take me seriously, or  even laughed at me. This can sometimes be quite daunting, but that wasn’t the case. I constantly heard people saying “You need experience to become a CCIE“, and  ”without experience you’re just a paper CCIE“. That’s total crap and I don’t give a shit about it. The more I meet/met such people, the more determined I become to prove them wrong. In my opinion, it is  very important not to care about these things.

After the Written

It was time to make a plan for the lab. I think making the plan for the lab was one of the hardest things because there is so much stuff that you rarely know where to find resources and what exactly you will need. The plan looked like this:

I copy/pasted both the official lab blueprint from Cisco’s website, and the one that InternetworkExpert provides. If it was a technology that I had to acquire more knowledge for, I read books and documents from Cisco’s website including config guides.

Topics were marked either:

• In Progress
• Covered
• To be Revised
• Not Covered/Partially Covered

Then I had “Books to Read:”

• Regular Expressions – http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2/termserv/configuration/guide/tcfaapre.html (BGP only) & Cisco Press 2001 – Routing TCP-IP Volume II (CCIE Professional Development) (Appendix B only)
• QoS – Cisco Press 2005 – Cisco QOS Exam Certification Guide IP Telephony Self Study 2nd Edition
• Cisco Press 2001 – Routing TCP-IP Volume II (CCIE Professional Development) (MSDP only)
• Cisco Press 2000 – Performance and Fault Management (SNMP section only)
• BGP – Cisco Press 2000 – BGP – Internet Routing Architectures, 2nd Edition
• PPP – http://cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ito_doc/ppp.htm http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/471/understanding_ppp_chap.html , http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/471/config-pap.html

I also copy/pasted the following Cisco IOS Configuration Guides:

• Cisco IOS IP Addressing Services Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS IP Application Services Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS Bridging and IBM Networking Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (Bridging Overview, Transparent bridging (includes IRB, CRB))
• Cisco IOS Configuration Fundamentals Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS Dial Technologies Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (PPP only and not everything)
• Cisco IOS Interface and Hardware Component Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS IP Multicast Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS IP Routing Protocols Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS IP SLAs Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (except for VoIP Gatekeeper Registration Delay, VoIP Call Setup Operation, DLSw+)
• Cisco IOS IP Switching Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS IPv6 Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (R&S related stuff only)
• Cisco IOS LAN Switching Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS NetFlow Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS Network Management Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS Quality of Service Solutions Configuration Guide, Release 12.4
• Cisco IOS Security Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (R&S related-stuff only/blueprint, and without 802.1x authentication)
• Cisco IOS Wide-Area Networking Configuration Guide, Release 12.4 (Frame-Relay only)

I read these end-to-end. You will probably say I’m insane and I probably am, but I wasn’t just reading these for the lab, I wanted to improve my IOS culture. It’s really an enormous amount of work and thousands of pages to read, but I found it really useful to read all of them. It took me like 6 months to read all this and it was a lot of tedious work sometimes. This is probably the time I acquired studying habits that I will also benefit from in the future.

I left the 3550 and 3560 configuration guides last because I wanted switching to be fresh in my mind when I was about to start labbing, and I also found myself not having access to switches except for those on the PEC, where you can only find a 3550 in a lab provided by NIL.

The boring stuff was over. Lots of theory in my head and lots of  scenarios to lab. I’d decided that InternetworkExpert’s Class-on-Demand series should be the next step in my preparation. I watched some of the videos just before I took the written exam as I had some doubts about certain things in FR and Switching. I was highly impressed with the CoD. You get so much knowledge in so little time and it’s a pleasure to study this way. So I watched all the videos, that is two weeks (10 days) worth of training with about 5-7 hours a day. I highly recommend the CoD, it’s probably one of the best, if not the best training you can get for the CCIE.

Then it was time for labbing. I quit my job because I needed more time and wanted to completely concentrate on my CCIE lab preparation. I used to teach CCNA classes as Joseph Brunner suggested in a topic in GroupStudy, but it wasn’t fun anymore, and probably because I could hardly ever gain free access to 2960s from then on, which was the reason I agreed to teach classes in the first place.

So I decided to move on.

I started with InternetworkExpert’s volume 1 workbook, which includes plentiful of labs on all topics from the blueprint. These are very useful as you get to test many features you’ve only read about, and also because you get to configure all possible scenarios of a technology working alone and not interfering with other technologies.

After that I moved on to IE’s workbook volume II. At first, I found it hard to interpret the wording of the tasks. Speed was another issue, but I always tried to configure and think about all tasks. Later on, when I was a month or so before my real lab exam, I started worrying about speed and tried getting 80 points in 8 hours, but as I did more and more labs, my speed improved with every session. By the way, do not do the Dynamips workbook labs if you are using Dynamips for your preparation. Do the regular labs and just write the solutions you cannot configure in a notepad and then check your solution with the solutions guide.

So I did 10 labs from IE, then I moved to IPExpert’s v9 workbook. I didn’t do the first 18 labs or so because I didn’t have much time and they are practically the same as volume 1 workbook of IE so I did the first 10 multiprotocol labs. When I moved to IPExpert, I found out that tasks there were much easier, a little bit vaguer, but you have more freedom and most of the labs do not have initial configurations so you build the network from scratch. Then I returned to the last 10 labs of IE and then again to the rest of the IPExpert labs. The reason I switched between vendors so often was that I easily get used to the physical topology and I really wanted to be able to do a lab with any possible physical topology.

I am very thankful to a person from the local Cisco office who booked ASET labs for me. These labs are provided by LabGear, but are booked via Cisco and are only available for Cisco Partners. Contact your local Channel SE if you are interested. You have 6 built-in labs there and auto verification available to run. I also had 3 labs for this topology from a workshop in the local Cisco office my brother attended plus the CCIE Practice Labs. So it was 11 labs that I did in 7 sessions. I had 8 sessions booked – 4 in the beginning of January, just before I took off to San Jose, and 4 a week before the real lab. So in the last session I labbed all the Catalyst features I could think of. I wanted to know how to configure them in case I get them in the lab. The list is as follows:

• Local Proxy ARP
• Flex Links
• MVR
• MST
• 3550 QoS
• 3560 QoS
• IP Source Guard
• DHCP Snooping
• IGMP Snooping
• L2PT
• QnQ Tunneling
• Private VLANs
• RSPAN
• Protected Ports
• Port Blocking
• SDM Templates
• Voice VLANs
• UDLD
• Fallback Bridging
• Smartport Macros
• 802.1X
• HSRP with Port Security
• Flow Control
• 3560 IGMP Profile (available on 3550 as well)
• IGMP Max Groups
• Loop/Root/BPDU Guard and BPDU Filter
• Etherchannel
• LinkState Tracking
• Jumbo Frames and Routing MTU
• System MTU Change
• VLAN MAPs/ACLs
• Error Disable & Recovery
• IGMP Snooping
• MLD Snooping

I also watched once again Netmasterclass’ VoD for Catalyst QoS as this is a very vague topic and to be honest I still have some things to clear up. The video is amazing! It explains a lot of things about the 3550 and 3560 QoS so I definitely recommend watching it. Not to mention the amazing posts in some of the blogs out there on the Internet. Remember this: Google is always your best friend. I’ve found so many things in blogs, IE and IPExpert forums, and of course GroupStudy, which I couldn’t find in any book.

So it was February 3rd and time to take off to Brussels. I will post about the actual lab in a separate post very soon.

Okay. After I took off from San Fran, I arrived in Atlanta, Georgia. I was about to spend a week at my aunt’s and uncle’s house. I was very eager to visit them and my cousins because I hadn’t seen them for a long time.

Atlanta is very beautiful from above. There were millions of lights across the whole city, which is spread across a vast territory. Many of you most probably know that Atlanta’s Airport is among the biggest in the world and it took us like half an hour on the ground to reach our gate :) traffic jam of planes

I had a whole programme scheduled for the week and I have to say it was a very exciting week. I got to visit some very interesting places – Georgia Aquarium – the biggest aquarium in the world, CNN, the High Museum of Art presenting paintings from the Renaissance and special guest exhibition of figures and objects from the army of the First Emperor of China, and others.

The Climate

The climate there was more or less the same as in Bulgaria. I was quite in a shock when I first arrived, coming from a city where it was 20 degrees centigrade the whole time to a city with temperatures below the zero. There is a much higher humidity there compared to my own city, but you get to feel that usually in the summer.

The City

Atlanta is another large city and there are multiple business areas. Some of the biggest companies have their headquarters there, and one I am sure you know about – Coca-Cola. Yeah, you can also go to the Coca-Cola museum, spend $30 and drink e few different types of Cola from different locations in the world, but I left that for my next visit.

The downtown is much less crowded and buzzing compared to San Francisco. It’s currently being reconstructed and will have a slightly different look from the one from the Olympic Games in ’86. Some very beautiful, modern buildings can be spotted when walking around the city.

I noticed no traffic jams whatsoever so my first impressions were that Atlanta is a great place to live in. Especially if you live in those peaceful and quite residential areas located among the forest.

To be honest, I did not see as many nationalities as I saw in San Fran, but that’s understandable considering the fact that Atlanta is not the place to find tons of gold :) I am not sure if this is a good thing, but I really enjoyed being among people from different parts of the world and would definitely like to live in such place.

Georgia Aquarium

I had heard a lot of nice things about the aquarium and I was very lucky to visit it. As I mentioned earlier, this is the biggest aquarium in the world and has thousands of species ranging from Beluga whales to saw-fish, and South American piranhas. The aquarium is divided into several parts. If you have the time and there aren’t many people, you can use the moving walkways while listening to relaxing music. You feel like in a fairy tale and you get the feeling it is too beautiful to be true. You are practically walking either under or on one side of the aquarium, and some tens of centimetres of solid glass are preventing millions of litres of water from killing you :)

Thousands of species can be noticed – sword-fish, saw-fish, hammer fish, sharks, devil-fish, piranhas, dragonflies, Crustacean, crocodiles, alligators, turtles, sea stars, pikes, everything, but personally speaking the most interesting one was the Beluga whale. Beluga whales live in the Arctic Ocean, in the coldest waters on Earth. They are white in color and distinguish themselves from other whales in that of every ton of body weight, 800 kilogrammes are fats. These whales are extremely beautiful and as you spend more time observing them, you will notice that the males perform something like a dance in the water – circling around in the water and slowly moving towards the surface to get some air.

There were also funny animals like these:

Some other beautiful views:

While the crocodiles were enjoying the heat in their aquariums:

The piranhas were staying so still in the water that they looked 2D. At first sight, they don’t look ugly and dangerous, but after awhile you can easily notice huge wounds on their bodies. I can’t imagine though what happens when they are fed. It probably looks something like a volcano of blood in there :)

If you would like to visit Georgia Aquarium and see more information, go to: http://www.georgiaaquarium.org

If you would like to see more pictures from the aquarium, click here.

So this was my journey in the States. I had wonderful two weeks, probably the best in my life, got to see so many new and exciting things, meet a lot of new people, visit great places, taste delicious food, and the most important thing – I found the place where I want to live in.

Last year Csilla Bessenyei (Hungary), Christian Sandescu (Romania), Grega Presenen (Slovenia), Boris Dekovic (Croatia), and I won prizes in the Netriders Challenge, which was the first organised for whole Europe. 24 countries took part in it and not surprisingly to me the winners were all from Eastern and Central Europe. It was 50-50 whether I was to be allowed to participate as I had to be 18 to fly to the USA, but luckily the trip was in January, 2009, which meant I am good to go. The challenge consisted of 3 parts – a theoretical test, packet tracer challenge, and a TAC call. To be honest, I am not the biggest fan of Packet Tracer and I have never used it in any of my studies, but I navigated pretty well in the competition. The fun part of the competition was the TAC call, where you had to act as a TAC and an engineer from Cisco would call you, pretending to be a customer and have a problem with its router, and you had to guide him on the phone. Pretty funny as I was not told in advance that I had to be on the TAC side of the call and it was really weird at first :)

On January 11th, I headed to San Francisco with a flight from Sofia. I had never travelled with a plane until then and it was kind of exciting. The flight to Munich was just a few hours and I had an hour and a half stay there to catch my flight to San Francisco. It was a long and exhausting 12-hour flight as we flew all the way over Iceland, Greenland, New York state and down to California. I have to say I was completely satisfied with Lufthansa, very professional work by the crew. If it wasn’t them to feed and entertain us all the time, it would’ve been a very boring flight. Unfortunately, I had no MP3 player as my Zen Vision:M broke a couple months ago and had to listen to Lufthansa’s radio or TV shows.

Anyway, I did not really know what we are going to do there as we received no agenda for our stay so not knowing what it would be made me look forward to it even more.

When I went through the exit gate, a taxi guy was waiting for me outside with a piece of paper “Pavel Stefanov – Netriders”. When we got to the car, I was completely astonished. It was a very nice and spacious Lincoln with leather seats inside. That’s not a bad start, isn’t it? Commuting to the hotel, I didn’t really know where I was. At one point I decided to ask the driver and he said “We are in Santa Clara”. So it’s a big mega polis there including San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose and you don’t really know where you are until you see a sign.

I arrived late at the hotel – about 9 pm, and couldn’t make it for dinner with the rest of the guys so I had to meet them on breakfast in the morning. We stayed at Hilton Garden Inn, which is a really nice hotel, and I will definitely stay there if I come back to San Jose some day. The beds were king-size, with 5 pillows, and as I told the guys “sleeping in those beds for 9 hours feels like sleeping for a whole week”. There was also cable Internet (and FREE unlike hotels in Europe) and I was so happy :)

Day 1

In the morning, I met the rest of the winners and Penny Bradley, which made all this competition and trip possible. We were taken to building 5, where we introduced ourselves, met Amy Christen, the vice president of the Networking Academy programme, and then were given a brief presentation about Cisco Culture by Isaac Majerowicz. We were very hungry by that time and went to Cisco’s cafeteria. It is a very big hall with all kinds of food – Chinese, Indian, European, American, basically anything you can think of. There was also a Cisco burger which I had no other choice but to taste the next day, tastes pretty good :) And I had never seen so many engineers at one place, let alone Cisco employees, will never forget that landscape :). My eyes were immediately on the Cisco Merchandise Shop, where I bought stuff for $100 the next day :). Cable Lab with Joe O’Donnel was next on the list. I can tell you one thing – this guy is a guru. He used to be a mountaineer in the past, but like Jeff Doyle, who gave up a career of psychiatrist to become one of the most respected engineers in the field, he decided to go with networking. Joe is currently something like a manager of the lab, a lab in which Cisco has invested at least 200-300 millions of dollars in recent years.

In this room, there are devices downloading channel streams from satellites, those streams are demultiplexed, then encapsulated into IP headers and finally multicasted inside Cisco’s internal network. They use a different device for every one of these processes so what’s that virtualization Cisco is constantly talking about on conferences? :) Anyway, these channels are only used by Cisco employees and Joe makes sure everything works smoothly so that he doesn’t get called by John :) Then we entered the *real* room. We weren’t allowed to take pictures there for obvious reasons, but I can tell you one thing – it felt like heaven – more than 15,000 cable modems making noise and enormous ventilation systems beneath the floor cooling the whole room. Interesting fact – when they moved to the building, it was just a regular room and they had to turn it into what it is now, but not just do the whole moving, they had to do what they did for 6-9 months in the previous building in just 3 days. Can you believe it? They did the whole thing, 15,000 modems, cabling, cooling, content delivery systems, everything. No wonder why Joe feels pretty proud of this accomplishment. Then you would ask, what does Cisco use those modems for? It turns out that whenever there is a new Cisco IOS release, it goes through an enormous amount of testing, and not just testing of new features, they test the new release if it is compatible with every single Cisco IOS release there’s ever been. I was amazed, and still couldn’t explain why I find bugs in the IOS occasionally. The answer was simple “We can’t test every possible scenario, and if even if we could, it is not worth doing it” (or maybe it was “it wasn’t cost-effective”, not sure). Fair enough. They also had some kind of environmental change machine that they use whenever Cisco receives hardware that is suspected to have faults.

Executive Briefing Centre was next. This is where Cisco brings customers when they want to be shown some technology working. It is a beautiful building and the area where we were presented the latest Voice solutions looked more like a disco club :)

I was pretty overwhelmed by the end of the day and really happy with my experience during the day. We decided with the rest of the guys that we were very tired so we went straight to Applebee’s, which is only a few meters from the hotel. I was very hungry and didn’t have a clue how big portions are in US restaurants so I ordered a Santa Fe salad with a chop steak and fries. The guys had a good laugh while I was struggling to finish my dinner.

Day 2

New day, more energy, no jet lag. Speaking of jet lag, my body clock fits perfectly into the Pacific time zone as I used to stay up until 7 am doing labs at home. We had a job shadowing session planned in the morning. We had to choose between Ali Moghadam, a software developer at Cisco, or Dennis Frezo, who is dealing with the development of Packet Tracer. So considering the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that I am not really into this application, I went for the session with Ali. I think this was one of the most productive things we did there. Ali is a very down-to-earth man and was happy to share with us a lot of things. I completely changed my vision of how an employer should treat an employee and how a simple working day should look like. Something I forgot to mention earlier is that when we went into the building at 9 am, there was not a single person in most of the halls (where everyone has its own cubicle). So Ali explained that in Cisco it doesn’t matter when you go to work, when you leave work, or where you do your job. It’s all up to you. You can work at 4 am in the morning in the office, you can work every day at home through a VPN (by the way, every Cisco employee gets a free 800 series router, cool, huh?), it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is keep up with deadlines and do your job. It was also interesting to hear how he got his job and how he got into software engineering. I confessed I knew very little in this area (I still do) and was wondering where he got all this knowledge from. The answer was very relieving – from university! About the interview – it was really fun as he told us he had two interviews, one with Cisco, and one with another company on the same day. He had the interview with the other company first, which went really well, they even sent him the contract immediately by email so he didn’t really try to put much effort into the second interview – a 4-hour interview with plentiful of technical questions. I was surprised to hear that there had been no HRs during the interview and no stupid “How do you see yourself in the future? What are your plans? Describe yourself. What’s your biggest weakness?” type of questions that when you hear on a regular interview, you just want to slay the guy :)

The afternoon was designated to visiting Stanford University. I would lie if I didn’t say I’ve never stopped dreaming of studying there since Jun Kim told me of it. Stanford University is said to be one of the most prestigious universities in the whole world. Classes are very small, tuition fees are very big, and places are very few.

This is an example of taking a class in the beautiful gardens in the campus, speaking of which it is enormous and includes very big territory. It has its own two hospitals, a church, stadiums, etc. The library is impressive, consisting of more than 2,500,000 books and you can practically find any book you want.

Technology – it was everywhere. The university has spent tens of millions of dollars on the most innovative technology. But it’s not just a lot of technology at one place, you see technology integrated and working hand-in-hand with education. Classrooms are state-of-the-art and the university actually has started taking another approach to designing classrooms. As opposed to the regular classrooms where the teacher has its own desk and students sit in front of him on their desks with a white board behind the teacher, the classrooms in Stanford are very spacious, opened and look more like a cafe than a real classroom. They have found that this new approach boosts students’ effectiveness and helps them relieve stress.

The university is where people like William Hewlett and David Packard graduated or children of presidents from the whole world study.

Dinner was at the Campus Cafe and I ate lobster ravioli. They were pretty delicious although it looked more like a soup than a meal.

Day 3

On day 3, we were joined by Bob Schoenherr, organizer of world competitions and network consultant at Cisco. He was born in California and everybody loved him right away. Even at the end of the trip some of us said that Bob was the best part of the trip :)

In the morning, we had a Telepresence session booked in one of the Cisco buildings with friends of Csilla, who were in Hungary. I was very impressed with this technology that I was exposed to for the first time. It is basically three big flat screens, each consuming about 5 megabits of traffic, HDTV cameras, and of course point-to-point links between the places. Telepresence sessions are very expensive because they consume a lot of bandwidth and require very good QoS characteristics. In addition, every Telepresence room must be built in accordance to the same design so that you really get the feeling you are in one room. All that is different in the rooms is the sign on the wall with the city’s name. I really felt we were in the same room. I was even told a funny story where a guy inadvertently dropped his bottle of water and another person from the other end of the session tried to catch it :)

The rest of day was for San Francisco. What can I say? I fell in love with the city. It’s a unique and charming city. San Fran is built on 29 hills and that’s the reason roads there are extremely steep. First station was the seaside from where we took pictures of Alcatraz. We didn’t have much time so we couldn’t visit the prison. A beautiful view from the Golden Gate Bridge was in front of us. Bob pointed out that the bridge is named after Golden Gate (which is just a narrow part of the ocean), not that the place got his name from the bridge.

I felt so small. Apparently, during the World Wars, the Americans laid submarine nets in the ocean to protect from torpedoes and Japanese submarines. It was a quite peaceful place at that time and the city accepted a lot of immigrants from Chine during the Gold Rush, but it turned out there is not much gold in the valley. This is why you can see a lot of Chinese or predecessors of Chinese people there.

At lunch, we went to the wharfs, where we had white chowders. It’s basically a small loaf with a hole in it where the soup is. I recommend eating this if you have the chance to go there. From there we headed to the downtown of San Francisco by cable cars!!! I think this is when we really got the feeling of the city. This area is really beautiful, with a lot of modern architecture and high buildings. Another thing that stuck in my mind was that I could see a real community – from the homeless beggars on every corner to the well-dressed businessman carrying his brief case probably with contacts for millions of dollars.

Chine Town was next – a great chance to walk around this area. I truly felt like being in a Chinese city, but we didn’t stop there for much longer. Bob had mentioned earlier Fry – the biggest electronic store in the world, and Christian and I were eager to go there. He wanted to buy the Creative X-Fi PCMCIA sound card and I wanted to buy the player I could only dream of buying in Bulgaria – Creative Zen X-Fi. The store was gigantic. They sell every single electronic thing available on the market there. It was like heaven for geeks :)

Dinner was at an Indonesian restaurant, food was okay, service was great, drank some very good Singaporean beer.

Day 4

I felt really sad in the morning that we were leaving on Friday. But then I thought “Hey, I have another week in Atlanta”.

Thursday was for Apple’s Headquarters. Cisco and Apple have established a partnership not so long ago and the first fruit from this partnership is WebEx being available on the iPhones. We met Wendy Walker, the Sr. Marketing Manager of the company, and were given a short presentation on what the company has been doing since its establishment, how it progressed to being one of the leaders in multimedia solutions nowadays, and the range of its products. I am not going to lie to you and say this is my favourite company as I am firm admirer of Creative and as I already mentioned I just bought the Creative Zen X-Fi. So my already existing impressions were confirmed – Apple is a very proprietary-oriented company and focuses exclusively on end users. Maybe this is one of the reasons for their success, but sooner or later they will have to open up a little bit and partnering Cisco is maybe one of their first steps. On the other hand, the company idolizes the word “innovative” and I was really impressed with their vision and the fact that they really adhere to it. Their products are made to be very user-friendly, easy-to-use, and last but not least beautiful.

I learned a new, awesome term- BSAs (bandwidth-sucking applications) :D WebEx is probably one of them.

We had a lunch at Apple’s cafeteria and they boasted they stole Google’s Head Chef :D

The last interesting thing for this day was the Compliance Lab with Tonny Youssef. This is where any product that you’ve seen available on the market from Cisco has passed before being announced and where products reach end-of-life before they are even produced :). Here, devices are tested for safety and assurance. Most companies prefer to outsource this kind of work, but Cisco has decided to do this itself. Few advantages – smaller amounts of time for testing, as a result they can create a new product before their competitors, smaller chances of confidential information being leaked out, from what I heard Cisco employees are very loyal. Anyhow, I was astonished to see what hardware is tested against – low temperatures, very high temperatures, earthquakes – 8.1 on Richter Scale, RF and sound emission, high pressure, ability to be used by disadvantaged people, compatibility with other vendors, possibility to stick your finger into the device and get electrocuted, ability of the device to inflame. Amazing, isn’t it? And they video tape most of these procedures and send them to some of their biggest clients like AT&T, Verizon, etc. Cisco is just one of 4-5 companies in the world that does this kind of stuff. So from now on, whenever you’re mad, Cisco hardware is an option… :)

We also got to see Cisco’s data centre, which looked very decent, but Bob told us the one Cisco has in Texas is really one of the greatest and an example of Green IT.

Day 5

Csilla, Boris, and I had to give short presentations to 10-15 people from Cisco about our trip and how it impacted our careers whereas Christian and Grega talked about career opportunities in the IT. Grega and I left earlier because I had to catch a flight to Atlanta so we said good bye and that was it.

This week was one of the best, probably the best, in my life and I will never forget it. I liked a lot of things about the USA and was proven wrong to have any prejudices. I will never ever have such, I’m sure about that. People in the USA are very friendly and are smiling all the time. It took me awhile to get used to it, but I loved it. I met so many new and different people from all parts of the world and I noticed no discrimination at any time. One thing I was unable to get used to was that everything was big – buildings, sings, streets, advertisements, food portions, cars.

I felt kind of sad at the end, but I know some day I will meet these people again and will be back in San Jose and San Francisco, cities I fell in love with.

John O’Callaghan feat. Audrey Gallagher – Big Sky (Markus Schulz a/X Remix)

More pictures from San Francisco & San Jose here.