During Cisco Live! I sat down with Shawn Wargo @shawn_wargo and Brandon Carroll @brandoncaroll to talk about SDA, DNA and how SDA works and why you want it.
The episode is up, go get it!
https://blogs.cisco.com/perspectives/ciscochampion-radio-s4ep15-what-the-heck-is-sda
As you know, I was previously a Tech Field Day delegate, many people have asked me “What is Tech Field Day” and how did it start?
Well, I grabbed Stephen Foskett at Cisco Live this year, and asked him those questions in my in-depth interview. Check out the link and the audio below..
https://blogs.cisco.com/perspectives/ciscochampion-radio-s4ep-14-all-about-tech-field-day
Back at Cisco Live in June, I had a chance to sit down with David Zacks – Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems and talk about Catalyst 9K, and the importance of Flexible Infrastructure.
It was a great honour to get a chance to sit with Dave and talk about Cat 9K and microsegmentation and how Cisco has really changed the way they create hardware.
Podcast Discussion Topics
Listen to the episode below…
Disclaimer: Before modifying your diet, speak to your doctor, do not do anything I am talking about without talking to a medical professional.
I have always just consumed whatever I wanted. Then when life got busy, my diet got really bad. Tons of fast food, always on the go. The problem is that the more I ate, the more I wanted to eat. When work got busy, I would eat more. I realized I was eating when life got busy – but there wasn’t much I could do.
It is easy to grab a pizza slice, or a burger at a fast food restaurant. The entire world pushes us to eat horribly. Every TV advertisement, or billboard talks about the amazing Big Mac, or Asiago Range Chicken Club – who doesn’t like cheese, on fried chicken with bacon. It was nothing for me to just devour an entire bag of potato chips in an evening.
Then one day, I had problems going from my basement office, upstairs without getting winded, I had to hold my breath to tie up my shoes and I simply could not keep up with regular life anymore – I felt horrible. I had reached an all time high weight of 258lbs.
With a new baby on the way, some kind of a switch flipped inside me – and I realized I had to do… something.
After talking to my good friend Adam, who recently went on a similar journey, he helped mentor me into the Ketogenic Lifestyle (KETO).
Before I get into what I did and how – this is my opinion on the matter, and what you will come to realize is that many people agree, and disagree with many of the things I will say here. Please read, learn and understand for yourself and make your own decisions – again, seek medical advice.
I started my journey on June 4th, 2017 – I was simply not proud of who I had become.
Weight: 258.4lbs
Body Fat: 39%
BMI: 37.1 – Obese
Resting Heart Rate: 86
Resting BP: 135/90
Fasting Blood Sugar: 6.3
Starting Waist Size: 44
These numbers were alarming, I was seriously overweight, and my fasting blood sugar was pre-diabetic. I have a history of diabetes in my family, I was not on a good path.
I went down the road of the Ketogenic lifestyle. With a focus on weight loss and eating healthy.
Keto is a scientifically based food regimen. I say it is scientific – because this is not something you can just half-ass. You need to take it seriously, you cannot “cheat”. The key for success is understanding the ketogenic process in your body.
If you do Keto properly, you actually learn a ton about what you are eating, and the affect of that food on your body, and on your health.
Ketogenic diets are low in carbohydrates, and high-er in fats.
Fat is not your enemy – our bodies are fat burning machines, they are actually designed to burn fat. They can burn other substances for energy – like sugars in the form of carbohydrates, but our bodies are designed to burn FAT.
Keto is all about putting your body in a fat burning state, something called “Nutritional Ketosis” The idea is that we feed our bodies FAT, to burn for energy, but when we don’t eat enough fat, our body goes looking for fat to burn — and hey, I had close to 100lbs of it on my body at the time.
Your body burns consumed carbohydrates, or sugar, then when it runs out of that (if it even does!) it burns any consumed fats, and then AFTER that, it starts to burn off body fat.
The idea is running on ketones instead of blood sugar. Your system still needs blood glucose to operate important things like the brain – but your system will generate what it needs from the proteins in your system. There is no need to take in significant
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded through studies that eating carbohydrates stimulates the addiction centres in the brain. If you look at the typical North American diet, or worse the poor North American diet, what you typically see is tons of pasta, bread, sugars but the bottom line is carbohydrates. Tons of processed food, all filled with very cheap to manufacture carbohydrates.
See the red line? That’s what happens when you eat significant carbohydrates – your blood sugar spikes like mad. This causes your brain to feel happy, and you feel full – but only 240 minutes later, you crash hard and start feeling hungry. You never reach nutritional ketosis, because you ran for more food. This means you don’t often burn the fats you are consuming – instead you pack them on.
What is with the war on fat? Did I not just say we are fat burning machines? Well, it has to do with fat around our bellies. People think “Oh I don’t want to be fat, don’t eat fat” so the “low fat” industry was born. However if you compare many “low fat” alternatives, they pack in the carbs to make up for the missing fat. How is this helping? It isn’t. High carb, low fat foods, generally processed are super easy for the industry to manufacture, at very cheap prices.
Fat is not your enemy.
Enhanced mental focus: You will be able to focus on tasks without getting as distracted
No more sugar spikes: You feel fuller longer, without the hunger pains or the drive to run and eat. Skipping a meal happens by accident because you just don’t have the up and down sugars in your system. Your system will normalize, you can actually reverse type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes.
Better health: This goes without saying
More Energy!
Here are my results… Results may vary, and it depends on your unique situation. My results came with a little more exercise than normal (which became easier once I started) I feel way more energy, amazing concentration. My results are dramatic, and your can be too. The best part is not how I look, but how I feel.
As of September 24th
Weight: 198.9 lbs — Lost 59.5
Body Fat: 28.4% — Lost 10.6
BMI: 28.6
Resting Heart Rate: 54
Resting BP: 120/80
Fasting Blood Sugar: 5.2
Finish Waist Size: 36
First, tell yourself you can do this. The bottom line however is that you have to want to do it. Whatever your reason is, not because someone told you to, but because that magic switch in your head flipped one day and said “I want to be healthy, I need to be healthy”
If you are waiting for me to link you to some magic diet pill, or magic recipe to make this work – move on, you won’t find that here. This requires work, and sacrifice – I won’t sugar coat it (besides, those are carbs)
I am going to provide some reading, why re-invent the wheel, I will provide you with the amazing things I have read to learn about Keto before I went on this journey.
The biggest advice I can provide you with, is to learn and read before you do anything. The key to success is understanding the science of Keto.
https://www.ruled.me/guide-keto-diet/
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto
There are great visual guides on dietdoctor.com – check these out, learn what works and what does not.
Courtesy of dietdoctor.com
Some great guides over at DietDoctor that show you what is good and what isn’t on Keto… Below is a good sample of keto friendly foods..
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto#food
Not everything you think is safe — is safe on Keto. Here is a good example of vegetables, because not all are built the same. Photo again courtesy of Dietdoctor.com
https://keto-calculator.ankerl.com/
2. Read. I said this already, but you need to learn how your body works, and read up on what you can and cannot eat.
3. Learn your body. Learn to understand your body, you will be learning new cues, new feelings.
4. Stick with it. Keto flu is real, you will read about it, and it sucks. It goes away
5. Water. Drink it, lots of it. Constantly, the Ketogenic process needs more water to operate than you probably consume today.
6. Supplements. You will probably need some supplements, see your doctor but generally you need to consider magnesium and potassium supplements.
7. Calories MATTER! – lots of people will disagree here. However your body is an energy consumption machine – calories in, calories out, calories stored. You need to run a deficit in order to lose weight. PERIOD
8. You cannot eat unlimited fat. See #7
Recently released at http://www.krackattacks.com – a serious weakness in WPA2 has been found by the team there. For all the heavy technical details, go there.
The krack itself basically hacks the encryption ITSELF within the Wi-Fi WPA standard, when clients negotiate, they perform a multi-step encryption key. By recording, and replying some packets, we can trick devices into using encryption keys more than once – which means now we can decrypt their traffic, and/or hijack TCP sessions and inject traffic into the network.
The key here is that we are attacking CLIENTS – not infrastructure, so we can go after an individual client and steal their data. This means the majority of the updates will be against CLIENT operating systems.
The bottom line is that here is what you need to know.
This is a problem, but for many this is a bump in the wire. Wait am I crazy for saying this? In our modern world you shouldn’t be trusting your network anyway – yes that is right, trust no-one. Even your corporate LAN. We think nothing of connecting at a Starbucks, or at home where our children have virus-laden machines. Why would we trust the wild west that is the corporate LAN/Wi-Fi these days. Especially when you consider that most attacks these days occur inside.
Network-as-an-enforcer, Network-as-a-sensor – technologies like StealthWatch, these types of technologies continue to be extremely key in the safety and security of our networks. Technologies that watch for strange behavior (like duplicated key packets) and protect against replays. Would these types of technologies saved you here? I cannot speak to that right now.
How many times do we need to say this – security is a multifaceted, multi-layer approach. You must never rely on a single security layer. We run HTTPS, we use client-side AV, client-side firewalls. Client devices should already protect themselves against attacks or vulnerabilities that exist in the network domain.
If you are being responsible, operating your networks and infrastructure in a responsible manner, this shouldn’t be a big deal for you. I would still go and update your networks ASAP, but if you are following best practices in your network, you should be ok.
Back in June at Cisco Live, we launched a special edition of Cisco Champions Radio, and with never before access to basically any Cisco resource, we grabbed the best of the best and the coolest Cisco peep’s and brought them into the Podcast Domain at Cisco Live.
Grab the episode here!
https://blogs.cisco.com/perspectives/ciscochampion-radio-s4ep12-cisco-tacops
In this episode, we interviewed Sue-Lynn Hinson from the Cisco TacOPS and talked about how they were founded, all the cool stuff they do, and what TacOPS does in the downtime. Is this your dream job? Yes, it is for many of us. So we completely nerd out, and talk to Sue-Lynn about without question (IMO) the best job in Information Technologies in the world.
My amazing Co-Host for this was Aaron Conaway @aconaway
In a splash we are not used to seeing it has been announced that at Cisco Connect Toronto on October 12 (Also known as “Mini Live”) – the keynote speaker will be Chuck Robbins.
In the past the Cisco Canada President – currently Rola Dagher would keynote this event, but this year with Chuck Robbins coming on site, I think we will see an increase in attendees.
But will Chuck Robbins upstage Rola Dagher? Will they stand side by side on stage? Will Chuck and Rola have sit down and talk about technology and specifics about Canada?
This could be a pivotal moment in history for Cisco Canada – as in the past, the great white north has felt cut off from the super power that is Cisco USA. With Chuck coming here, it may give customers a feeling of connection back to the mother-ship in California.
No doubt the focus of conversation from Chuck Robbins will be DNA-Centre, SD-Access and Catalyst 9K technologies – but how will he customize the keynote for the Canadian audience.
I will be there – and will bring reaction back to the blog.
Information on the event CLICK HERE
The team at GestaltIT has released the schedule for new field day events for 2018…
Get your web browsers ready to learn, I recommend booking yourself appropriately for these days – everyone can be a virtual delegate.
Some customers have very stringent outbound firewall rules (Oh, and good on you by the way!) – just an FYI, Meraki is about to change the IP’s of their back end gear on some of their shards.
In an email to customers blasted out from the green heavens today, Cisco/Meraki let customers know that they are going to make some changes in the back end with different control IP addresses.
The good news is that if you forget, or don’t make the change your network will not go down, but you won’t be able to make any changes to configuration, and use data will be cached.
So, go ahead and make that change now before you lose connectivity. This comes after Meraki had some block storage issues a few weeks ago which saw some configuration data impacted. This may be part of the remediation and resiliency upgrades to deal with that situation, but I don’t know and cannot confirm (Looking into it).
Dear Meraki Customer,
As part of ongoing efforts to improve the performance and resiliency of the Meraki Cloud we will be changing the IP addresses used by Cisco Meraki devices to contact the Meraki Cloud.
In order to ensure that customers have time to make these updates, the change will take place 8 weeks from first notice, or after all affected networks have updated their firewalls, whichever comes first. You can prepare for this change by opening up access in your firewall to the IPs and ports listed on your organisation’s Firewall Information page ( https://dashboard.meraki.com/manage/support/firewall_configuration ).
Your Meraki network will continue to operate, but your Meraki devices may experience degraded performance and connectivity to the Meraki cloud if your firewall rules are not modified to include the IPs and ports listed on that page.
If you have any questions regarding this message, please contact Meraki Support at support@meraki.com or +1-415-632-5994.
So many of you know I am good friends with Steve Thorne from www.flightchops.com and also his amazing YouTube channel located HERE
I want to take this moment to congratulate Steve and his team for reaching 100K subs, as of this writing he is actually at 107K. This has been an amazing story about someone who was passionate about a topic, took that online in their own way. People attacked Steve alot in the beginning, and even now for posting mistakes, troubles and pitfalls of learning to fly but the truth is – that is what made his channel popular.
Sponsors have taken note, and big names too like Bose and ForeFlight have put some support behind Steve. Even with the big name support he still receives a significant contribution from Patreon (including me) and he never forgets those who got him here, by running many contests for everything from Bose Aviation headsets to a San Juan Islands Adventure trip!
Content is king – bottom line – and Steve and his team of editors and videographers have amassed a ton of content and gone from twice monthly to sometimes 4 times per month publishing this amazing content. Steve continues to do this his way, and sponsors do not impose on content. His “day job” of video and media production has brought a significant professional flair and production quality to his episodes and that production quality has been steadily increasing.
Will this ever reach “Mainstream” television? You mean YouTube isn’t mainstream? I would appear to me that the likes of “Outdoor Network” are only interested in fake shows auctioning off storage units sadly.
So if you are a private pilot, or just an airplane nerd like me – go and check out his humble little channel and I promise you will learn something along the way, as Steve says “Keep your Flight Chops Sharp!”
Congrats again Steve on your channels success!
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