Basic Networking Helps

I have not had much opportunity to do much physical networking other than connecting to them in Windows, so I am trying to catch up and figured I may as well start at the beginning. For that reason, I have been reading the Ciscopress book CCNA ICND1 (yes, I do hope to someday become CCNA certified).

In the book, they recommend a website that I have just been looking through, which seems like a great place for beginners to start. The website is LearnTCPIP.com and it has video/powerpoint presentations on TCP/IP, Subnetting and some other beginner networking tutorials. Don't get me wrong, this is very basic information, but it does explain it well. I wish I had known of this site when I first started out.

Another site that I have found to be very useful is the Petri IT Knowledgebase. There is a wealth of information here, and my favorite post, and honestly one of the most useful for gaging how I am doing on learning all I need to know is this series on Interview Questions.

I Want One

I am a pretty hard core PC user. I have dabbled with Macs in my different jobs, but really only put hands on them when I have to fix a problem. However, with the introduction of their new Mac Pro, I just may have to change all that.

A collegue pointed out this blog post over at ZDNet, so I had to check it out. It is true, Apple has released the "Fastest Mac Ever."
This new Mac Pro has 8 processor cores. Yes, that is correct, I said 8 processors. And as if that is not enough, it can also house up to 4TB of INTERNAL storage, and oh yeah, 32GB of RAM. Evan if I combined all the desktop computers in my house (and actually that is a few computers and parts) I don't have that kind of power.

Now, the price is still a bit high for me to justify buying as my personal laptop, but given the fact that this beauty is a portable server, the price doesn't suck.

Yep, I am in love.