May 11, 2002 – I managed to get some sleep and wake up at about 3:30 am. I had left the TV on and some documentary was on. That is far better than the standard fare of infomercials.

Now that my brain is its usually skewed self, I can comment on some issues with my trip. First, casino air is crap. That is a given but I either caught a big or am having some kind of extended allergic reaction. Truth be told, I noticed an odd odor in my hotel room. No! This is not some digression into the urban legend of a dead body under the bed. I have a strong olfactory sense. It reminded me of rotting orange peels. I think it may have been some kind of fungus growing in the air conditioning unit. Whatever it was, I felt like utter crap until I woke up today. I was sucking on lozenges like Ginger Lynn sucks, um, nevermind. Anyway, it seemed ok by the time I was out of the plane back home except for a rancid mucus congestion I have to deal with. Blech!!!

As for Interop, I was very happy to see the influx of wireless at the show and even happier to see wireless made available to attendees. It drew attention to me that there are a few shortcomings with wireless. I, for one, disliked having to carry my laptop (and case) around the show. Key3Media needs to make some lockers available to attendees in the wireless access areas. Also, I wished I had a cell phone that offered some IM services. I have no idea if Sprint PCS offers anything like that but, then again, I am really tempted to tell Sprint PCS to go to hell. When I get new cell service, it will be an item I look for in the service. Maybe one of those Palm/phone combos…

Cell coverage at the show was better than before. I was able to get signal all over the convention center and the Hilton. The only issues were capacity issues. My signal strength was great but if too many people were using the service at once I would have calls drop. Of course, having full signal and having calls drop is not unheard of on the Sprint PCS network.

For as much as wireless was at the show, so was security. I was able to look over the full setup for wireless security used at the show and get a firm idea of how 802.1x works in BOTH wired and wireless networks as well as RADIUS and VPNs in wireless setups. The available documentation was plentiful and very thorough. I wish I could make Visio documents like that…

MPLS was very present. This is a technology I am sadly not able to play with now since it is 1) bleeding edge, 2) not available on the network equipment I now have, and 3) I have no interconnect with a carrier offering the service. It makes me wish I had access to a carrier who at least was testing it.

Since the wireless/MPLS/security issues were about 1/3 of the show, the remaining 2/3 were the same old stuff and some SAN/IP Storage stuff I had not yet seen. I did not really focus too much on it since it is the same old FC vs iSCSI stuff I see in the trade magazines and, in all honest, other than the QoS implementation, it is not highly interesting to me.