I’ve been looking for tools to supplement Power Point, Whiteboard, etc. and Brian Gracely (@bgracely) suggested I try Prezi (www.prezi.com.) Prezi is a very slick tool for non-slide based presentations.  I don’t think it will replace slides or white board for me, but it’s a great supplement. It’s got a fairly quick learning curve if you watch the quick tutorials. Additionally it works quite well for mind-mapping, I just throw all of my thoughts on the canvas and then start tying them together, whereas slides are very linear and take more planning. My favorite feature of Prezi is the ability to break out of the flow, and quickly return to it at any time during a presentation. I love this because real world discussions never go the way you mapped them out in advance. To start learning the tool I created the following high-level overview of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS.) This content is fully/usable and recyclable so do with it what you want!
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We have a raft of 3750s throughout the range from G to X, PoE and non-PoE, 24-48 ports. I hate them all with a psaoisn. Everything is a chore with this platform. Hardware failures and software failures relating to stacking are the particular bains of my life. Most of my recent weekends have been spent dealing with stacks of 3750s which have been either upgraded or been replaced due to faulty hardware. The single-integrated-PSU Gs with their horrific RPS system drive me mad. Yesterday I had to fly to an island to swap out a bust G which was running on RPS after blowing its’ internal PSU. First thing I did (after prep, of course) was to switch the RPS to standby to kick the failed G over either to internal PSU if it wasn’t fried, or dead due to lack of power. I wasn’t counting on this knocking off 2 other Gs in the same stack. A 5 member stack down to 2. WTF?! They can’t have been running on RPS as the stupid thing only supplies one device at a time, so why the hell did they power themselves off when it was disabled?! Franticly ripping the RPS cables out of the now dead switches (the RPS was in standby, remember ), removing and reapplying the power cable had no effect. Removing the stack cables completely and reapplying power DID however revive them. So after I repeated this for the not-really-failed switches and swapped out the one with the blown supply, I went to change my underwear.Other stacking woes? Removal of a stack member for upgrade (replace G with X), disconnected both stack cables (the to-be-replaced switch was powered off), but show switch stack-ports’ shows 3 of the 4 necessary cable endpoints to be DOWN. How the f Turns out that while it thought this member was still in the stack while it wasn’t (showed up in show switch’ as Ready), forwarding was being screwed for some reason (maybe it was punting traffic down a stack cable that wasn’t really there? :-/). We had to reattach and then detach the switch again in order to observe it properly disappear.Added an X to a stack a few months ago, it functioned perfectly except didn’t apply any QoS marking on any of its interfaces. No other hallmarks of any kind of problem. Just incorrectly dropped traffic which was pretty tricky to isolate. Reboot fixed that.StackPower whinging about unbalanced supplies in an identically populated stack with no hardware or power issues. Reboot fixed that.Spontaneous stack-split during the addition of an X to a stack of other Xs. A stack cable in the middle of the stack spontaneously appeared disconnected and caused a complete stack split while the stack ring was open at the bottom for the new member. That one could’ve been the fault of the guy that was doing the work but he denies it. I have no reason to trust him on this, however: fairly certain he’s the one who keeps bending fibres very tightly (to the point of the insulating sheath going white with stress ) to make them fit in cable management arms.When we finally replace our X installations with Nexus, we’ll be replacing the G installs with the Xs, which at least have dual modular power supplies. Shitload of work and still a massive potential for stack issues to bite us all though. And then I’m going to go Office Space on those fucking RPS.