In an effort to spread the Scrutinizer love abroad, I and other members of the Plixer team travel yearly to Asia for not only the Cisco Networkers show in Australia, but also to meet with some potential resellers in the east.
Are any of you familiar with Andrew Zimmern’s show: Bizarre Foods?

If you are and enjoy the series,  you’ll appreciate that I was somewhat inspired by this man to try different food.   In 2007 I met with a partner of our sister company Ravica in Thailand.

The manufacturer’s president and I ended up in the dark streets of Pattaya looking over the street carts of some very interesting snacks: maggots, grass hoppers, scorpions, ants, etc.   I mustered up the courage and tried some bugs:

I have to video these events in fear that my co-workers and friends won’t believe me.  In truth, the bugs tasted pretty good.  Not nasty at all.

In 2008 I ended up in The Philippines.  Like Thailand, it is a beautiful country that is rich in culture, offers great hiking and of course: bizarre foods.  We traveled to a small village north of Manila.  Our guide and driver spotted a market on a stop for some medicine I needed for some digestive problems.  Once again we observed a smorgasbord of interesting snacks, from weird looking fruits that tasted awesome to some chicken parts that I’ll share with you in this video:

So there you have it, how Cisco’s NetFlow led me to some bizarre foods.    Hey, “If it looks good, eat it!”

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager
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“What is going on here? It’s freezing!” is something I seem to hear here from time to time.  My friends who sit directly under the air vents have been saying the vents blow very cold air for a few minutes, then warm, then cold etc.  On the bright side they seem to stay warm from the activity of putting on and taking off their coats through out the day.  It’s all fun and games until I have to put my coat on.  Time to get to business…

Ironically, when the maintenance guy who we call KennyG shows up to check it out it, it miraculously warms up.  We know we have a problem because we’ve “temperature lasered” the vents and found that they were about 55 degrees.  What we need is cold hard proof, so why not score points for style while we’re at it?

We decided we were going to shove an SNMP temperature sensor in the air vent and graph the temperature with Denika so that we can show KennyG what really is going on here and when.  Ravica offers Bitsights, which are really cool little environmental probes that we use to monitor our server room’s temperature and humidity.

It turns out the temperature swings are pretty substantial, and probably shouldn’t be blowing air that cold in the first place.   KennyG now has the information that he needs to do whatever KennyG does and hopefully the need to wear our jackets inside will be a thing of the Christmas past.

So, if your maintenance guy isn’t working too hard on solving your problem with the HVAC, tell him to go shove a temperature sensor in the vent.

Merry Christmas,

Raul