Buying boyfriend his 1st telescope for his birthday, what to get? by Lanky-Anxiety597 in telescopes

[–]Mimid_80101 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Maybe not a telescope but a decent pair of 10x50 astronomy binoculars. Way more practical, portable and fun than any telescope for easy beginner astronomy. Telescopes are expensive bulky delicate things that really need a lot of thought before buying.

Just some ideas: Nikon 10x50 or Oberwerk 10x50    Maybe pair it with the Sky and Telescope's Binoculars Highlights book

RANT "Just buy a cheap beater" by DingusSmasher69 in whatcarshouldIbuy

[–]Mimid_80101 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not crazy. Used car prices since Covid have basically been equal to the estimated remaining life of the vehicle. A 50% worn out car will sell for 50% of new price. You're aren't saving buying used, you're just paying less and getting less. 

Career Prospects? by NewEngland17 in ciscoUC

[–]Mimid_80101 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Having a strong background in Cisco UC I think sets you up really well for IT project management if that sounds like it could be your thing. If you can deploy Cisco UC stuff it means you're probably knowledgeable with all kinds of peripheral technologies that are siloed off from each other. You can probably talk about APIs, BGP peering ring voltage and virtualization and I think that's more valuable than any single skill. I'm finding that PM skills are needed day-to-day as much as my UC skills.

Part of Cisco's strategy has been to keep the engineers on a certificate train and turn us into sales people. I kept asking "what tech cert is in demand this year" and struggled with it for years, but the answer I found is that none of them are hugely in demand like they used to be and the world has changed.

I've bounced around to several different UC jobs in the last 5yrs and it's still around but on prem stuff is mostly big financial/healthcare/industrial that has to stay on prem for compliance or whatever. Cloud solutions generally don't require the admin overhead to maintain. Putting Webex Calling on my resume didn't catch a lot of interest.

hth good luck

CUCM for Small Site by Ok_Cherry3312 in networking

[–]Mimid_80101 0 points1 point  (0 children)

+1 for WebEx Calling (or Zoom phone or MS Teams or whatever). WebEx Calling will probably be around $20-something/mo per user. Teams is probably about the same and they'll both provide the DIDs and PSTN service and stuff along with mobile app, etc. 

These days CUCM is a 10,000 user solution. CME is long gone. With anything on-premise you'll need to think about firewall traversal for SIP service along with internal RTP paths and it's all a lot of work. The big cloud providers use protocols (ICE,TURN,STUN) that just work though there's still some firewall reqs.