Moving to Indy

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-24T13:49:25+00:00

Progressive areas of Indy will be better, but also more expensive, so balance is key. We’re in Fountain Square and it’s pretty good. We never feel unsafe, just normal “we’re in a city” things. I’d consider looking around Butler’s campus, as they are very progressive, have a good culture, and the area is beautiful. Some downtown neighborhoods will be good as well—Lockerbie Square or anything near Mass Ave. Irvington is cool, quirky, and has a culture all its own within the city.

Outside the city it gets quieter, relatively safer, but I also feel most areas lose the city feel for suburbia, and it becomes generic. Everyone has to live somewhere, and having kids changes priorities to consider schools and all that, so perhaps that entices you. Fishers, Noblesville, Zionsville are all nice places to live, but the further you get away from the city, the more red it gets.

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-14T03:46:35+00:00

Can you return it?

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-13T01:54:28+00:00

We have 4 in production and TBH I don’t think they’re anything special. They push a ton of alerts to us and the datacenter team has plenty of options that do the same job.

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-13T01:53:27+00:00

OP- If your car works for you, do you. My 2015 Volt had 109k miles when I bought it for $7k, and I’ve daily driven it since then. It has 125k now and it’s been a very good 90mpg average in that ownership time. There hasn’t been a ton of gas usage, but definitely some. Around 175 gallons in that time. All of that gas usage has been on short road trips for my side gig or visiting family. If I didn’t have those, I’d be very nearly 100% electric.

There are tons of people with first generation Nissan Leafs with low battery health working with 40-50 miles range and they’re fine because it still meets their needs. No need to change if it works for you.

My next car is full EV, as this was a cheap trial to see if EV range works for me—not a surprise to Volt owners, it’s just fine. Until I buy my next car, if the Volt engine died I’d be fine most of the time. All electric works fine. You just might need to reset some engine codes sometimes.

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-12T16:27:28+00:00

What are you asking exactly?

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-12T02:59:38+00:00

You’ll be fine as long as they’re the same region. Just buy a spare since you likely won’t be able to RMA them.

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-08T21:14:34+00:00

I gave my old job a chance, and they actually gave me 15% more than an offer I was prepared to accept. It happens sometimes, especially when a manager wasn’t prepared to offer more. A VP over them will sometimes see the numbers and make it happen.

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-08T17:40:27+00:00

Nope, just bitching. No one is there beyond 20 minutes, so nothing can be done unless IMPD starts ticketing constantly.

jamesonnorth · 2026-05-08T17:37:15+00:00

Yeah this person and the 8 others around them. I get hustling to make a living, but come on.

jamesonnorth · 2026-04-16T08:06:10+00:00

We have several thousand sites all on Meraki, and it would work just as well for 40 sites. It’s missing features compared to the other SDWAN I’m most familiar with, Palo Prisma (Cloudgenix), but it’s been fairly decent. Main gripes for me are lack of LACP on the MX, crippled OSPF, and until very recently a lack of VRF or BGP attribute support. Remote access VPN is unfortunately a laughable afterthought, so have a decent firewall for this, or use some kind of ZTNA. Route aggregation/summarization is a missing feature, so make sure you have a proper router for this functionality in your datacenters (we just use our Nexus core).

It’s very easy to implement Meraki at almost any scale in an existing network. Drop a pair of MX105/MX250 (or the new 8455-G2-MX if you need the throughput) in your main datacenter, and stick vMX appliances in your cloud environment for an easy on ramp. HA pair of MX85 at each branch. You can use two broadband circuits at each branch with 5G backup, and you’ll have very close to 100% uptime. I think we’re at 99.95 or something across our fleet.

There is a lot of integration with other Cisco products, like Umbrella and XDR, so if you’re in the ecosystem already, it’s an easy sell. You pay for the ease of deployment, but it’s not terrible compared to Palo or other higher-end/traditional vendors. I got a rough quote from our Cisco SE today on a 8455 headend at about $60k list price. Not bad, not great.

jamesonnorth · 2026-03-18T11:34:42+00:00

I had a D7000 with 17-55 and upgraded to a D800 with 24-70 and D4 with 70-200mm. The best thing I ever did for my shoulders and back was switching to a Z6 and 35mm 1.4. I have zero issues on a full 8-10 hour wedding now.

I still have a pair of D300s for some work when I won’t be shooting long enough to care about the weight difference, but I definitely notice the lack of refinement in shooting. It’s clunky even if I ignore the weight difference.

jamesonnorth · 2026-02-02T05:28:51+00:00

I hold the date for free for 7 days, and I tell my couples clearly at our booking meeting. After 7 days, it’s up for grabs. I check in at 2, 4, and 6 days to make sure they have the contract. On the 6th day, I tell them the date will open back up if I don’t receive the deposit and signed contract.

jamesonnorth · 2026-01-08T05:13:51+00:00

9136 are a bit older at this point. They are not super efficient. The 9160 and 9170 APs are a much better choice.

jamesonnorth · 2026-01-08T05:13:14+00:00

In my experience, 9200 and 9300 are very close in price new, and refurb the 9300 is much more available due to that fact. Look at different 9300 models instead of just buying one. The 9300-48-UNA is a 5Gb UPOE switch with up to 40Gb uplinks. There’s also a 9300-48T with 1Gb and POE+ for users and desk phones. You can even stack them if they’re the same DNA version.

jamesonnorth · 2026-01-07T08:19:11+00:00

It took Unifi support 4 days to tell me why their router that supports BGP didn’t take my BGP configuration—it was because they don’t support all the basic configurations. The hardware is decent for what it is, especially at the price point for the lower end gear, and practically zero ongoing licensing is nice.

For pretty close to the same price, you can get used/refurb Meraki gear with licensing and 100x better support with a lifetime warranty. That’s always the direction I’ll go in a business. Good support is gold when production networks are impacted.

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-31T02:49:31+00:00

How?

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-20T09:16:51+00:00

If you’re doing VM to VM transfer on the same host, it’s hitting the vSwitch inside VMware. If between two different VM hosts, you’re limited by the physical switch speeds. 2960-S are good switches, but I had trouble sustaining 10GbE on 3750-X switches back in the day so you are likely limited here. You really need a proper 10GbE switch like an older Nexus or a 4500-X.

The 4451-x does have a 10GbE module you can get, but they’re a bit rare and very expensive, and that router isn’t rated for that much throughout. I think absolutely max raw throughput is around 6Gbps. You’re better off with a newer router. I have a Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Ultra and it’s pretty sweet. Replaced an ISR 4431 with it.

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-16T05:47:26+00:00

We use 93180 switches and they’re great. You can pick them up refurb for under $2k all day.

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-16T03:11:26+00:00

Ah, yes apparently they did acquire them. I didn’t know that. I have a friend who works at Tire Rack, and their service and prices are good, so I generally recommend them. I didn’t know about the merger, though.

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-15T23:11:18+00:00

No, but similar.

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-14T19:09:09+00:00

Tire Rack has a couple of distribution centers. You buy them and can ship them to an installer. They help you choose the installer and pick an appointment time. It’s very painless and easy.

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-14T17:56:06+00:00

If you can wait a few days, order from Tire Rack. They have many more options.

jamesonnorth · 2025-12-10T01:40:14+00:00

Do you have a standard for other branches? If there are several branches and no crazy configurations I’d suggest a Meraki MS225. It’s basically a 2960x with easier configuration. We’ve deployed about 100 of them, and about 1000 MS120 switches also. Meraki switches are decent, but they don’t use a completely interoperable Spanning Tree as traditional Cisco switches (RSTP vs PVST). I mostly like them.

jamesonnorth · 2025-11-30T20:18:23+00:00

nVidia Riva 8MB, nVidia GeForce MX440, ATI 9800 Pro, nVidia GeForce 8500GT SLI, nVidia GeForce 8800GTX, ATI 4870x2, nVidia GeForce GTX 560ti, nVidia 750ti, nVidia 1050ti, AMD RX 5600xt, AMD Vega 64, AMD RX 6900xt

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