A few years back, Interop attendees practically had to ward off job recruiters with mace. These days, that's rarely the case. However, tucked away in a back corner of the show floor was State Farm Insurance, which was not selling policies but hiring network talent. State Farm says some of the necessary network skills are in short supply in and around company headquarters in Bloomington, Ill. So if you're a job seeker and want to live in the Midwest, check it out.

Extreme Networks CEO Gordon Stitt doesn't miss a trick. During his keynote presentation, he rested a Diet Coke can on the dais in a little product plug for Coca-Cola Enterprises, a big customer of its switches.

It's getting so you can't tell the product types without a scorecard. There was a time when a switch and a router and a bridge and a gateway were distinct and well understood. However, last week there was Bluesocket announcing something called a switch wireless gateway. And Vivato Systems chimed in with a Wi-Fi bridge/router.

Paul Mockapetris, chief scientist and chairman of IP address infrastructure software vendor Nominum, said during a chat at the show that he is getting ready to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of DNS, which he invented. How does he intend to celebrate? Well, his company is planning a party. But Mockapetris says the real meaning of being the "Father of DNS" is that his young children now point to ads on the sides of buses and say "Look Dad, .com!"

No queues is bad newsOfficial attendance figures are always tough to come by at trade shows, but if taxi lines in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center were any indication, there's no way 40,000 people showed up - as touted in preshow literature. At 5 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, usually a hectic time to get transportation, there was no cab line at all. In past years it was at least a 20-minute wait at that time of day.

Some of the most jarring signs for N+I veterans are in the Hilton Center and Pavilions at the Las Vegas Hilton, adjacent to the convention center, where N+I keynote presentations and associated meetings have been held in years past. The signs read, "Multi-Housing World." The Hilton rooms were taken up by an annual show for the multifamily housing industry. Once-mighty N+I, it seems, was just one show among many in this convention mecca.