Birthday Again

Already One year since my last birthday post (I was in Chad), I think it was yesterday.
During this time what's happen to my life ?
Read 2 books discussing about Vmware and virtualization
Read 1 book about google
Read 1 book about Lean Management
Got CCNA Security
Many happy moments with my familly  (this is the most important)

But I'm so far from get ready to pass my CCIE lab exam, why ? I often work 10 or 12h per day without find no more than 45 min for my CCIE studies. How is it possible? I have to many things to handle at the same time :
-presales
-technical support
-solution designer, solution adviser
-implementation engineer
-technological watch (share with all other employees technical innovation, big IT projects in other countries and so on)

I'm also involved in differents IT related area with differents vendors : PBX, Network, Contact Center, Wireless, Gsm gateway, Wan optimization and now I will have to deal with virtualization and storage (cloud) with Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Bluecoat, fortinet, Genesys, Hypermedia, Vmware.

I need to have more strict day to day schedule, I will plan for that. I also decide to buy a study table with a confortable chair and upgrade my laptop RAM from 4GB to 8GB.

Yes CCIE is hard but, it's more about how long you can keep yourself focus on learning and improved your networking skills, this for me the secret of CCIE.

Happy Birthday to me.

How hard is it ?

A friend of mine ask me one morning: "Hey I supposed you're CCIE now", after I answer him "oh not yet", he ask how difficult can this exam be for me to not have crack it already.

My answer to the question is: You can't imagine how harder and painful it is, but it's doable :-).  You really can't imagine how difficult CCIE is until you decide to get into it.

May be I will go for a Bootcamp in India in order to maximize my chances, but I have already put a lot of money in my CCIE studies.Should I keep my money for a possible second attempt or put all my money on a single shot attempt ?

CCIE & Multitasking

It's very difficult to keep focus on the way to be a CCIE, I have read many ccie blogs that tell to pretendant do not divert themselves with many objectives.
For me it's impossible as I evolve to my CCIE preparation, I feel the need sometimes for doing other thing else.
So I decided to go with 3 objectives :

1st : CCIE R&S most difficult exam in the IT world it's not the hardiest exam, it's the worst craziest you can't imagine how many protocols, rfc, tips and tricks you have to know, to master, to memorize

2nd : Virtualization / Datacenter I decided to improve my skills in virtualization and I bought 2 books (VMWARE vpshere 4 and vspere 5 after I will take a look at Hyper-V and KVM) in order to get all the basis, yes I make a lot of reading around the web but I think books are differents and I appreciate them because they have a strutured approach (the good ones ;-))

3rd : CCNA Voice my daily job is about 60% dealing with Alcatel-Lucent voice products (IVR, Contact Center, IPBX, GSM Gateway) CCNA Voice is just a way to convert all my Alcatel-Lucent and Genesys Knowledge into Cisco stuff (I already know all about telephony and other related concepts)

How can I handle all this 3 objectives, simple after 6 hours doing lab or reading for CCIE when I decided to relax my mind for about 1 or 2 hours; I moved to the 2 others objectives :-)

For now, everything is going well I hope I will have the strengh to continue on this way.

Happy New Year 2K12

Happy New Yeat to all, new year but regarding this blog no change same objective get this fuc@!#* CCIE number.

CCIE Dreamer can't have beautiful afternoon like the others until he gets his number.

I use all my saturday afternoon doing some labs  : BGP, OSPF, Tunnels.
It's very great to see yourself evolved as you go throught your preparation. When you read some questions you can easily derive some further pbs or question just after reading this first one.
OSPF and Tunnels going well, but with BGP hmmmm (need some revision: Dampening, neighbor capability, memorize BGP decision process)

One thing I can say after this afternoon lab experience don't try to be faster, take your time read the questions type normally, the important is to think and to know exactly what you're doing if you
think before typing you will be 'de facto' more precise when you will entered the commands.

I think it's time to watch a football game : Real Madrid vs Granada