Friday, October 31, 2008

IPExpert's Answer to IE's Major Annoucement

IPExpert has answered back on IE's major announcement. Have a look at the following URL.

http://ipexpert.ccieblog.com/2008/10/31/ie_major_announcements/


Just in case anyone is wondering, I am a neutral customer (as stated in the previous post). Like most of the other candidates, as a customer, all I want is affordable (cheap and free would be nice) and high quality products. I don't really like politics but being the customers of both IPExpert and Internetwork, it is my interest to know the scene ...

Internetwork Expert's CCIE 2.0

I didn't sleep well last night. Throughout the night, I was thinking of the annoucement IE was going to make. Will they be purchased by Cisco as Brad Reese of NetworkWorld has said in his blog? Will they offer Cisco 360 programmes?

After sneakingly viewing Twitter updates from my Nokia N95 last night while 'sleeping' beside my wife, I was happy. Very happy that IE decided not to join Cisco's 360 programme. Happy that they placed us, the customers above everything else (yes the 50% non-US customer case helped a lot :-)) and finally happy that the changes that they bring to their current CCIE programme are improvements and not mere gimmicks (just like how our car maker Proton is doing nowadays). Special thanks to CCIE Pursuit and Brandon Carroll for updating us who were unfortunate to listen to it live.

In a nutshell, the improvements that IE's CCIE 2.0 will bring to the exisiting 1.0,
-FREE BEER!
-dynamic customized self-paced content
-adaptive written & hands-on assessments (Poly-Labs)
-continuing interaction with instructors, authors, customer success managers, and support staff-community involvement (users e.g. bloggers/IEOC forumers will get points for helping others and this could probably lead to incentives and such).

It is also good to note that starting Q1 2009 IE will also be offering programmes for the Cisco Associate & Professional level tracks.

For the full audio recording session on this, head off to the following URL:

http://ieclass.internetworkexpert.com/p95047727/


* Free beers only apply in 3030.


Update: I receive some mails saying that I am pro-IE now but I wish to state that I am a loyal and honest customers to both IPExpert and Internetwork Expert. All I really am interested is to get my first CCIE numbers.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

CCIE Flyer October Edition

Just in case some of you didn't know, CCIE Flyer October edition is out! Get it at http://www.ccieflyer.com :-)

Study CCIE Lab First then CCIE Written

An interesting post caught my eye today. It's located at http://www.sadikhov.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=143419 . MarkinManchester's post on studying the lab first then the written has its merits. Now I wonder ... am I doing the right way by studying for the written and doing labs occasionally the right way to go? Nevertheless I am 25% done with the examination guide book and have been doing virtual labs with Internetwork Expert's audio series. Still I wonder should I continue with studying the written first then concentrate on the lab or the other way around.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Tidbits 081021

First things first, congratulations to Matt Hill for passing his CCIE R&S and being certified as #22386. Nice number! Reminds you of the Intel's 386-era ;-). Stop at his site to congratulate him. He's been working hard on this and getting lost in the city a few times before passing :-)

IPExpert has been quiet recently. However all that ended a few hours ago when they finally launched their blog site at http://www.ccieblog.com/ . You can add your existing blog there (apart from me, I saw Arden Packeer's site, Caue's site, Brandon Carroll's site and CCIE Pursuit's site listed as well and not forgetting a few others, some of them new bloggers).

Their October edition newsletter is out as well. You can have a read at http://imakenews.com/ipexpert/ . Some interesting news there ... especially the one about IPExpert vs. Internetwork Expert. Personally for me, it's good to have competition. Neither vendor can slack and us the users will benefit the most. I am pretty sure the other camps will not keep quiet after this ...

This week Narbik Kocharians is in town (Kuala Lumpur) to train CCIE candidates on the Routing and Switching track. A few days ago, on a local forum, I posted on the best benefit from attending a bootcamp would to be 3 months from your actual lab sitting. The reason is because by then we should have a strong grasp of the CCIE R&S technologies. We can't expect the bootcamp to teach us from ground up. He however had a different tought about it arguing that it is beneficial as we can benefit from the training by getting more knowledge. I no doubt agree but I will not want to spend USD $2,500.00 in class just listening to Narbik if I could not catch up to his lecturing (this is assuming that I have not gotten a strong grasp of understanding of the CCIE technologies or have not done any of the labs from any vendors). Well, in the end, I just requested him to let me know of his experience at Narbik's camp and my opinion might just be swayed ;-). We all know how good Narbik is :-D.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Status Update : 081009

Been pretty quiet and has not posted a blog in weeks but if you notice, a lot of additions to the CCIE blog list and also I've added Emmanuel's cool CCIE Agent picture there :-). Visit his blog and give him some support!

Also I now have started as what some other bloggers have started, a status update. My format will be year/month/day hence 081009 means 9 October 2008. This is somewhat like Ubuntu Linux's style of formatting which I shamelessly copied :-D.

Ok for the last few weeks, this is the current stage I am in ...

From the CCIE R&S ECG 3rd Edition, I have completed the first two chapters (it's taking longer than I expected since I had to juggle between studying, working on several non-work-related projects and work) which are

1. Ethernet Basics
2. Virtual LANs and VLAN Trunking

I plan to finish Spanning-Tree, the third chapter sometime this week. Of course, I been using the CCIE Command Memorizer tool along this as well. Apart from that, I also finished viewing 1/2 of the Day 1 VoDs from IPExpert and at the same time the first two videos from Internetwork's CoD. I am just going through this videos just to refresh some knowledge and not really dwelling into it at this point. Also I been listening to Internetwork Expert's audio series daily. I commute about 30 mins to 45 mins from home to work and vice versa excluding the time to wait patiently for my time to board the train hence I used the time for what else, my CCIE preparation. I found out that I could listen to the entire EIGRP section and at least up to chapter 5 of the OSPF series on a one-way journey.

Back to the books :-)