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.