Week 24 à “It’s a relief that I no longer need to keep to the ridiculous schedule I had set for myself! à Fully-prepared in 17 days! à Who was I kidding?”

Week’s Study Time: Study Hours = 11  inc. Lab Hours = 0 Total study time so far: Total Study Hours = 291  inc. Total Lab Hours = 20.5 What I have studied this week: Ethernet Basics 802.1d PVST+ 802.1w 802.1s Spanning Tree Protocol Protection VLANs VTP Trunks Private VLANs Interface Bundling IP Addressing inc. NAT Recent test scores: Numerous Boson ExSim tests….

The ‘CCIE Quickfire’ workbook I have created is maturing nicely; I have been running through all of the questions at least twice a day over the last few days and it’s becoming a fantastic tool to aid my short and long term memory of all things routing and switching.  I have been using the 2 hours of study in the evening to review notes and then update the workbook with new questions for each technology I come up against, I am however going to need to re-arrange the workbook every now and again – knowing ‘Ethernet Basics’ inside-out obviously isn’t as important as knowing ‘BGP’ yet I’ll be answering the questions on it many more times the way the workbook is arranged at the moment…..
Here is a copy of the workbook as it is at now (right click – save target as), my colleague “SP” has been a great help to me over the last few days because he has also worked through a few questions and pointed out little bits of information I should add in.

I’ve spotted one or two excellent articles around the ‘blogosphere’ during the last week, here are some of them:
1) “U.U.U.U” à ever wondered what this means? à head-over to packetlife.net to find out
2) Tutorial: Filtering Routes in OSPF Part 1 » Filtering Within An Area by Arden Packeer
3)  CCIE Job Searching by Emmanuel Conde
4) A series of MPLS related articles by Human Modem

An announcement:
I will be moving onwards and upwards next month into a Systems Engineer role at Cisco! J  I am over-the-moon, it was a dream of mine when I focused on networking just 4 years ago that I didn’t think would ever materialize – and now it has!  I really can’t wait for the opportunity to work within such a dynamic and prestigious company. J
One of my first tasks within my new role will be a trip to San Jose – I have earmarked the evenings in the hotel as ‘intense-study’ evenings, hopefully that time will take me past the 350-001 ‘knowledge-line’ and get a base-level in place ready for lab prep.
I think you will now understand why my manager has asked me to postpone my 350-001 written exam for a few weeks.