The next steps

Its been a week. The initial euphoria of passing the lab is beginning to settle down now. I must admit that even though towards the very end of my prep for R&S I was getting a bit bored of labs, labs and more labs, and I am now missing doing them! Does this sound crazy? Not doing endless labs has given me more time to spend with my wife which is great – and I havent fired up Dynamips which has to be a step in the right direction, but there are a few areas I would like to keep up to date on.

Now the lab is out of the way and before I start the next one I have decided on a couple of mini projects to fill up a little bit of the time.

• Learn Turkish
• Start swimming again
• Do some mini technology focussed labs
• CCIE Voice

The first one on the list Ive been meaning to do for a while – my wife is Turkish, so whenever we go to visit her family over there she ends up spending half the time translating for me. I would like to get to a point where I can have some kind of direct conversation with them – to give her a break more than anything! Hopefully I can find an evening class somewhere and get some good self study material going. If I can pass the CCIE lab then learning another language cant be that hard right?

Secondly I need to start doing some regular exercise. I have certainly gained weight since I started all of this – now I dont put it down to the CCIE directly, but it would be better for me to lose a few pounds. I used to swim quite regularly but this stopped a couple of years ago and I am feeling the effects.

I want to do some more of the technology focussed labs. Towards the end of my prep I only really looked at some of the areas in Volume I of the BLS that I was weaker in. So Multicast and QoS really. I intend to take another look at more of the individual technologies in there, in an effort to keep them fresh in my mind. I wont be spending 8 hours at a time doing it, but maybe a couple of hours here and there. I have some Proctor Labs vRack sessions remaining, and I have also got the IPexpert .net file for Dyamips that I might play around with.

The next one on the list is the biggie – Voice. Out of all the tracks this one gets more of my attention for some reason. At work our network is more of a SP type design, with MPLS, VRF’s and BGP running across it, so doing SP may be easier initially to pick up, but its not appealing to me as much. The security exam is awaiting an update, so I wouldnt want to make a start on that until these have been officially announced and the vendors update their material to reflect them.

Hopefully I can pick up the IPexpert Voice BLS towards the end of this year – I have no idea how long it will take to go through the material but hopefully I can get it done by the end of 2009. Im not sure if Voice is due an update anytime soon. Does anyone know?

IPexpert currently have a deal on for their material – head over to this page for more info. I do hope they have this offer running when I am ready to jump into Voice fully.