Friday, June 13, 2014

What have I done?!

What was I thinking?  I recently scheduled my first attempt at the CCIE Data Center certification.  To quote Jensen Button's line from a Mobil 1 commercial I find hilarious - Oh my word.  Watch it yourself here.


I know what a lot of you are thinking - he'll be able to walk in a breeze through this lab. I can tell you, that's not going to happen.  I've been so focused on the Nexus side of things with my day job that I am pretty confident I can do OK on that section.  It's the UCS and N1K side of the test that is making me nervous.  Like, I've not touched those technologies for 2 years, nervous.  Yeah....something like that.

Of course, I'll be hitting the rack hard and trashing multiple UCS topologies along the way and intend to blog about some of my experience as writing it down helps reinforce what I think I know.  I've been there, done that with the CCIE which almost makes it more nerve wracking as I know the level of effort required and need to be rock solid.

My dear wife of course just rolled her eyes when I told her.  She's been there, done that with me every step of the way as well and thinks I must be mental to even consider it. My kids are in for a treat as none of them are old enough to remember the early mornings and stress.  *note to self* try not to be a wanker during this process.



Early mornings you say?  Yes, I study in the morning - like early morning 5AM kind of early.  This is a study habit I picked up when working on my R&S CCIE.  At the time my wife was a teacher and had to be at school early. I knew if I wanted to see her in the evenings and actually have a marriage, I couldn't do late night study sessions so I did early mornings.  I've found my brain is fresh in the AM and not bogged down with work items and makes focus much sharper.  Certainly YMMV but it's worked for me twice now in my CCIE pursuits so why fight it?

Anyways, hopefully this will be the start of more posts that are not pasta sauce related or 3 years old on OTV.  ;)

Stay hungry my friends.

Done!
Done!

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