WoW it has been a long time

As the title of the post says it has been a long time since I have posted anything or been on this blog at all. The reason I stopped studying was that I was heavily into my CCIE study and with work and personal commitments I just did not have the time to do any blogging. I was to busy labbing away and not taking any notes, naughty boy.

Anyhow a couple of months ago my CCIE study came to an end not because I passed the lab unfortunatly but because the kids were to much of a handful for my wife to handle on her own on weekends. I do hope that not everything has fallen out of my head and that I can pick it up again sometime in the near future maybe in winter where I can trick my kids into believing it is bed time at 3pm in the afternoon :-) It will not be any time soon though because my lab is in pieces as I have decided to move house. Not only have I decided to move into a bigger more expensive house when interest rates are at their lowest levels in hundreds of years but I have also decided to move jobs and take a pay cut at the same time. Nothing like making life difficult for yourself hey? As you can see I am going stuggle with that CCIE as I am not the brightest lamp on the street :-)

On the job front I am moving away from the large enterprise and my chance of finally attending Networkers or even getting on my first Cisco course to go back to a small enterprise. Back to the land of being a jack of all trades as I will have to go back to doing Microsoft and VMWare. However maybe this I can get on the VMWare course and actually do my VCP. Also although I remember Greg Ferro saying that he thought IP Telephony was over (http://etherealmind.com/ip-telephony-over-no-cisco-voice/) (which I tend to agree with) there is a chance I can get involved in an IPT rollout and have even less focus on my R&S CCIE :-)

Talking about Greg Ferro I decided I should catch-up on all my reading and visited his blog. I noticed he is obviously a very bored man as he has now launched a podcast http://packetpushers.net/. I managed to listen to one episode and I must say it is amazing so I would highly recommend you take a listen. Also juding by his accent Greg is an Auzzie (or at least still sounds like one) I should have guessed it by the fact that he did his CCIE down there. So they must do something to the water down there because all the best CCIE's I have met have some sort of Australian connection.

So life has been pretty hectic so studying has all but died although since I only had one exam left for CCIP I thought I could at least do that and finish something off. Only trouble is it turns out my BSCI is over 3 years old now and so does not count anymore. So now I have to do the new ROUTE exam as well as MPLS to finish CCIP argh. It turns out that my BCMSN expires next month so if I did CCDP I would have to do SWITCH as well, I do not remember anyone tell me this. By the way does anyone know if the QoS exam has a time limit on it?

So thats where I am at the moment and hopefully once I have settled into my new places (job and house) I will be able to update my blog a bit more.