From: Joseph D. Phillips (josephdphillips@fastmail.us)
Date: Thu Jul 29 2004 - 01:34:08 GMT-3
Well, I had a feeling of illegitimacy going in anyway. Something the
Brians said a week or two back has been haunting me.
Truer words have not been spoken -- it is too easy to fall into the lab
workbook trap. I don't know about the rest of you, but the lab exercises
can be kind of addicting. You do them over and over, get good at them
and feel a certain satisfaction that you've learned something when it's
all over.
It's especially easy to fall into lab mania when you work a full time
job and come home tired. I was doing labs at work, completely exhausted,
and some every weekend, just mindlessly going through the steps without
learning much.
I have gotten better since my previous attempts, to be sure. Many things
are very easy to do now, but there are some things none of the lab
workbooks
cover.
It's a lot easier for the Cisco folks to come up with an extremely
obscure task for you to perform than it is for Wayne Lawson, Brad Ellis
or the Brians Dennis and McGahan, et al, to prepare you for every
possible lab exam item.
This is the first time since I flunked my first time back in July 2003
that I am not disconsolate. I had a raging headache going in on Tuesday,
and thought I was going to faint during the exam. Still I recovered
enough to do most of the tasks except for multicast.
Anyway, I need to spend some quality time making friends with the
technologies I have since dreaded, and maybe less time on the rack.
Maybe I grab my buddy in Sherman Oaks and we do labs together, or I come
up
with some books to read, like on multicast, QoS or Security. And I think
I'll do another mock lab, too.
My problem is that I'm running out of time.
On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 23:50:33 -0400, "James" <james@towardex.com> said:
> >
> > Oh yeah, I flunked attempt number four in SJ on Tuesday.
>
> awww :( But, don't give up!
>
> So yea I flunked my first attempt today at RDU. I know how it feels.
> What really got me is that after viewing the score report, I was close to
> pass.
> Just a few necessary points killed it.
>
> When I looked at the score report, I pretty much realized where I screwed
> up.
> It appears after all seems to be my misinterpretation of how the Cisco
> wordings
> of the question wanted the solution to be configured. And apparently it
> wasn't
> done to their likings, hence no partial credit. What threw me off even
> more into
> dissapointment is on couple topics that I KNEW I was very weak on, I
> scored
> 100% on those, but not on the ones I knew well? Talk about irony..
>
> As a result, I am going to invest in that new 50 dollars Parctical Lab
> studies
> or whatever book from Cisco Press (I have the link somewhere, just dont
> remember
> the name top of my head) as well as DQOS book. Then focus specifically
> into
> where I exactly failed, and attempt and reattempt various IPexpert labs,
> specifically the nightmare and brutual Lab39 and Lab40 in ipexpert which
> scares
> the shit out of everyone, then go for 2nd Lab attempt soon.
>
> It appears I'll need to continue configurating IGP on routers 24/7, and
> continue redistributing them at 6 point places while keeping best+backup
> paths
> available until the whole technology becomes fast-switched in my head,
> where
> during the lab, fingers start typing without any thinking done, assisted
> by
> that small ASIC in your brain that got brainwashed with 300 hours of big
> messy
> IGP trainwreck :)
>
> Either way, no hard feelings. I hate the Boston weather anyway.
>
> -J
>
> --
> James Jun TowardEX
> Technologies, Inc.
> Technical Lead Network Design, Consulting, IT
> Outsourcing
> james@towardex.com Boston-based Colocation & Bandwidth
> Services
> cell: 1(978)-394-2867 web: http://www.towardex.com , noc:
> www.twdx.net
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