From: WorkerBee (ciscobee@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2007 - 22:20:11 ART
For Tokyo, get used to the Japanese Dell keyboard, with
a tiny space bar and some weird key arrangement.
Color pens is not provided but I recommend you to get your
own OHP permanent colored markers. You are welcome to
bring in some sweets like "Green Apples" flavor to stimulate
your brain to work harder. ~:)
For Tokyo, the proctor is very strict on punctuality, never never
be late for the lab or else....you will start later than the rest.
Tokyo Lab is at Mitsui building beside Grand Hyatt Hotel with
Cisco rate within 10 mins walk. About 20,000 Yen per day with
free breakfast.
I am very please with Cisco Tokyo lab except the keyboard
which kinda slow me alittle.
On 8/23/07, Ben Holko <ben.holko@datacom.com.au> wrote:
> Thank you for the informative post Mark, I WAS seriously considering
> Beijing/Hong Kong, and even scheduled Tokyo.
>
> Has anyone got any feedback on the Tokyo location?
>
> Sorry to hear it didn't happen for you Mark, chin up :)
>
> Ben
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
> Mark Abrahams
> Sent: Wednesday, 22 August 2007 8:13 PM
> To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
> Subject: Beijing lab experience
>
> Hi all
>
> Just thought I'd share my Beijing lab experience with you all, as I
> would have appreciated similar info prior to taking it on.
>
> First, the history: I was a victim of the Great August 2007 Sydney Lab
> Reschedule, and so received a phone call from Cisco two days prior to
> sitting my first attempt in Sydney on August 2nd advising that my date
> had to be rescheduled to early October. As I felt ready to do the exam
> at that point, I looked for alternatives, and the one feasible option
> turned out to be Beijing. Thankfully, Cisco offered me an August 15th
> seat there, but as travel to Beijing is quite a different proposition
> than to Sydney (I live in New Zealand) it took a while for me to make
> arrangements for this. Finally I confirmed five days out from the exam
> date that I was on my way to China.
>
> There were a few challenges, at least to me as a foreigner, that the
> Beijing lab environment introduced:
> 1. The desktop environment used a Chinese locale, which wasn't too much
> of a problem since you didn't need to use it that much at all.
> 2. The lab had only HyperTerm as the console application (from other
> comments I had assumed that all CCIE labs used SecureCRT).
> 3. In HyperTerm, most of the keyboard mappings I was used to didn't
> work. For example, no up arrow - you had to use Ctrl-P instead, Ctrl-B
> for back one character, etc. So I wasted time before establishing with
> the proctor that this was the way of things in Chinese HyperTerm - and I
>
> wasn't about to wade through the Chinese menu structure to prove him
> wrong. Every time I reverted to using the arrow keys, the next
> character I typed was also gobbled. Didn't realize how ingrained my use
>
> of the arrow keys was until that eight hour stretch!
> 4. Also, the Chinese notepad has no search-and-replace function. More
> time wasted trying to look through the Chinese menus in vain for this
> function, then trying to explain to the proctor what I was looking for,
> and then finally establishing that you couldn't do this. Again,
> disappointing because I had learned from someone on this forum (whoever
> it was - thanks!) what I thought was a rather slick process of
> harvesting all IP address from the configs and search-and-replacing to
> produce a TCL script and switch macro for reachability testing (very
> useful these are!).
> 5. The proctor's English was reasonable without being outstanding.
> While most questions were understood fine, some took a little longer to
> get through than perhaps with a native English speaker - no major
> complaint though. Worst case, I had to use scratch paper to write out
> examples of what I was talking about. The proctor was helpful, while
> maintaining a professional distance.
> 6. The lab exam consisted of a paper copy of the diagrams followed by
> the questions, all stapled into one booklet, with no electronic copy (is
>
> that normal for other CCIE labs locations?). Although I found the
> provided diagrams adequate for most tasks (I did diagram a few point
> solutions), I was used to having the diagrams on a separate unattached
> page so that I could view them easily along side reading the questions.
>
> I had assumed that either this would be the case, or there would be an
> online copy of the diagrams to refer to. Again, I didn't realize how
> much I flicked from diagram to question to diagram etc. until I had to
> turn pages to do so. In hindsight, it would have been less problematic
> for me to copy a couple of diagrams verbatim to the scratch paper, just
> to get them on a separate unattached page.
> 7. The lab was _cooollllld_. The amount of typo's I made was
> understandably higher under the exam pressure, but I'm sure the very
> aggressive air conditioning didn't help as I felt my hands freezing up.
>
> Understandable though, as the exam was in the same room as the five
> racks of testing equipment. And I'm notoriously cold under normal
> conditions, so this probably wouldn't affect most normal people :-)
> 8. Lunch was nice but required chopsticks to consume. My chopstick
> skills are appalling :-) Interestingly, we only had twenty minutes for
> lunch, and we sat in silence at our lab desks to eat (although no work
> was allowed during this time).
>
> Despite all this (and although the list is long, none were major
> impediments), I felt that I knew all the topic areas and answered all
> the questions with about an hour to go. It was in fact with about 10
> minutes to go I discovered a problem with one of my IGP solutions that
> may have lost me 6 points or more (poor verification strategy - point
> noted). So I was flustered and rushed leaving as I didn't fix the
> problem, and so this made me feel I hadn't done very well.
>
> My reconstructed score ended up being 75%, which was obviously
> disappointing, and I couldn't help but think that if I'd had a little
> more time afforded by an English-speaking setup, things may have swung
> for me enough. However this is likely just me clutching for excuses,
> and probably because I felt I otherwise had a pretty good handle on the
> test. Having said that, I still lost too many marks on things I should
> have either known better or verified better. And this is the stuff that
>
> ultimately needed to be more up-to-scratch.
>
> So, back on the horse, and looking forward to wreaking some havoc in my
> next attempt, which will be in Sydney.
>
> Cheers, Mark.
>
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