Doug’s Ramblings

Islay Rugby

Well finally, after a lot of hassle and changes, Tess and I managed to get over to Islay for their beach rugby tournament…

What a great day out!

It’s essentially 5-a-side, with rolling subs, so I expected a sevens style of play - fairly stand-offish and brief moments of excitement.

oh no! It’s full contact and only 4 minutes each way, so it’s fairly brutal.

Apparently the winners were Lagavulin, but no-one’s quite sure where the team actually came from

And of course there was the party after…

relaxing weekend?  hardly.

Many, many thanks to Ian and Caroline for puting us up ( or should that be putting up with us ) over the weekend… hope we can return the favor later in the year.

more photos from the weekend here.

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links for 2008-05-29

• “It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don;t know too much about the problem”
  - Malcolm Forbes
  (tags: quotes)

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links for 2008-05-27

• Islay ICT: InkSeine
  Looks like a great application for Tablets - and a pretty good endorsement from someone whp’s using Tablets day in and day out.

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CCIE Voice - The Lab!

Well, I’ve actually gone and booked the lab - pretty much for the first date that was available ( well, unless I wanted to be sitting it in the next week or so… no thanks.

16th January 2009 it is then!

I know there have been a few blog posts bemoaning Cisco’s practice of not billing for the exam until 28 days before the actual date, thereby allowing people to speculatively book up dates they have no intention of using. However I genuinely thnik that this is a reasonable time to sit the lab - my current work projects should have tailled off by then and I reckon a couple of weeks of solid work after Christmas should work well - and then there’s the likely ski holiday shortly afterwards to look forward to.

Photo from jaredb

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CCIE Written = Passed!!!

well, that’s the easy bit over and done with! :-0

77/100 - At first I saw this on the screen and went “oh no” as I had assumed that the written pass mark was the same as the lab - i.e. 80% but then I saw the “CONGRATULATIONS!” in (large-ish) black text on the screen…

oh well, goes to prove that assumptions make an ASS out of U and ME … (sorry)

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links for 2008-05-22

• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market

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links for 2008-05-21

• TED | Talks | Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind (video)
  Must remember and come back and watch this on a machine that can view flash videos…

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Vmware

is an incredibly useful tool for CCIE - with demo licenses of software, you can have a full Voice over IP implementation running on a single server…

However, I have noticed that the time-sync between the host server and the virtual server doesn’t work “out of the box”.

“so the clock drifts… so what” might be your first response, until you think about the fact that some of these virtual servers have to playout voice messages and that frames should be generated every 20ms or so… suddenly “your call cannot be completed as dialled” is unintelligible…

The solution… well, I’ve tried a few - host.cpukHz, host.noTSC etc as advised by vmware’s knowledgebase… all to no avail…

so now, it’s yet another vmware doc … let’s hope that works

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Update and tips…

Well, for anyone expecting a celebratory or despairing post - tough!

The testing centre I was going to use apparently lost their testing administrator on Friday ( kinda careless if you ask me ) and I got a call from Prometric on Monday afternoon offering to re-schedule my exam… At least I wasn’t one of the poor sods that turned up on the Monday morning to be told that they couldn’t sit their exams…

So Friday it is, in Glenrothes of all places…

Now for the tip - anyone needing a free, easy to use ( no cygwin, no installer etc ) SFTP client ( perhaps you need to get some CDR records off of a CCM or something ) for windows should take a look here:
http://www.coreftp.com/server/

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CCIE Voice Written resources

Just thought I’d put together a list of some of the resources I’ve been using in studying for the CCIE Voice Written exam…

Books:

• Cisco Voice Gateways and Gatekeepers
  Cisco Press, ISBN: 1-58705-258-X
• Cisco Qos
  Cisco Press, ISBN: 1-58720-124-0
• Cisco IP Communications Express
  Cisco Press, ISBN: 1-58705-180-X
• Cisco Unity Deployment and Solutions Guide
  Cisco Press, ISBN: 1-58705-118-4
• Troubleshooting IP Telephony
  Cisco Press, ISBN: 1-58705-075-7
• CCIE Voice Exam Quick Reference Sheets
  Cisco Press, ISBN: 1-58705-333-0
  Available as a download purchase only from Cisco Press website

Sites:

• IP Expert Free vLectures
• Cisco SRNDs

I’ll let you know on Tuesday whether this, a CCVP and 7 years playing with this stuff ( since CCM 3.1 for those interested ) is sufficient

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