While the IT gods were hammering me this week, they were shining brightly on Arden Packeer (actually no supernatural assistance was needed, Arden was more than prepared for the lab). Arden became CCIE #20716. He has posted his story so surf on over and show him some love.
Congratulations Arden!!!
Ethan and Arden both went one and done on the lab. Thanks for raising the expectation bar you guys. :-p
I must have angered the IT gods this week. On Sunday the drive on my work laptop fried. I very rarely use a docking station, but my laptop does not have a DB15 connector so I’ve been using a USB converter to connect to my lab stack. The USB converter died, so I pulled out my docking station and used it because it does have a DB15 connector. As I was wrapping up on Sunday, I popped the laptop out of the docking station and my laptop rebooted. Then it came up with a blue screen telling my my PsMain.db is corrupt. Oh joy. It may still be salvageable as the error I’m getting is from my disk encryption software. My dilemma is that if I give it to our desktop support staff, they are very likely to just re-image the entire drive. Of course, I have a ton of CCIE notes and configurations on that box that I never bothered to back up (I know – I’m an idiot). That’s a tough lesson to learn. 
On Monday I got a new boss. This guy is like antimatter to me. I took Tuesday – Thursday off to cool down and concentrate on my studies. The CCIE is looking SO much more like a nescessity to me right now. My chances of staying with my current company after getting my CCIE just dropped from 90% to about 10% if I have to work for this jackass.
I planned to really knuckle down on multicast (one of my big weaknesses). I even bought some rack rental credits with IE and planned to get some labbing done. I made a couple of blog posts and then did some yard work before the expected thunderstorm rolled in. The rain hit and I went inside to start my studies only to find that my cable Internet connection was down. I called the vendor and they told me that they would send a tech out on Thursday. He just left my house. The problem was a bent pin in the pedestal.
Two full days without Internet access – what a horror. I am officially addicted to the Internet. I didn’t even realize how much I used it. What’s the temperature? I’ll just hit weather.com. Who’s winning the Democratic primaries? Off to CNN.com. Did Edith Piaf really have an affair with a Moroccan boxer who died in a plane crash (the down time let me catch up on some movies like ‘La Vie En Rose’)? Off to wikipedia.com.
I’ve decided to finally capitulate and get a cell phone with a dataplan and Internet access. Up until this point I have purposely only used cell phones with no bells and whistles. My phone does voice and is text-capable. After being separated from the life-giving teat of the Internet for 48 hours, I am finally seeing the need for another method of web access.
I have learned my lesson. NEVER dis AT&T in a blog post. 
Within a few hours they somehow managed to knock me off the web.
Anyhoo…I’ll start posting the question of the day again tomorrow. I apologize for the backlog of comments, I’ll jump on those ASAP. Then it’s time to get cracking on multicast.
