Status Update: 27 January – 03 February

It had to happen sometime, but this weekend I completely dropped the ball on my studies.  I started the week out strong with some rare mid-week rack time, but ended up only getting about 4 hours on the rack over the weekend.  I really couldn’t get started on Saturday.  Between ennui and getting sucked into issues at work (work was really hectic last week) I only managed 4 hours on the rack.  I vowed to make up the time on Sunday.

I went out Saturday night to get together with a couple of friends that I haven’t seen in years.  My Google calendar had this event running from 6 pm – 8 pm.  Eat, shoot the shit, and get back home.  Enter the $3 margarita.  Needless to say, the night stretched way into Sunday morning.  Sunday my head was absolute mush.  I attempted to do some labbing, but could never get started.  I gave up and watched the Super Bowl.

Here are my goals from last week: 

Finish Volume II lab 6.  Redo Volume III lab 1.  Do the Volume I BGP labs.

I finished Volume II lab 6.  That’s all I finished.  This was a very good lab.  It was the first difficulty level 7 lab (equivalent to the difficulty of the actual lab) I have attempted.  It was a tough lab, but very fair.  I am still messing up enough that I have no chance of passing, but I’m not hitting much that I don’t know how to configure.

This Wednesday I have a day off from work.  I have rented some rack time and will attempt Volume I lab 1 as a mock lab.  I will simulate the lab enviroment by doing the lab from beginning to end without any resources except the DOC in an 8.5 (30 minutes for lunch) block.  Although this is the easiest of the Volume II labs (difficulty rating of 5) it will at least give me some idea of where I’m at time-management wise.  It will also be the first lab that I have attempted where I will not be verifying my solutions at the end of each section.  So an early mistake will probably go unnoticed.  I will not be blogging the lab with the detail that I have for the other labs.  I will eventually redo this lab and blog about it at that time.

I am also going to commit more time to reading.  I started rereading the OSPF chapter(s) in Routing TCP/IP again.  This is probably my third time through this material, but I am finding that I still pick up new bits each time as well as fortifying the stuff that I already know.

Goals for this week:  Do Volume II lab 1.  Read OSPF chapter in Routing TCP/IP.  Redo Volume III lab 1.

Days Until Lab:	117
Readiness (1 to 10):	2
Lab Hours This Week	10
Study Hours This Week (estimate):	3