A Quick Update

Reviewing my progress today over the last week of study.

I haven't really been getting to any technical stuff yet, so my posting has been light.  I'm a little bit behind and am planning to schedule some evening work to catch up.  By my progress-o-meter, I should be on page 72 and I'm on page 42 (hmm...I didn't think I had fallen that far off the mark already!).

I'll spare the excuses and come up with a schedule.  A big part of my difficulty is that I need to wake up pretty early to get the full amount of time to study.  I've been kept awake late pretty much every night and the alarm clock isn't getting me motivated to crawl out of bed.  So, issue #1 is that I need more sleep, and this needs to take precedence over everything else.

Issue #2 is that I have a large number of projects that I'm trying to complete, both at home and work.  At home I'm trying to get the house put back together before winter and at work we're busier than ever with fiscal year-end (that magical time of year when sales people realize they may not make quota).

Could use a few more hours in the day, but mostly I need to make this a priority and execute on the plan.

A Slight Change in Program

Due to some recent initiatives at work, I'll be putting the CCNP on hold temporarily while I concentrate on adding the Voice option for my CCNA.  This will be to support several installations of Cisco Voice and add to the team within our Managed IT offering, and it will renew my CCNA as a side benefit.


I am awaiting the Cisco UC500 demo kit to arrive in our St Cloud office so that I can set up some equipment and have a lab to work in.  I haven't seen what's included yet, so I'll update the equipment list once it arrives.   I'm studying out of Cisco Press' Official Certification Guide for exam 640-461 and will likely supplement with real-world support calls from our existing customers.  I also have a pretty deep bull-pen at work with some experienced voice professionals who have been installing and supporting Cisco Voice for some time.  As per usual, I'll post updates about what I'm learning and doing here, mostly as a review for myself - but if someone else can benefit, all the better.


I'm pretty excited to begin.  It's good to have a direction and a plan.  My schedule is:

• Study 5 days/week - 1 hour each day
• Complete the study guide by Nov 11
• Review for a week between 11/13-17.
• Test date will be November 17, 2011.

So let it be written, so let it be done.