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Studying in style, back in the USA

May 10, 2012 in CCIE studies

Home study setup (click for full size)

I’ve been back in the US for a little more than a month and continuing on my CCIE studies.  My four months in Thailand were great, but I still need a few more months of solid practice and studying to be fully ready for the CCIE lab.  One of the questions people often ask is how do I actually study?  Above is a picture of my computer set up at home.  The components and where I purchased them are listed below

1.

  • Sheet music stand from Guitar Center
  • New Apple iPad running iBooks and viewing the Internetwork Experts Workbook Volume 1 Solutions
  • Sketch book with topology drawings – you can buy these at any stationary or art store

2.

3.

  • Core i7 Lenovo laptop upgraded to 8GB RAM – GNS3 with RelativityDrive’s configs, Remote Desktop Manager running the consoles
  • Zalman NC1000 laptop cooler – The Core i7 runs a bit hot with everything running in GNS3, so a laptop cooler is a nice thing to have

Since I study several hours a day, it’s very important to maintain good posture and health.  I stand up while studying and the laptop and monitor are set on top of wooden cubes and  a table to keep everything at eye level.  I stand on a Costco anti-fatigue mat.

 

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So long IOU… welcome back GNS3

March 12, 2012 in CCIE studies

This is going to be a LONG blog post about running ANY GNS3 .NET file without crashing.  If you are having trouble getting GNS3 to work on your computer, this post is for you!

I’m still in Thailand and no the M-150 energy drinks haven’t killed me. After three months of studying with IOU, I’ve gone back to GNS3. IOU is a great tool, but it needs a bit of refinement before it can be used as a full-time study tool. I’ve hacked around with Asasel’s IOU, changing configs, MAC addresses, netmap files and rewritten scripts, but the dreaded “excessive collision” problem keeps popping up. When IOU works, it works great… but the problem is that it doesn’t work all the time.

Recently an updated Solaris version of IOU has been leaked and it apparently solves most of the current problems. When I get back to the United States, I’ll be purchasing a cheapo Sun Blade system to test it out. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of these systems and they are going for a few hundreds dollars. The downside is that many of these units come with only 1 GB of RAM and accept only ECC (expensive) memory.

There is a particular forum that talks about IOU and many people complain that it’s a wasted effort playing around with the Linux version. How absolutely wrong these people are! After going through most of INE’s Workbook 1 with Asasel’s IOU I can honestly say the problems that crop up have increased my troubleshooting skills. One minute my topology and routing protocols are working and the next minute half of my network has dropped off the face of the Earth. In no particular order, my troubleshooting steps have been

  1. Do I have a VLAN spanned all the way?
  2. Am I pruning/allowing that vlan?
  3. Are interfaces down? Are the IPs correct?
  4. Do I see an mac-address/ip pair in the arp table?
  5. Trace the IP.. how far does it get?

You do those steps enough times, they become etched into your neurons. I’m quite happy to have found IOU and played around with it. It was time well spent, but I’m back with an old friend now.

GNS3 topology for INE Workbook 1

I’ve used GNS3 for several years in teaching Cisco courses and running my Southern California Cisco Router Gods Meetup Group. It’s a great utility, but many people still have problems running. Specifically, many people have tried integrating GNS3 to run their Internetwork Expert Workbook 1 and 2 labs without success. Thankfully, people like “RelativityDrive” have done most of the dirty work by adapting the configs and topology to closely match the workbooks. There are still several settings you need to modify to get these topologies and configs to work on your system, but at least 95% of the work has already been done.

Of course I’m going to show you how to do this… but first let us go through some background info. INE has four workbooks for CCIE Routing and Switching

  • Workbook Volume I – Technology specific labs
  • Workbook Volume II – Full labs to make you cry
  • Workbook Volume III – “Speed labs” – topic specific to increase your speed and accuracy of core topics
  • Workbook Volume IV – Troubleshooting

Volume II has two versions. One version is designed to work on regular gear while the other version is specifically made for Dynamips/GNS3. INE even gives you the .NET file along with all the starting configs for Dynamips/GNS3 verson of Volume II. There is no official INE GNS3 .NET file/configs for Volume I, but RelativityDrive has created them and you can download them from his INE Forum profile here.

I’ve modified RelativityDrive’s configs and .NET in the following ways

  • Created a “0-base” folder to store the base configurations
  • Cleaned up the folder names a bit – mainly shortening everything and getting rid of spaces
  • Lowered cased all file and folder names
  • Modified the .net file in the following ways (you will also need to modify the .NET file to match the settings on your system)
    • Changed the working directory to point to my “G:” drive which is my RamDisk
    • Changed image path to point to my 3725 file
    • Changed the RAM allocation.. 256 MB for the BB routers and 128 MB for everything else. When you get into the NAT and heavy duty stuff, you can up the memory on the regular routers to 192 or more.
    • Changed the idlepc to match my preferred idlepc value. If you don’t know how to find your idlepc value, watch this video.

NOTE – there are two hypervisors in RelativityDrive’s .NET file, so you will have to do the above four changes twice.
change cnfg = to whereever you put your configs

Memory allocation – common cause of GNS3 crashes

You have downloaded a brand spanking new .NET file and modified it according to my instructions above, you click the green play button and the darn thing crashes on the second to last router. You close up GNS3, clear our your temp folder and try again, but it crashes in the same spot. Welcome to the ugly problem of memory starvation.

The three types of questions you should ask yourself when running GNS3 are

  1. How much memory does your computer have?
  2. How much memory are you allocating your hypervisors?
  3. How much memory are you allocating your routers?

If you are running GNS3 inside of Windows, you should have 4GB of RAM. Memory is cheap these days and if you have the cash, upgrade your computer to 8GB. Linux users luck out on this one as GNS3 runs beautifully, even with a 15+ router topology, on 3-4 GB of RAM.

Allocating memory to the hypervisor

The GNS3 hypervisor is the virtual machine running all of your routers/devices.  If you don’t allocate enough memory to your hypervisors, things may get sluggish.  Thankfully, the default value of 512MB is OK for most people, but you may want to change it to a higher value to see if you get better performance.

You can configure a default amount of memory to the hypervisor by going into the GNS3 menu – edit/preferences/dynamip/hypervisor manager tab (shown above) and upping the memory.

Changing the ram under the hypervisor text in a .NET file does NOT alter how much RAM is given to the hypervisor

One tricky thing about a GNS3 .NET file is that changing the ram amount under the hypervisor text does NOT change the memory for the hypervisor itself.  This changes just the default memory given to the routers under the hypervisor.  This amount can then be superseded by ram values under the router configurations themselves.  TRICKY!

Memory misconfiguration causes this !!!

The most common cause of crashes (like the one you see above) is giving your routers TOO MUCH memory.  Yes, you saw that right… in most .NET files you see a “ram = XXX” line under each router.  If you are experiencing crashes, change this number to 128 MB for every device.  Your crashes should disappear.  As you get into more complicated labs, you’ll need to up the memory to 192 or 256 to handle all the wonderful BGP stuff.  Personally, I set my BB routers to 256 and everything else to 128.

Loading in router and switch configs

As I stated earlier, RelativityDrive has modified the official INE configs to work with his GNS3 topology.  He has even populated them into a neatly organized folder system.  All I did was clean up the file and folder names just a bit.

Cleaned up config folder names

I prefer to load in the configs by editing the .NET file and changing the “cnfg =” path to point to your appropriate lab.  In the below example, I used my favorite text editor, notepad++, to find/replace the “6-initialospf” config folder with the “3-rip” folder.

Use your favorite text editor to find/replace the config folder names

After changing the .NET file, open up GNS3 and select “Open a project” button on the first pop-up window.  After selecting the .NET file, the configs will automatically load.

GNS3 Click "Open a project" and find your .NET file

Configuring your layer 2

After starting up your topology and consoling into all your devices, you’ll need to configure your layer 2 VLANs.  Of course you can’t completely practice your layer 2 switching stuff in GNS3, but you can easily set up all the VLANs for all the labs past layer 2.  Each switch in the topology has a 16-port Ethernet switch module installed and you add the vlans with the vlan database function.  Just paste the following into each switch.

enable
vlan database
vlan 5
vlan 7
vlan 8
vlan 9
vlan 10
vlan 22
vlan 43
vlan 58
vlan 67
vlan 79
vlan 146
exit

Pasting in your VLAN info into each switch

You should see your VLAN interfaces come up and you can verify the VLANs by typing “show vlan-switch”

Verifying VLAN info

Recommendations

HIGHLY recommended that you use the 3725 image, don’t ask me where to find this… if you use any other image, you’ll need to change the names in the .NET file. In addition, the other images are not as stable.

Buy the best computer laptop you can afford. This means a multicore processor (splurge for the Core i7 if you have money) and at least 4 GB of RAM. Upgrade to 8 GB to be on the safe side because RAM is cheap. To fully take advantage of the extra RAM, you’ll need to run a 64-bit operating system.

If you don’t have money to buy a souped up computer, install Ubuntu Linux. INE’s topology will run fine on a Linux machine with 3-4 GB of RAM and a single core processor. Another alternative is the awesome GNS3 Workbench (link here) which is a live Linux CD that you can also pop on a USB stick.

Dataram RAMdisk makes your GNS3 run FAST!

If you are running more than 4GB of RAM, I highly recommend you use a ramdisk program and make a drive/folder as your temp/working folder.  You can download a free version that will handle up to a 4GB ramdrive from Dataram.  I devote 1500 MB to my ramdrive.

The $14.99 version can handle more than 4GB of RAM for the lucky people with crazy Core i7 setups with 16/24/32 GB of RAM!

Video Links

To make things a little easier, I’ve made a YouTube screencap video that explains the steps in editing the .NET files.  As a bonus, I’ve also made a video clip that shows you how to configure Remote Desktop Manager.

 DOWNLOADS

Of course I didn’t leaving you hanging!!! Here is the download link to my modified RelativityDrive INE Workbook 1 .NET and configs.  For the physical and layer 3 topology diagram, you can make that yourself by booting up all the devices and “show cdp neighbors”.  If you’re going for CCIE, you should be able to make your own diagram, but I’ve included a picture of my drawing to help you out.

RelativityDrive physical/layer3 topology diagram

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Study tip – Active Recall

February 16, 2012 in CCIE studies

Have you ever read a chapter in a book and wondered, “What the hell did I just read?” Reading mountains of books and PDFs is a must for any CCIE candidate, but can we improve on the typical reading experience? For the past few weeks I’ve added a new study techniques which I call, “Active Recall”… and it seems to work very well.

Ok, so let us break down the typical reading session for most people.

1. Open book to a chapter
2. Read a couple pages
3. Re-read those same pages because you didn’t remember jack squat.

The problem is two fold.. your reading is completely passive and you weren’t focused/relaxed to begin with. Most people begin their reading sessions with thoughts swimming through their heads – everything from marital/financial troubles to work difficulties. It’s difficult to remember anything when you’re stressing out about life!

Let’s address the passive reading part. We’ve been taught that reading is sitting back, propping up a book and looking at words. When we stop reading, we’re expected to remember stuff. This is a pretty lazy way approach that can be improved.

Before you start reading, you have to relax. I use the following technique.

1. Close your eyes
2. Look up about 30 – 40 degrees
3. Imagine balancing an orange on the back of your head
4. Breathe deeply through your nose using your stomach
5. Exhale slowly through your mouth, while thinking to yourself, “Relax”
6. As you think relax, imagine a wave of relaxation flowing down from the top of your head down to your shoulders and back
7. Repeat the breathing cycle and you’ll find that everything starts getting quiet and your breathing will slow down

Now you’re almost ready to begin… grab the book/Kindle/ipad and before you actually start flipping pages, ask yourself these questions.

1. What do I want to learn from this?
2. What don’t I know about the subject?
3. In what ways will this reading help with my work/test/etc?

Start reading and stop every ten pages or so and try to recall something… at first, you might not remember anything, but with practice you’ll start remembering stuff. I do this silently, but others like to write things down or say stuff out loud.

At the end of the reading session, do the same recall attempt for the entire session. To end the day, try to recall as much as you can from all the day’s reading sessions.

Happy Studying!!

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M-150 gives you MEGA POWER !!

February 14, 2012 in CCIE studies

Enough M-150 to kill you!!

It’s 6:40 AM here in Thailand and I haven’t slept yet. In fact, I just came back from a jog and before that I labbed for approximately six hours. Where am I getting my limitless energy? Am I inhuman? No. Do I do drugs? Hell No. My secret is a small and insanely cheap energy drink called M-150. Purchased for 10 baht or about 33 cents, these small caramel-colored bottles of human rocket fuel are the most popular energy drink in Thailand. And boy do they work !

My previous experiences with M-150 didn’t fare well. I had a slight energy boost for a couple hours, but then petered out quickly. Perhaps there was a trick to drinking these things for the best effect, so I asked the most logical people…. motorcycle taxi drivers.

Yes, those colorful vest wearing guys clapping their hands every time you step out of your hotel or onto the street. Yelling, “Motorsai taxi!!!” they can get annoying, but they are an essential part of Thai culture. They will whisk you through traffic jams – often on the wrong side of the road and on sidewalks – for a pittance. Staying awake is essential for these guys because you can’t get customers if you’re dozing off on your motorcycle.

A single motorcycle taxi guy is always parked outside my condo waiting for customers and I’ve used him a couple times to get to the large Tesco Lotus store in Jomtien. So one day I bought two bottles and offered one to him. I told him that I tried drinking one, but it didn’t work. He gave me three nuggets of info.

1. Eat some bread while you drink the M-150
2. Drink some water after finishing the energy drink
3. Most important, you must drink this BEFORE you are tired.

Freakin genius, so last night I bought a 12 baht croissant and 15 baht strawberry yogurt from 7-11 and gave M-150 another try. I slowly drank the syrupy liquid while chomping away on the croissant at 10:30 PM. When I was finished, I followed it up with the yogurt and drank a lot of water.

Worked like a charm. I labbed up the QOS part of INE’s Workbook 1 for several hours and at 5:30 AM took a jog. I started this blog post at 6:40 AM and now it’s 7 and I’m still WIDE awake.

I’ll probably pay for this dearly tomorrow.

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Labbing up Cisco switches at PacketLife’s free lab

February 7, 2012 in CCIE studies

You’ve heard it again and again that GNS3 and IOU can’t perfectly emulate Cisco switches. Let’s be honest here, GNS3 sucks for switch practice. IOU is much better, but still cannot run many of the commands necessary for people gunning for their CCIE R&S.

So what is an aspiring CCIE supposed to do? You could plunk down serious money for a home switch lab, something which I did by buying four Cisco 3550s off of eBay. Or you could go with rack rentals which run for approx $4-$5 per hour. If you’re really desperate, you could exchange some janitorial work at your local Cisco Academy or Learning Partner in return for rack time :) Hey stranger things have happened, trust me!

As I start my third month of studying for my CCIE R&S here in Thailand, IOU, so far, has been darn near perfect with Layer 3 tasks. All I need is some 3560 time and a rack rental seems like overkill. Let’s face it, I don’t need a massive rack of 8-10 devices when I just need to work on one or two switches. Also, I want to save my INE/Graded Labs tokens for my serious Workbook II/Workbook II practice in the coming months.

Well, Jeremy Stretch of PacketLife.net fame has been running his FREE (BOLD FREAKIN LETTERS FREE) Cisco lab for a while now and I finished a two hour session earlier today while stuffing my face with a chocolate croissant and hot Spearmint green tea at the Starbucks in Pattaya Thailand. If you’ve been in networking for any amount of time, you’ve probably stumbled upon Jeremy’s site and downloaded a couple of his famous Cheat Sheets…. heck they helped me out when I was studying for my CCNA and CCNP recert. I think his free lab is a real service for anyone going for their Cisco certs and I completely recommend giving it a try.

Signing up for lab session took just a few minutes. First you have to sign up for a username and password and then you just look at the nicely laid out schedule for an open spot. Jeremy runs one big lab that is split up into different blocks of gear. I signed up for my February 7th session back on January 30th and the normal lead time seems to be about one to two weeks in advance. To keep things fair, people can only reserve one spot at a time.

After scheduling your session, you are given a web page with all the necessary login information. A confirmation email with the same info is also sent. What’s also nice is a reminder email that is sent one hour before your session is scheduled to start.

PacketLife Lab Confirmation email

I scheduled my session on the Block A set of gear which included one 3550 and one 3560. I set up my Putty sessions beforehand to save me some time. I also set up Remote Desktop Manager to auto start the four devices that I were most interested in (two routers and the two switches). My goal of today’s session wasn’t to do anything heavy, it was just getting used to the lab/syntax and rattling out some cobwebs with private vlans and port security. In future sessions I adapt INE’s Workbook I exercises to work with Jeremy’s lab.

Users of the lab are instructed to do a ‘wr erase’ at the end of their session, but apparently the user before me forgot to do that. No big deal because I nuked the gear quickly (don’t have to tell you how many times I had to do this at Ascolta!) Even though there is a topology page on packetlife.net, I treated this session as a completely unknown network and made my own diagram with MS Paint, turning on all the interfaces and lots of ‘show cdp neighbor commands’. You should do this too on your first session because it’s good practice.

Even though I had the session for two hours, I only used a little more than an hour poking around. So you should really think about booking time for anything more than 2-3 hours. Chances are you won’t use that time and you should play fair with everyone else who wants to reserve a spot.

Here are some suggestions if you use the free lab at PacketLife

  • Read the lab documentation and FAQ thoroughly before starting your lab (RTFM)
  • Take the login info contained in your confirmation email and make your Puttpy/Remote Desktop Manager sessions before your session – this will save you 5-10 minutes
  • Only reserve one or two hours on your first session… take it easy and just play around
  • Check the running config on all your devices before doing anything…. the guy/gal before you might have forgotten to do a ‘wr erase’
  • Make your own topology diagram with the information from ‘show cdp neighbors’
  • The night before review some Workbook tasks that you want to cover during your lab session

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Editing configurations in Asasel’s IOU 4.3 – Video included

January 27, 2012 in CCIE studies

For those of you playing around with Asasel’s IOU, you may have notice some quirks while labbing up INE’s Workbook I. In the past month and a half, I’ve been using IOU exclusively for my CCIE practice and have been keeping a running list of problems and fixes for each workbook task. Usually the problems aren’t related to IOU itself, but the starting router/switch configurations for the section.

For example, in the BGP tasks, you probably noticed that the BB1 and BB3 routers aren’t advertising their routes into AS100. This is because the BGP and prefix list configurations on those routers are incorrect. More specifically, some interface commands have interspaced themselves in the BGP/Prefix commands. This interspacing of commands breaks the CLI out of BGP mode and any BGP commands that come afterwards won’t be pasted into the router.

You can see from the screenshot below that BB1′s config is jacked up from the interface commands. All those wonderful network commands won’t work.

Delete those pesky interface command lines

Ok, so how do you fix this? It’s pretty easy and I’ve posted up a YouTube video about the process.

The basic steps are

  1. Break out of the IOU menu by typing q
  2. Change directory to the IEWB configs
  3. Use vi to edit the particular router’s text file
  4. Delete the offending interface commands
  5. Add “no service config” to the configuration to prevent it from tftping 255.255.255.255
  6. After you have modified everything, go back to your starting directory and type “menu”
  7. Snapshot the VMWare so you don’t have to do this everytime you boot up IOU

While you are fixing the BGP configs, you could also change the backbone configs so that you can go into them

  • kill the enable secret password and set the password to cisco
  • kill the alias commands that would cause you to exit

If the above sounds too tough for you… man up and learn some Linux.

 

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Cranking up my studies

January 23, 2012 in CCIE studies

I have been in Thailand for approximately one and a half months studying for my CCIE exam and I’m cranking up the pace of my studying. Previously, I had been labbing two to three times a day with Internetwork Expert’s Workbook I, but I’ve now upped that to four daily sessions. Also, through trial and error, I’ve discovered an effective method to space out the topics.

The old method was studying the same topic (let’s say Frame-Relay) for several days straight. Afterwards, I would switch to another topic for several days. While this definitely boosted my confidence and abilities in the said technology, there were two problems.

  1. The stuff gets boring quick.
  2. There is a danger in becoming too comfortable with a technology. Basically, I was getting a false sense of security because I had basically memorized the commands of the workbook.

The solution was pretty simple. I now vary the labbing sessions with current, old and new material like so.

  • 1st session of the day – Lab an older topic that I learned earlier in the week
  • 2nd session of the day – Lab a current topic
  • 3rd session of the day – Lab a completely new section of the workbook (something that scares me)
  • 4rd session of the day – Lab a current topic (til failure)

Here’s an example of how it works. Currently, I’m labbing BGP in INE’s Workbook I. The study sessions would look like this.

  • 1st – Lab OSPF
  • 2nd – Lab BGP
  • 3rd – Lab Multicast because it’s scary :)
  • 4th – Lab BGP til I drop

The first three lab sessions are approx 1 1/2 to 3 hours while the last one goes until I conk out. This gets me used to doing configurations while tired – something I’ll have to do during my actual lab day.

Before starting each labbing session, I’ll prepare by

  • Reviewing the corresponding Ruhann’s Notes section
  • Watching 1-2 INE ATC videos on the corresponding topic

The labbing of old material helps review and solidify the knowledge. Studies have shown that you forget a big percentage of material in one week, so you have to keep refreshing the stuff until it sinks into your long term memory. Hitting the new/scary material keeps my motivation up by giving me that “zing” of learning something new and realizing that scary stuff isn’t so scary.

My next blog post will be a Frequently Asked Questions of all the emails/requests I’ve received. Thanks for reading!

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BGP in Boracay

January 14, 2012 in CCIE studies

Starbucks Boracay Beach

Just 40 meters away, crystal-clear ocean waves glide over smooth white sand. White-hulled boats with bright-blue sails criss-cross the bay while children slowly sculpt intricate sand castles for pocket change. It’s 5PM and the sun is slowly setting in Boracay Beach in the Philipines, the light breeze goes well with my hot chocolate as I fire up my IOU for another round of CCIE labbing.

Studying BGP at Boracay Beach Starbucks

After conquering frame-relay, RIP, EIGRP AND OSPF in Internetwork Expert’s Workbook I, I’m now starting the MASSIVE BGP section. To celebrate, I’ve traded my digs in Jomtien Thailand for Boracay Beach Philippines ! Ok, so I’m actually here for my cousin’s wedding on the 17th, but since I have some free time I might as well mix in some labbing.

I’m here at a beach-side Starbucks with plenty of seating, power plugs and most important of all, free Internet. From the second floor, I have a great view of the beach, tourists and boats. It’s hard to believe that just one month ago I was toiling away at my job in Southern California.

Boracay Beach Sunset

So what’s so great about Boracay Beach? Quite simply, this is probably one of the best beaches in the world. White sand, clear light blue water and awesome weather. Littering and smoking on the beach is not only outlawed, but it is strictly enforced. The sand is also regularly combed to remove trash and big rocks. The result? Walking on this beach is one of the things you MUST put on your “bucket list”.

The beach and island itself has a mix of tourists.. I’m seeing a fair amount of Koreans, Chinese and Russians with a smattering of Aussies and Americans. Not too many Brits for some reason. Almost every worker here from the highest managers to the lowly security guard (and there are TONS OF GUARDS here, they all have guns) speak perfect English. Heck, their English is probably better most peoples’ English in the United States.

Chicken Adabo at Lazy Dog Bed and Breakfast

Food is plentiful and cheap with most meals costing around $4-$5 which for a beach resort is pretty insanely cheap. Portions are huge and you have a good portion of meat, rice and some type of tropical fruit like mangoes, coconut, etc.

Accommodations

I’m staying at the Lazy Dog Bed and Breakfast which only costs $60/day. So far it’s been a great stay. The room is pretty basic concrete block, but it has a nice bed and bathroom. The place is less than a 30-second walk to the beach and has a great staff.

Boracay Beach outside Lazy Dog

As you can guess by the name, there are also a couple friendly dogs roaming around. One is getting kinda shaggy, but the other one is nicely groomed.

Cost Breakdown

$600 – RT trip flight from Bangkok to Manila with transfer to Caticlan Airport (Boracay)
$15 – escorted transfer to/from hotel from the airport
$4-$5 – meals
$60/day – lodging at the Lazy Dog Bed and Breakfast

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View Talay 2A condo review

January 8, 2012 in CCIE studies

This is my last night at my current condo unit on the second floor of View Talay 2A in Jomtien Thailand. The place has been great, but unfortunately I was only able to book this room for one month as another tenant is coming in next week. All in all, the condo has been a great value. Cost breakdown below

Condo rented through dancewatchers.com (their office is on the ground floor of View Talay 2A)

  • 15,000 baht rent for the month
  • 4,000 baht for maid service (was good, but in retrospect probably didn’t need it)
  • 650 electric – barely used the aircon because it was a bit cool in december
  • 200 water
Total – 19850 baht for one month – December 8 to January 8

6000 deposit – got 1150 baht back after maid, electric and water was deducted

Pluses in no particular order

  • Room safe
  • Location – couple minutes away from Jomtien beach and the condo was right on the main road to Pattaya (baht buses run right outside)
  • Friendly security guards
  • A guard cat – friendly cat that hangs out by the front gate guard
  • Pool – looked nice, but never used it
  • Tons of facilities on the ground floor, condo/apartment rental brokers, laundry, restaurants, market

Minuses

  • No real minuses for the condo building itself
  • Specific to room – don’t leave any food lying around !!! There are mites and ants roaming about… probably because of the numerous restaurants on the ground floor.
  • Minor minus, 2nd floor view is mostly obscured by trees. However, the slight rustling sound during a breeze is quite nice.
  • Balcony slightly cramped
  • Hallways echo.. a lot
  • Walls are slightly thin, I couldn’t do podcast/YouTube videos for fear of disturbing neighbors

View Talay 2A Room 75

View Talay 2A Room 75

View Talay 2A Room 75 room safe

View Talay 2A Room 75 Closet

View Talay 2A Room 75 Balcony

 

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Happy New Year and a progress report

January 1, 2012 in CCIE studies

Late night snack from 7-11, M-150 Energy Drink and croissant

Happy New Year everyone!!!!!

It’s January 1st 2012 and I’m getting into my third hour of labbing at 11PM.  For some reason, studying and labbing make me ravenously hungry and I usually need to grab a snack midway through.  Eating in Thailand is insanely easy because 7-11s, street food vendors and restaurants are always nearby and open.  M-150 is basically the energy drink from hell (Thailand is the country that invented Red Bull) and I ate a croissant so the M-150 wouldn’t gouge a hole in my tummy.  The drink and croissant cost 22 baht total or around 70 cents.

Sunday is my day of rest and I usually don’t lab, but I felt guilty not labbing yesterday.  So far, I’m putting in approximately 6 hours of labbing a day.  My original schedule was the following

Fours months in Thailand from December 8 2011 to April 5 2012

  • First month – complete INE’s Workbook 1
  • Second and third months – complete INE Workbook 2
  • Fourth month – Take written again (I passed before, but it expired), run through the workbooks as a refresher and mock labs

I’m in the EIGRP section of Workbook 1, so I’m about a week behind schedule.  This kinda makes sense because my first week here was a bit slow.  I was getting acclimated both mentally and physically, plus there were some kinks with Asasel’s IOU I had to work out.  I can probably add a few more hours of labbing each day this week to catch up, but I’m not too concerned.

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