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iman jalali, director of sales and support at trainsignal, was nice enough to send me a free copy of their ccnp video course.

the ccnp certification training package, according to the website, contains over 50 hours of training for the bsci, bcmsn, ont, and iscw exams for the ccnp certification.

the videos are led by chris bryant, ccie, who never misses an opportunity to try to get you to visit his own website (link intentionally missing), where he sells his own training products as well. i don’t particular care for him, but i’ll try not to let that bias my opinion of trainsignal’s course as a whole. i hope to “review” it here soon.

while there’s a plethora of labs to work through if you’re preparing for cisco’s ccie examination, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot for the lower levels, specifically the ccnp (what i’m currently working on). it could very well be because i haven’t bought any of the “official” cisco press books, who knows.

regardless, i, like many others, have been making extensive use of dynamips for running labs on a pc (even though i have a stack of cisco gear sitting right next to me). it’s just easier to not have to mess with the physical cabling, plus i can take it with me (i have dynamips and dynagen set up on my macbook).

i’ve considering making up some of my own lab topologies and then creating some exercises to go along with me. there are plenty of lab topologies already available (some even with the dynagen .net file), but i haven’t found many that have actual lab exercises to go along with them.

if i were to make up some of my own (complete with visio diagrams, dynagen .net files, and exercises to work through), would there be any interest?

p.s. i don’t use gns3 so you’d have to come up with your own config files for that.

if you happen to be going to cfunited (like me) next week, be sure to read through the cfunited attendee packet — some good info in there to know ahead of time.

this will be my first time attending cfunited and my first time in washington, dc, in about 15 years. anything i should know beforehand? =)

on season one, episode 9 of “house“, the was a conversation between john henry giles and dr. gregory house that went like this:

“i know that limp. i know the empty ring finger. and that obsessive nature of yours, that’s a big secret. you don’t risk jail and your career to save somebody that doesn’t want to be saved unless you got something, anything, one thing. the reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever, that’s because they ain’t got that one thing that hits them that hard and that true. i got music. you got this. the thing you think about all the time. thing that keeps you south of normal. yeah, makes us great. makes us the best. all we miss out on is everything else. no woman waiting at home after work with a drink and a kiss; that ain’t gonna happen for us.”

wow… that really struck a cord with me.

see, i got that one thing. for me, it’s computers. as i write this, my girlfriend is at work and has been for about the last 10 hours. i came home when she went to work and i’ve pretty much been sitting here in front of a computer since then.

i’ve caught up on some work e-mail, read up on some bgp stuff, creating and set up some mpls vpn labs in dynamips, checked myspace and facebook, etc.

it was a beautiful day outside, if the weather widget on my dashboard and the kids playing up and down the street are any indication. i wouldn’t really know though, i haven’t stepped outside since i got home about 10:30am this morning.

when the girlfriend gets here after while, she’ll have my full attention and i won’t even touch a computer until after she leaves tomorrow, but, for me, computers — networking, to be more specific — is “the one thing”.

kinda makes me wonder if i shouldn’t re-evaluate things…

it’s 3:30am and i’m surfing aimlessly. i’ve been reading a bit on “ccie candidate”. at the bottom of the “still slogging away” post, ethan writes:

“if ccie is important to you and you still have a choice, don’t get married, have kids, or buy a house until after you have your digits. the rest of you feel my pain, i have no doubt.”

the girlfriend and i have been talking a little about the future and marriage lately (nothing serious, trust me) so those words really hit me. i’m not working on the ccie just yet — eventually; have to knock out the ccnp first — but it’s definitely something i’ll keep in mind!

thanks, ethan!

the toronto star tells the story of chris avenir, a first-year student facing academic expulsion “for helping run an online chemistry study group via facebook“.

“so we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: ‘does anyone get how to do this one? i didn’t get it right and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong.’ exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the dungeon.”

as an educator, i think ryerson university is taking this way too far (based on what i know). if there was blatant cheating going on, then by all means punish those involved. if this is, as the article says, the students were simply using the forum to “brainstorm” in groups then it is completely absurd.

i *encourage* my students to work together in groups. working together in groups in something that higher education should teach you. every one of these students will have to work together in teams once they get out into the “real world” and will have to collaborate with their peers. it should also be common knowledge that having multiple people in your group who can provide their own insights is an asset, and makes the team greater than the sum of its parts.

again, blatant academic dishonesty should be punished. from what i’ve read, however, that is not the case here.

best of luck to you, chris avenir.

jeremy works at a post-secondary educational institution. his job duties include managing high-speed fiber optic networks, administering win2k/win2k3, debian, gentoo, and rhel servers, database administration, security, and occasionally hacking on some perl or php.

he also serves as an adjunct faculty member, teaching network security courses. he is a staunch advocate of foss, is currently working towards a bachelor’s degree in information technology, and also owns a consulting company.

jeremy has been a technological swiss army knife since the oregon trail was text only. his favorite color is sushi. he has never been to the moon.

this is a list of some of my “life goals” — things that i want to do at some point in my life. i usually track my short-term goals elsewhere (such as vitalist, my gtd system of choice), but it never hurts to make a list of things you want to do “someday” and refer to it often to keep you on track. a lot of these i will never get around to, for various reasons, and i’m fine with that.

with that, i present to you my list of “life goals”. it will be revised often and the list is not in any particular order.

• continue my education and finish a bachelor’s degree
• put away $10k in my savings account
• uspa skydiving license
• become a licensed private pilot
• red hat certified engineer (rhce)
• microsoft certified system administrator (mcsa)
• systems security certified practitioner (sscp)
• certified information systems security professional (cissp)
• visit italy
• visit australia
• get married
• fork() a child process
• buy a house
• buy a new car with cash
• pay off student loans

according to the international association of privacy professionals, january 28th is “data privacy day”:

north america joins 27 european countries to celebrate data privacy day 2008. the day will feature several efforts to promote the importance of data protection, including a meeting at duke university among european and u.s. privacy experts.

the iapp is encouraging privacy professionals to contact local schools, colleges and universities and offer to give a presentation on or during the week of january 28 about privacy using the materials provided. our goal is to have privacy professionals all over the country giving presentations to students about the importance of privacy today. details about presentations that happen during the week of january 28 should be sent directly to kim macneill at kim@privacyassocation.org.

as john bambenek mentioned on the sans handler’s diary, however:

“the important note about this effort is that it focuses its attention on the weakest area of privacy protection, the individual themselves. if people do not protect their own information (for instance, by putting their entire lives in their facebook profile) there is little other groups can do to prevent the misuse of that information.”

i just wish i had heard about this earlier. i work in higher education (college students are the most prominent facebook users) and could have done some presentations there. my hometown, an hour away, also has its share of parents who i’m sure would have benefitted from something like this. alas, maybe next year.

if you’re interested in seeing how much personal information i have on my facebook profile, add me as a friend!