a funny thing happened on the way to the forum...

   one of the first things i did after passing ccna was to check out the cisco cert forums... i'd never been a fan of these in the past as i didn't want to roll around in ccnaland discussing the OSI model and csma/cd the rest of my worldly existence, but i also believed i had no business jumping ahead to a more advanced cert forum until i earned my stripes... i still believe that... it's a personal thing, an integrity thing, just as i now believe i have no business poking my head around the ccie forums... now that i've earned my way into the middle, i will stay in the middle until i fight my way out...

  what i did was take it slow... i signed on for two groups at cisco;  ccna voice and ccnp... i belong in those groups... another thing i did was to set up email notification...this has proved enlightening... i get emails throughout the day, questions, comments, etc. and i read through them as i can, reply to the ones when i feel confident of adding an intelligble remark, and use them as a source of study material... when questions and comments come along i like to prove their veracity with example output from my equipment... this helps me get out of my particular study rut of the moment and back on to practical application...

  if you don't have a cco account yet, i'm not sure what you're waiting for... you know how it is; there's the right answer, the wrong answer, and cisco's answer... no point in pooh-poohing the issue; this is what we signed on for, better or worse... get it from the horse's mouth  and then dispute it at length... and always dispute it... question everything... just because it's printed by cisco, just because it's in cisco's database doesn't always mean it's correct...

  the other truly great thing is you never know when a rock star is going to pop in and sample some content...
our rock stars, like keith barker, paul geschw(fill in the blanks), scott morris, narbik and other designated vip's and decorated ccie's... it happens more often than you think... you can almost feel the written type become reverential... paul geschw actually laughed at one of my technical jokes last night...

i'm a geek, so sue me... but i'm a happy geek...

bootcamp...

i was in a real boot camp in '87, Marine style, parris island, hardcore...  11 weeks of agony... then i went to electronics school for a year at 29 palms, california, one of the meaner places on earth... but back to bootcamp... i have never experienced the phenomenon...

my thought is study, study odom, lammle, there's tons of instructional stuff on youtube, get your hands on gns3, buy a layer 3 switch and a layer 2 switch, ebay is often giving this away, check out blindhog, forums, get a cco account at cisco's learning center (don't waste your money on sims, and stay far away from braindumps) then after you've done all that...

then maybe bootcamp prior to testing...

i'd really like to hear about anyone with experience in one of these bootcamps...  please comment or email me, b.osgood2011@gmail.com... with permission, i'd be glad to post anything you might have about training, what worked, what didn't, study material, recommendations, tips, tricks, you name it... i'll put you up in lights right next to michael the network cat...

i mean it...