The Usual End of the Year Tripe

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The year is finally coming to an end, so it’s time yet again to look at goals and embarrass myself by publicly admitting that I didn’t meet them. Oh, well. Let’s get this done so I can go back to sleep.

I changed the layout of the blog, so the page with my goals isn’t really visible. Here’s what I claimed I would do this past year.

Select a CCIE training vendor - Yeah…this didn’t happen. This is a very high-priced item, and I simply couldn’t afford the packages I wanted. We’re talking $8k - $10k for everything. Yikes! I asked management at work to pay for it. They said they would but that I would have to agree not to leave the company for some long length of time. I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where finding a new job meant writing a check for $10k, so I decided to pass on it. Without the financial backing, this ended with me just sighing pitifully on my couch.
Take the CCIE R&S lab - Of course this didn’t happen without the first one. I guess I could have bought the materials that I could and just got on a bus to Raleigh to see what happens. This whole thing was complicated by the fact that the new job is 95% Juniper. My waking hours at work and my study time at home were spent trying to figure out how Junos works; I tried my best, but it was just too difficult for me to study both at the same time. For the trifecta of excuses, I also had an issue with my study area. I went from a 4-bedroom house to a 1-bedroom apartment when we moved for the new job. There’s no quiet space at all to study at all - a huge problem I need to fix.
Pass JNCIA-Junos exam - Wo! I actually did this one. I took this exam a few months back and passed it without any problems. Good for me! One out of three!

As for my goals, it really wasn’t a very good year. Even for me, it was bad. I’ll tell you, though, it’s very hard to study when you don’t have one subject or a place to do so. Definitely things I need to work on in 2013.

2012 on Aaron's Worthless Words

The Usual End of the Year Tripe