I’m 4 hours into my subscription and already I’m plagued with registration problems!  Viewing the on-demand material is straightforward and working properly.  For live material, I ended up emailing the support@ciscolivevirtual.com helpdesk, joining the ‘New to Networkers’ chat session, and calling the Registration support number to see if I could resolve my problem with adding sessions (i.e. keynote, breakout, technical, etc.).  I have yet to receive a response for my 1st email to the helpdesk.  Here’s the response I received in the chat session:

Barry Reyes: How long does it take for my premier pass to activate? FYI, I signed up earlier this morning but would like to start adding some breakout sessions.
Quang Nguyen: Hi Barry, your premier pass should be accessible right away. Please note that the On-Demand breakouts in the Auditorium are currently accessible, and the Live Day sessions begin tomorrow and then on Weds at their scheduled times. Since many of the breakouts are recorded from Cisco Live, the Session Catalog will begin populating in July once the sessions are produced for on-demand viewing.

I suspect that I won’t be able to add any sessions until tomorrow morning when the event actually starts.  I wish they would just come out and say that is the case.  The response I received over the phone was to send a 2nd email to the helpdesk.  So far I’m just going around in circles.  Fun stuff.

As much as I would’ve liked to have attended the event, I wasn’t able to make it out to Cisco Live in San Francisco this year.  Rather than miss out on some of the great information that will be delivered, I opted to pay for the Premier Pass.

For the record, this is my first conference with Cisco and already I’m overwhelmed with the amount of data on the site so far, but I’m sure after 30 minutes of clicking around I’ll find a comfort level.  I meant to sign up for the event yesterday, but didn’t get around to it so I find myself seeking support on activating my premier status.  As it stands, I’m unable to add any of the breakout sessions.  I’m sure my system profile just needs to be updated but hopefully I don’t miss out on anything while I’m waiting to hear back.  As long as I can view a missed session and read about the notes later on, I’ll be a happy camper.

When I first read the CCIE Party Recap posting by Brian McGahan at 2:53AM, I could already sense where the announcement was going. Much later in the day, I saw the breaking news from CCIEPursuit’s site which was posted at 1:29PM. It was now official that Scott was joining IE.

While many other sites are now referring to Brian McGahan, Brian Dennis, and Scott Morris as ‘The Big 3′, let us not forget about Petr Lupukov who is also a Quad CCIE. Petr may not have the fan fare like Scott does but he writes some pretty good postings up on the blog.

My hat goes off to the IE team for scoring this one, but I do have a minor concern about this merger. When I was studying for the R&S lab, I needed to complement my studying efforts and opted to purchase alternative workbooks. I chose to do so with IPExpert. Having another set of material gave me a different perspective and helped boost up my confidence in certain areas. With Scott leaving, the formatting of the IPExpert material will most likely change and possibly evolve into something else.

This could probably be a good thing for other companies out there trying to sell there workbooks. They now have a chance to boost up the content within their books. But if you have to think about it, where do we turn to for more material? For the R&S track, that’s really not an issue since you have many other companies to choose from:

Micronics Training

Netmetric Solutions

Netmaster Class

IE Mentor

CCBootcamp

I guess I’m just more concerned about the other tracks now that I have Security and Service Provider to worry about. Aside from IE, I’ve always looked to IPExpert for their strengths in the other tracks. There just seemed to be a balance to have an option. Based on what I’ve researched from various readings and forums, Micronics Training and Netmaster Class only focus on the R&S track, IE Mentor covers the SP track very well, and Netmetric Solutions is concentrated on the Security track. That leaves me with CCBootcamp whose material I haven’t really seen and may now need to invest some time with them. I can only wonder if after purchasing a $300 workbook from them if I’ll be satisfied.

Anyways, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’ve already weighed my options with which track to pursue next and chose Security, but I came across something on eBay today that piqued my interest.

Originally I saw a posting on Sadikhov forums regarding CCIE Voice workbooks and that ieMentor was selling the material for as low as $60. At first, $60 sounded fishy to me, so I checked out the ebay background of the seller and found that 288 other people have already purchased the workbook. The seller doesn’t seem to be affiliated with ieMentor, but may have used the material to pass his/her lab. At any rate, I went ahead and purchased a copy for myself.

The zip file I received contained ieMentor’s Voice v2.0 workbook and solutions that were created in May of 2007. The material contained within the zip is still on track with the blueprint. Labs 1 - 26 are pretty much mini labs to familiarize you with the technologies. Labs 27 - 28 are Master Labs which look to be 8-hour practice exams. Not bad for the amount I paid.

Now I know I stated I was going to jump into the Security stuff after my Juniper certs, but now that I have some Voice material to work with I figure I’ll test it out and lab what I can with Dynamips until February.

Then I’ll make decision in which track to completely focus on for the year.