So much to do, so little time. It’s been tiring lately, work and family have led me to decide to stop the CCIEing for the time being. I just did the RS written a couple of weeks ago and got recerted until  2013, which is very cool, plus that gives me 18 months to sit the new RS blueprint that is about to be implemented in Oct 18th. Will focus on lighter certs until I can have some things straighten out, the next several months I’ll be primarily working towards these in particular order:

  1.  PMP – Have done a lot of projects in the past 5-6 years, this cert is very well respected in the IT community and across companies where management has a clue of what projects are and how they should be run. So will be studying the next couple months to get this one out before the year is over.
  2. CCNP – With the updating of the CCIE RS lab and the usual avalanche that comes with it there are very few options to choose from with more than the regular pressure that studying for the CCIE takes – less than 2 months, traveling to Tokyo or Sydney to try to kill the beast, just to mention a couple of hurdles – it only made sense for me to settle down and do things that require considerably less effort, studying for these exams should be less daunting – note I’m not saying it’ll be easy – than working towards the lab beast.
  3. CCIP – With the v4.0 blueprint it’s pretty obvious that the MPLS part of this cert will be very important for anyone trying to attain the RS IE, plus BGP and QoS are not my strongest topics anyways.
  4. CCDP – This could be possible but I’m not particularly attracted to this one, it’ll all depend on the timing, if by the time I am done with both CCNP and CCIP the timing is right to get back to the RS track then the D will be a no go, I really don’t see a lot of value for this cert at this time.

I have a few MS certs that probably need some renewal, but I’m not really in the mood for MS until they get their act straight with their certification program, bunch of things being said but their exams and certs continue to be less respected than Cisco’s in the IT industry. There are a few things I am working towards slowly as I go for more certs while taking a pause from the CCIE RS lab exam like getting myself more acquainted to linux (been running Ubuntu at home for almost 3 months now, after running fedora for two), and will definitely put some time into protocol analysis (mainly wireshark), other than all this, I’m just trying to keep up at work, few projects, very exciting, but also tiring at the same time…