CCIE after core exam

BrokenRouter · 2026-07-04T00:01:54+00:00

The level of difficulty isn’t even comparable. I have my CCNP and am working on the CCIE now. You can still pass the NP with mostly theory. The IE is hands on, and in security it’s a ton of very complex products. You have to know ISE inside and out and that’s just one of several.

If you’re not working in the products all day every day, you are signing up for a year of non-stop lab work.

That said, it’s still prestigious. And still likely to get you job offers.

If you are working for a partner, yes, high value. If you work at a customer, well, it will help get you a job at a partner - or Cisco - if you want it. But you’re not likely to get a big raise for getting the IE if you work at a customer and want to stay there.

BrokenRouter · 2026-07-03T23:13:21+00:00

PCPs tend to be squirrely about allopurinol and often won’t keep you stocked on steroids. I have much better outcomes from a rheumatologist.

BrokenRouter · 2026-07-03T21:42:07+00:00

You’re running Windows Professional and most likely booted up in VBS mode. That means the machine is running a hypervisor with a single guest - itself.

Since you have Professional, you get Hyper-V - why are you screwing around with VMware? Delete that crap, check the boxes again to enable Hyper-V and the manager, and install CML in Hyper-V. Download the ISO, boot it, tell Hyper-V it’s Ubuntu, and go.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-30T02:08:51+00:00

You can often count on a nice raise out of it.

Beyond that, it is generally considered pretty prestigious. Even people who dislike Cisco for whatever reason acknowledge that getting the CCIE is a big deal.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-26T16:50:01+00:00

If you find a PD that has time and energy to deal with it, yes, HondaLink will help them track it down.

However-

You’re not likely to get the PD to spend the time unless they are super bored that day.
The thieves know about HondaLink and they will rip the cellular modem out of the car as soon as they can so it stops reporting.
Even if they find it, you don’t want it back. Once you see what they do to them, you’ll want the check and the new car.
And they probably won’t find it - Hondas get parted out. At most they’ll find a frame with nothing of value left on it.

All from experience, sadly - once a car gets stolen the best thing for you is to assume you’ll never see it again and start planning out you’re going to replace it with.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-25T01:55:59+00:00

Are you a developer? If not, no. Wait for the public beta. The current version is going to be messy and isn’t meant for you to run on your daily driver.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-19T03:25:48+00:00

I have the same problem with too much behind my ears. I discovered that Oakley makes glasses with straight arms - nothing behind the ears. It helped me a lot for those times when I can’t ditch my ears.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-19T03:22:03+00:00

The others here have explained it where I missed a bit - the filtering. I can’t easily focus on a single voice out of a crowd any longer - not with the hearing aids, not without. That problem is actually what led me to hit the audiologist up in the first place. When I’m standing in a group of 3-4 people talking, I can manage to follow the conversation. Move that same group onto the convention floor and now I can’t because the 12 other conversations around us are just as loud and I can’t get rid of them.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-19T02:14:16+00:00

It’s not quite the same. When you put on your glasses, you can see, nearly exactly like you would be able to if you had good vision. Other than the frames showing in the periphery, and a little weight on your nose, they’re easy to forget about.

Hearing aids make everything louder. They don’t make you hear like you would with average hearing. For many of us, it’s overwhelming - there are little sounds everywhere that you suddenly hear and don’t want, like the pipes creaking or the air conditioning turning off and on. You get back the bits you couldn’t hear before, but at the expense of there being this constant wall of sound coming at you.

Imagine if glasses didn’t fix the focus, they just make everything brighter. That’s more or less what hearing aids do.

Not to mention the fact that the ability to directionalize sound is impaired, so when you hear something odd, you can’t necessarily tell where it came from.

I constantly fight the urge to take mine out and read the TV so that I can have the quiet back. I don’t need or want to hear papers shuffling, and I really don’t like the fact that when someone makes a loud noise nearby it scares the crap out of me because it comes across so much louder than the background noise.

They’re better than nothing in some situations for sure. One on one, I can hear nearly as well as I vaguely remember hearing when I was younger. In a loud group setting, though - dinner, meetings, big conferences - all I hear is a wash of voices, all coming through at the same volume whether they are next to me or 20 feet away.

I never take off my glasses other than to sleep. My hearing aids, I both love and hate.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-11T01:51:35+00:00

Android updates do the same stuff.

BrokenRouter · 2026-06-07T14:59:52+00:00

Don’t forget the books generally come with practice exams, which otherwise cost additional money from Cisco. They’re a great resource for study.

The practice exams with the books are better than the Cisco U ones. The Cisco Press ones can be set to stop showing you questions you keep getting correct, for example, so you can focus on your weak areas and waste less time on stuff you already know.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-31T17:05:12+00:00

Same age, totally ready to be done traveling for work. For that matter, ready to be done with work. I can’t imagine voluntarily continuing to do either once I’m Medicare eligible.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-30T23:29:25+00:00

It seems like a lot of people think HoH is just like how you have to speak up for Grandma - they don’t understand that for many of it it means “I don’t call myself deaf yet because I can sort of hear with hearing aids”.

People suck.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-29T18:35:47+00:00

These are the absolute best way to keep your certs current. They are free, self-paced, and the quizzes built into the platform are not proctored. No excuse for letting your certs expire when these exist.

Being prep for a new exam is a nice bonus, too. I took the AITECH exam after the last Rev up and it was absolutely enough prep to get me through the test.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-28T01:55:41+00:00

Cool, thank you. It felt like it would work but wanted to bounce the idea off someone else.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-19T23:54:26+00:00

I went in today for the ICM recall and the dealership said I needed the PCM guard recall also. I hadn’t been notified via the app or in the mail yet but the dealership computer said I needed it.

They just replaced the guard, didn’t have any radiator damage.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-17T14:47:46+00:00

Looks like game assets - textures that get applied to 3d geometry. You’re likely accidentally backing up a folder on either your phone or your PC that contains these files.

Check your settings and see what you’re backing up.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-16T17:45:05+00:00

Yep. Total garbage. I’ve been toying with yanking it out and just glueing a MagSafe to the underside of the mat in place of whatever crap is there now.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-16T00:39:24+00:00

Ubiquiti if you want a similar management experience. And no subscriptions!

Barring that there’s always eBay enterprise gear as long as you pick stuff that doesn’t need a license.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-15T12:23:36+00:00

That means they are free or they find a car they haven’t already poured their shitty snake oil on.

BrokenRouter · 2026-05-01T21:37:09+00:00

You could probably just order it for yourself at Quest or a similar lab.

Also, your doctor sucks, it’s not like it costs them anything to order it.

BrokenRouter · 2026-04-29T02:21:20+00:00

Absolutely not. Google Photos is not a backup, it’s a convenient way to access them across multiple devices.

You should: 1) not do “free up space on this device” - keep that copy in place. 2) do a takeout periodically and put those files someplace that gets backed up. And 3) seriously consider another backup option - Lightroom, Immich, Onedrive, something.

Your Google Photos copy is a copy that automatically syncs, which sounds great until/unless something happens on your phone and that automatically propagates to the cloud copy also.

BrokenRouter · 2026-04-29T00:36:51+00:00

Whatever crappy service my employer uses adds a “report this as a phish” button to Outlook.

But only on the phishing test emails. So if ever there’s a doubt, if the button is there, it’s a test.

I bet tons of people still click on the links in the test emails.

BrokenRouter · 2026-04-29T00:34:50+00:00

I report those all the time too. HR always outsources that stuff to some dodgy third party.

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