Flight Tracker website

This is a genius website that tracks the location of planes in real time. For nosy parents who can check exactly when our plane will land for example.

Webtrack

For other airports like Melbourne, just change the web address to point to http://mel.webtrak-lochard.com/template/index.html for instance.

Lex is CCNP certified !

Today I passed my ONT exam after 8 long days studying ( on average from 10:00 in the morning to 22:00 in the evening ). A score of 945/1000 !
This means that I am now officially CCNA and CCNP certified !

Next in line is CCVP. I will take some more time to study CCVP because this is the actual field that I want to work in in Australia. On top of this there are some things I want to do in the garden now that it's nice weather and we also are planning to spend a day in The Efteling. Let's hope for good weather.

I have bought a few more hardware from ebay and I plan to spend some more time getting hands-on experience with VoIP.

Australia to cut back immigration of skilled workers to protect population from unemployment

While I have been busy getting my CCNP, the Australian government has not been sitting still. Although disputed in the news, the Australian Prime Minister Keving Rudd and Immigration Minister Chris Evans, have decided to cut skilled immigration by 18500.
As per direct, the Critical Skills List ( CSL ) will be amended and jobs not on the CSL will certainly not get their visa's this year. The CSL will now comprise mainly health and medical, engineering and IT workers.

This is sad news for the builders, welders, sparky's and brickies but it's good news for us IT people, who will now get faster allocation to CO's.

ISCW passed !

With a nice score of 963/1000 I passed the ISCW exam today. I've been studying non-stop for the last two weeks to pass this exam so it's a well earned score. ISCW focuses on securing and implementing WANs. I have loads of experience in the security field which made this particular exam easier than any other so far. There is only one exam remaining now : ONT ( it should actually have been called OCCN : Optimizing Cisco Converged Networks )
This module deals with only three things : Wireless LANs , Voice-over-IP and QoS
QoS and VoIP are bound together. You cannot have a good VoIP network without QoS, so this has been bundled up in this last module. Wireless LANs should not be a problem, I like WLANs and think they are the future ( albeit in a different way that many may think it will be, I think Wireless Broadband will take off between now and 2 years )

I decided to keep ONT for the very end, mainly because it's straight up my street of knowledge but also covers the basics of cisco VoIP, which will come in very handy when I pursue my end-goal : CCVP ( Certified Cisco Voice Professional )

Some positive news

According to the latest automated mail reply after sending an empty mail to aspc.processing@immi.gov.au the deadline for CSL applications is end of May 2009. This means that they will process CSL applications much faster than anticipated and we should hear something about our Visa any day now.

The Bailout Game is here

http://www.thebailoutgame.us/

Now you get the chance to bailout too.

BSCI passed !

Well today was exam day again, this time BSCI. For many this is an interesting module, mainly about routing IP traffic between very large multinationals and countries. Although this might seem very interesting to the masses, I just could not get myself to like it. I guess it's just one of those modules that I have to bite myself through "bit by bit". Luckily I was the only one in the test centre today so I didn't have to enjoy the sounds of keyboard ticking and mouseclicking, always a nice thing to have silence. I chose to go on exam on a monday instead of a friday as mostly people will use their fridays to get the exams done and then move straight on to their weekends. The passing score for this exam was 790 and I got a very respectable 877/1000. This is less than I had for my previous exams and I have to honestly say that I didn't prepare as well for this exam as the previous ones because of the lack of interest in the module subjects.
Now come the last two exams : ISCW and ONT. I have reviewed the subjects and they are more hands-on. ISCW will be next and I will keep ONT for last since that is the subject that best fits with Voice and QoS.
( remember, I was going for CCVP initially, but took the CCNA + CCNP detour )