I am still around and I did not forget the blog, it’s just that I’ve been a bit busy with other things lately. During the week not much special is happening, it’s just work as usual. Most of the time in München, some of the time in this shithole small town called Rheinbach on the other side of Germany. Which is where I will be next week, actually. I can hardly wait, I am trembling in anticipation. Umm .. no, not really. In any case, not much I can do about that right now so I have to go.
Otherwise we’ve been working on our house, which we nicknamed “The Cave”, don’t ask why. The Cave is starting to look better now. We are also trying to do something about what we call “city rats”. They are not actually rats, just pigeons. We don’t like them, they are all over the roof, they make weird sounds and they shit everywhere. Luckily Freya might’ve found a solution:
Yes, that’s a pump-action water gun with a pretty good range. We hunt them down now and I think they are learning that it’s not so safe anymore to sit anywhere they please.
At the beginning of June I finally have a week of vacation, which should be kinda nice. As it happens, my parents will also be visiting and they will also bring a very special little somebody, which I will very happy to see again. That’s also the reason we have accelerated a bit the renovation inside The Cave. It’s not yet ready to receive too many guests but hopefully we’ll get it ready in time ;-)
Professionally I am still kinda working towards my CCSP, I have two more exams left in which the Cisco ASA firewall plays a major part. That’s one thing I can’t practice with at home so I don’t have many choices. Either classes or I just get whatever books I can for self study and I do the practice online. Which is what I will do actually. Internetwork Expert is a well-known site for the candidates to the CCIE, the Holy Grail of the Cisco certifications. They also have rack rentals and I noticed that the security rack has all the equipment I need to practice for my ASA exam: 2 ASA’s, IPS sensor, ACS server and so on, just perfect.
So I just rented rack slots for one week and at the end of June and I will just stay home and practice. It’s actually not that expensive either, about $15 for a 5.5 hour slot. My boss agreed with the plan, probably the $90 price for one week plus some books as opposed to many thousands of euros for a 4-day Cisco course plus travel expenses might’ve had something to do with it.
Last but not least, I am still trying to convince Freya to do a guest post on the blog but so far no success. I am still working on it, she has some funny stories to tell from her daily trips to work ;-) I even offered to translate it into romanian but I guess I need to offer more incentive. We’ll see.
Tags: ccie, ccsp, cisco, germany, house, munich, pigeons, rack, rheinbach, watergun, work
Daily stuff, Our House, Pictures | Stefan | 
May 20, 2009 6:33 am | 
Comments (3)
We are about to finish our corner where we have our desks and computers. This is how my desk looks right now, tonight I finished mounting the shelves and I managed to make more space on the desk.
Lately I worked a lot with wood, since we have a lot of it in the house. Between living room and the bedroom there is a door which we don’t need so I removed the door, I put a wooden plate on the bedroom side and I built some shelves in the door frame:
This reminds me of a quote from “Gone in 60 seconds“:
Metal. Steel. It’s cold. Ugly. Wood is warm. Clean. Provided by nature. To see a piece of furniture take shape it’s like watching a child grow.
Very true ;-)
After only three weeks ago I had murderous thoughts towards Deutsche Telekom, now I came back to more peaceful feelings. Finally the internet works decently at home. I still don’t have VDSL because it’s not yet available in my area but I do have 16 Mbps ADSL2 with the Telekom’s package Entertain Premium. A couple of the interesting features of this package:
- fixed telephony flatrate
- internet flatrate (of course!)
- decent actual speed, 12-13Mbps
- good upload for DSL: 1Mbps
- IPTV which works, good quality
- flatrate for all Telekom hotspots in Germany, 8000 of them or so
So I am kinda pleased so far. I am also in the process of setting up the multimedia system in the bedroom. After quite some searching we decided for a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo SL 3230T 23 inch monitor and a Zyxel DMA1000 digital media streamer. We’ll use this to watch the movies and episodes we have on the network server and for the TV part we’ll just get another receiver for Telekom’s IPTV. We don’t need a DVD player because we don’t really watch them but should the need arise, I can always just rip it and put it on the server.
I really hope the internet problems are gone, knock on wood!
Tags: dsl, entertain, fujitsu siemens, internet, iptv, network, telekom, vdsl, zyxel
Daily stuff, Our House | Stefan | March 18, 2009 2:40 pm | Comments (2)
What a shitty weekend, excuse my french. As I was saying earlier, Deutsche Telekom was kinda late in sending me the access information. To cut a long story short (not to mention that I get pissed off again if I think about it too much) on friday I manged to get a temporary DSL connection after a LOT of “discussions” with the people from the T-Punkts. The idea was that I can use this connection until the stuff that I ordered becomes available (16 Mbps Entertain package with IPTV and all kind of flatrates included). Surprise, surprise, they even activated it on friday afternoon. It worked fine until saturday before noon when it died again :evil:
It seems there was a bigger problem in our area and monday morning it was solved but we were left without internet access during the weekend. That was really bad. Anyway, we did all kind of things in the house, it’s not like we don’t have stuff to do. And I started to play again Mass Effect :oops: It’s an excellent game, I recommend it.
Still, in order to avoid such painful moments, I ordered a USB UMTS stick from Vodafone. From what I read it should even work with my Fritzbox. It’s a prepaid deal so access is not really cheap (4.95 € per 24h) but this is only for backup so it’s acceptable. What kind of speeds I will get, I don’t know yet. In theory we live in what Vodafone calls “UMTS Broadband” area so I should be getting speeds up to 3.6 Mbps but we’ll see.
In other news: Freya makes some delicious “Red Rice”. More details and pictures in a future post ;-)
