NOTE: This post was originally written Aug 2011
It’s been a while since I updated this blog, so I thought I’d post a quick update on my CCIE lack of progress. The weather at the weekends has been really very good since May on the whole, and I’ve been unable to remove myself from having a good time riding my bicycle at the weekend. I’m not the fittest of people, but combined with riding “Boris Bikes” in the week and “long” 20-30km rides at the weekend, I think I’m getting there. This combined with the usual summer social life means I haven't had the spare time to focus on what I need to do for the lab. So I’ve decided to call it a winter sport and will pick up again and crate time when they days are shorter and the nights longer. My study location is nice and warm in winter, but just a bit too warm at the moment for long periods in there! I’m not throwing in the towel completely, I’ll continue to read and keep my knowledge up with VoDs and the like on my daily commute. So until the winter then….
Thursday, 31 May 2012
To 3 or not to 3–a mobile dilemma
NOTE: This post was originally written Aug 2011
As a long time Vodafone UK customer (10+ years), I have had many contracts and been mostly happy with there network coverage, which can be a little patchy on my train journey home. I had a long-running billing issue with them which was eventually sorted out and on the whole their customer service has been excellent when I’ve needed to use it. But there is one thing that really annoys me – and that is their data policy.
Just over two years ago when I got my Vodafone (HTC) Magic, as I wrote about here, Vodafone were giving “Unlimited” data packages, and I’d signed up for a two year contract. The “Unlimited” actually meant 500MB, but with no penalty for going over this. About halfway through the contract, Vodafone moved this from “Unlimited” to capped, and enforced the 500MB limit with charging beyond that. This didn’t go down well. I’m not a heavy data user, but that is as much to do with my network coverage at the time I would use data, i.e. on my daily commute from London to Bicester – most other times I’ll be on Wi-Fi, or using my phone as a phone!
Recently I upgraded one of my contracts to get a Samsung Nexus S – and it is by far the best smartphone I have ever owned (best phone award still goes to the Nokia 6310i for its battery longevity and the fact it just kept making calls). However it being a powerful smartphone means that I’m using my applications on it and more data. When I went to Australia earlier this year I put a Telstra PAYG SIM in it and it worked flawlessly. So this got me thinking. My Magic is now out of contract – and I don’t see a need for a new phone until the next Nexus comes out. So I thought lets give the 3 network a try – they are forever advertising their “all you can eat data” packages, which they also do on PAYG. This meant I could just get a SIM for £2 (or free from their website I think!), register it and try it out.
First impressions were not good – I put the SIM in the Nexus S and waited for it to register on the network (I was in the office of my current client, where I spend roughly 8 hours a day 5 days a week – so quite important that it works in here – and it is a bit of a black spot for some mobile networks) – eventually it found a trace single and registered – I know this because when I called the number I was initially getting Number Unobtainable, and finally I got to my new voicemail box, but never did my phone ring – it did get the occasional welcome SMS, but not all of them. So I went outside – and that finished the job – all set up now. My Magic had my Vodafone SIM so that I could make/receive calls, so I wasn’t completely cut off. One nice surprise was that once I’d registered on the my3 website, I got a few £10 + 150MB data credit – this’ll allow me to test them out for £2 I thought.
Saturday, I was working in the office and decided to stay with the 3 network for the day. Once on the train while sat at the station I ran a Speedtest and got a very respectable 3Mbps down/2Mbps up and thought this is nice. So once on the train I set up the phone in wireless tether mode and used the internet lightly (Google services) all the way into London with negligible issues (tunnels are a problem for all networks!) Back in the office – again not much signal, however the odd thing is that 3G data still seem to work, although only intermittently, voice/SMS was right out of luck. However, for the big test on the way home, I again went to wireless tether mode and fired up Test Match Special via BBC iPlayer, i.e. live streamed radio, and I listened to the England v India Test Match all the way home – once very happy commute I’ll say!
Sunday, long (by my standards) bicycle ride, network coverage seemed fine – 3G when I needed it for maps, MMS etc. Ok, lets forward all calls from my Magic to my 3 SIM.
Monday, true test – no Vodafone SIM in hand off to work. I didn’t receive any calls all day, nor could I make any while in the office. I missed at least 3 calls I should have been able to take and when I went outside I had to reboot my phone for it to be able to place calls. I think you know where this is going.
So today I am back with my Vodafone SIM, my 500Mb data plan and not listening to streaming media on my commute. Would I recommend the 3 network – well if you live in a tent and don’t work in an office in the City of London or you don’t need to make and receive phone calls then yes! Their data coverage is excellent and at £15 on PAYG for a month of unlimited data its hard to go wrong. But if you want to make and receive calls, then go to someone else.
I have not used the three SIM since – however it did prove useful for my Mum when she was over here from Australia recently and needed a UK SIM for her mobile. It worked flawlessly for phone calls and texts, she had no need for data.
I am also now using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus as my primary phone, but that’s a different blog post.
As a long time Vodafone UK customer (10+ years), I have had many contracts and been mostly happy with there network coverage, which can be a little patchy on my train journey home. I had a long-running billing issue with them which was eventually sorted out and on the whole their customer service has been excellent when I’ve needed to use it. But there is one thing that really annoys me – and that is their data policy.
Just over two years ago when I got my Vodafone (HTC) Magic, as I wrote about here, Vodafone were giving “Unlimited” data packages, and I’d signed up for a two year contract. The “Unlimited” actually meant 500MB, but with no penalty for going over this. About halfway through the contract, Vodafone moved this from “Unlimited” to capped, and enforced the 500MB limit with charging beyond that. This didn’t go down well. I’m not a heavy data user, but that is as much to do with my network coverage at the time I would use data, i.e. on my daily commute from London to Bicester – most other times I’ll be on Wi-Fi, or using my phone as a phone!
Recently I upgraded one of my contracts to get a Samsung Nexus S – and it is by far the best smartphone I have ever owned (best phone award still goes to the Nokia 6310i for its battery longevity and the fact it just kept making calls). However it being a powerful smartphone means that I’m using my applications on it and more data. When I went to Australia earlier this year I put a Telstra PAYG SIM in it and it worked flawlessly. So this got me thinking. My Magic is now out of contract – and I don’t see a need for a new phone until the next Nexus comes out. So I thought lets give the 3 network a try – they are forever advertising their “all you can eat data” packages, which they also do on PAYG. This meant I could just get a SIM for £2 (or free from their website I think!), register it and try it out.
First impressions were not good – I put the SIM in the Nexus S and waited for it to register on the network (I was in the office of my current client, where I spend roughly 8 hours a day 5 days a week – so quite important that it works in here – and it is a bit of a black spot for some mobile networks) – eventually it found a trace single and registered – I know this because when I called the number I was initially getting Number Unobtainable, and finally I got to my new voicemail box, but never did my phone ring – it did get the occasional welcome SMS, but not all of them. So I went outside – and that finished the job – all set up now. My Magic had my Vodafone SIM so that I could make/receive calls, so I wasn’t completely cut off. One nice surprise was that once I’d registered on the my3 website, I got a few £10 + 150MB data credit – this’ll allow me to test them out for £2 I thought.
Saturday, I was working in the office and decided to stay with the 3 network for the day. Once on the train while sat at the station I ran a Speedtest and got a very respectable 3Mbps down/2Mbps up and thought this is nice. So once on the train I set up the phone in wireless tether mode and used the internet lightly (Google services) all the way into London with negligible issues (tunnels are a problem for all networks!) Back in the office – again not much signal, however the odd thing is that 3G data still seem to work, although only intermittently, voice/SMS was right out of luck. However, for the big test on the way home, I again went to wireless tether mode and fired up Test Match Special via BBC iPlayer, i.e. live streamed radio, and I listened to the England v India Test Match all the way home – once very happy commute I’ll say!
Sunday, long (by my standards) bicycle ride, network coverage seemed fine – 3G when I needed it for maps, MMS etc. Ok, lets forward all calls from my Magic to my 3 SIM.
Monday, true test – no Vodafone SIM in hand off to work. I didn’t receive any calls all day, nor could I make any while in the office. I missed at least 3 calls I should have been able to take and when I went outside I had to reboot my phone for it to be able to place calls. I think you know where this is going.
So today I am back with my Vodafone SIM, my 500Mb data plan and not listening to streaming media on my commute. Would I recommend the 3 network – well if you live in a tent and don’t work in an office in the City of London or you don’t need to make and receive phone calls then yes! Their data coverage is excellent and at £15 on PAYG for a month of unlimited data its hard to go wrong. But if you want to make and receive calls, then go to someone else.
Update May 31 2012:
I have not used the three SIM since – however it did prove useful for my Mum when she was over here from Australia recently and needed a UK SIM for her mobile. It worked flawlessly for phone calls and texts, she had no need for data.
I am also now using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus as my primary phone, but that’s a different blog post.
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Why I hate IPExpert’s DRM for their workbooks
Last week I got back on the horse and started studying again to get myself ready for another attempt at the CCIE voice lab. I had a pretty poor session (by my standards), and resolved to get on with it. So this weekend I fired up all the phones, routers and virtual machines and started on an area of weakness – CME features and functions. IPExpert have a nice lab on this which is all CME - yes three CME – highly unlikely for the real lab – but it does enforce those CME principals.
Well as I’ve mention before, I’m no fan of IPExperts DRM and for the workbooks have printed them into OneNote and make my notes etc in there. However, I haven’t done that with the proctor guides – as I have the PDFs and am likely to be online – and it seems that I can no longer do the OneNote shuffle (I tried a while back and it said OneNote was not a valid printer). So I got to a certain question and was having trouble with it (rustiness), so I went to the proctor guide, got asked for my login and password by that annoying FileOpen plugin which it accepted, and I got a book full of blank pages. Initially I blamed Adobe, as I had recently updated Acrobat Reader to version X, so I tried on my Adobe Reader version 9 laptop – same thing. So now I was frustrated by the question and frustrated by not being able to look up the answer and had wasted much valuable study time.
I have logged a support ticket, but its the weekend and there is no support on weekends. It really annoys me as I promote IPExpert as a great training provider and then this. I’ve paid for the material, and for their bootcamp, and yet I can’t access what I own. I’m not likely to give away what I paid for, and I don’t object to watermarked PDFs (which they are) – so lets get rid of the DRM it just causes me to tell people not to buy the product.
PS. I did eventually work out the answer, I was just misreading the requirement, and eventually I got past the issue. Lesson there – just because you think it might violate the question, doesn't mean you shouldn’t try it!
Update: IPExpert support got back to me and suggested that I re-download the PDFs to update the encryption. Yesterday when I tried to re-download all I got were "404 file not found". Today they download fine and I can read them again. Thanks IPExpert for your responsiveness - but I still hate your DRM.
Well as I’ve mention before, I’m no fan of IPExperts DRM and for the workbooks have printed them into OneNote and make my notes etc in there. However, I haven’t done that with the proctor guides – as I have the PDFs and am likely to be online – and it seems that I can no longer do the OneNote shuffle (I tried a while back and it said OneNote was not a valid printer). So I got to a certain question and was having trouble with it (rustiness), so I went to the proctor guide, got asked for my login and password by that annoying FileOpen plugin which it accepted, and I got a book full of blank pages. Initially I blamed Adobe, as I had recently updated Acrobat Reader to version X, so I tried on my Adobe Reader version 9 laptop – same thing. So now I was frustrated by the question and frustrated by not being able to look up the answer and had wasted much valuable study time.
I have logged a support ticket, but its the weekend and there is no support on weekends. It really annoys me as I promote IPExpert as a great training provider and then this. I’ve paid for the material, and for their bootcamp, and yet I can’t access what I own. I’m not likely to give away what I paid for, and I don’t object to watermarked PDFs (which they are) – so lets get rid of the DRM it just causes me to tell people not to buy the product.
PS. I did eventually work out the answer, I was just misreading the requirement, and eventually I got past the issue. Lesson there – just because you think it might violate the question, doesn't mean you shouldn’t try it!
Update: IPExpert support got back to me and suggested that I re-download the PDFs to update the encryption. Yesterday when I tried to re-download all I got were "404 file not found". Today they download fine and I can read them again. Thanks IPExpert for your responsiveness - but I still hate your DRM.
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Now What ?
So it’s been nearly 30 days since my first CCIE voice lab attempt and I’m soon able to take a re-sit. So where am I and what have I been doing ?
Well contrary to popular wisdom of throwing back into the books and finding where I went wrong, over analysing my mistakes and generally fretting about a re-sit, I had a holiday! And thus we go slightly off-topic. I played golf (well hit a golf ball around most of a golf course) for the first time in 20 years, thanks to my two best friends in the world – nothing better for dismissing a score report, which turned up as I was entering the first tee (as I knew what it said – I wasn’t going to let it spoil my day – although three days later when I had a look it did read better than I had expected!), than creaming a little white ball 200 yards down the middle of the fairway (I like to think that’s what I did – the reality was more 50 yards and very left or right!). I (with family of course) went to Port Douglas in Far North Queensland where I swam with turtles here.
We also got to see some really live and wild crocodiles too! He’s 3 metres in length and eating a mud crab claw!
The rest of the holiday was a celebration for my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary and my Dad’s 60th birthday – so much merriment occurred.
I also did do some study – it' just eats at you when you know there were things in the exam that you should have known and didn’t, so I now understand how to configure some of the things I didn’t expect to see (see I broke rule number 1 – expect everything to be there!), and I already feel that I have filled in some of those tiny cracks that will better prepare me for next time.
I have been struggling with flu-like symptoms since I’ve returned so I haven’t touch a router or phone in anger since the exam. I’m now looking at dates in June for Brussels – there seem to be plenty towards the back half of the month. I will have that booked shortly and we’ll go again, after all very few people pass first time do they!
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