February 2007 Archives

Well it's been really busy lately, hence no blog posts. Last Friday Elanna and I traveled to Lake Arrowhead,CA for a little vacation. the original plan was to ski for a few days but little did we realize that President's Day weekend is the biggest skiing holiday of the year, so it was very crowed. On Saturday, we went to the Wildhaven Ranch, which was very cool. We were the only ones there so we pretty much got a private tour of the whole place by the staff. Speaking of the staff, they were a little different. I think Wild Animal geeks best describes them. They were very into their job of caring for rescued wild animals. That night we had dinner at our friends wonderful restaurant, Bin 189.

Sunday we attempted to ski at Big Bear. The slopes were very crowed I attempted to ski down a green run with limited success. Elanna fell and hurt her back so we called it pretty early.

On Monday we drove down to Temecula Wine Country and did some wine tasting at the vineyards. We had some good wine, however some of the wines there are really really bad. We decided that the best way to see wine country would be to stay nearby and do one of the Limo wine tours. That way you don't have to drive.

The rest of this week I've been studying for my Mid-Term, which I took yesterday Morning.

This week I'm headed back to St Paul,MN where they just had a blizzard!

MS Vista is a bad OS. There's no real reason to upgrade to it and it includes a lot of "features" that don't do anything for the user but help Microsoft control the market. Bruce Schneier, a leading Security expert talks about it in this article.

"This is to advise you that your documents have been processed in the system as of today.

We are now printing certificates every day, therefore your certificate should be printed within a day following processing.

Your package will be mailed out within a couple days after the certificate is printed. Stateside delivery usually takes 10 days to 2 weeks; overseas delivery is 4-6 weeks.

Your official designation date will be the date your certificate is printed. You may NOT use the designation until your certificate is printed."

Whew, glad that is over.
2+ years of Prep.
2 weeks of studying Everyday.
1 week 60 hour Review Session.
1 250 questions 6 hour exam.
1 Week of Red Tape cutting to get my experience certified.

I like how they had to tell me I'm not allowed to call myself a CISSP UNTIL I get the certificate in the mail.

Let's hear it for resiliency and security at ICANN. Two of the 13 internet root DNS servers came under a Denial of Service attack on Tuesday. Did you notice? I didn't.

I received an email from ISC2 today stating that I had passed the CISSP Exam! Now I have to submit my resume and a signed statement from another CISSP or Corporate Officer so that they can verify my experience. That's in the works now. I'm almost certified! Now all I have to do is maintain the certification, which requires that you maintain a certain number of Continuing Education credits every year. Of course, they don't tell you any of the details of that UNTIL you are certified so I have to wait to find out exactly what I have to do for that.

Does everyone else know that Congress moved daylight savings time back like 3 weeks? It starts Sunday March 11th this year. (Halo's Birthday actually) That is too weird. I predict Mass Chaos on that Monday, half the country will go into work an hour late. Okay maybe just little chaos, but still not very well publicized. Make sure you patch your PC or it won't know to change either.