Wassim

It’s funny how sometimes you think you are making progress, and suddenly something unexpected happens and destroys the flow. I was steadily improving my life: I was having less and less breaks during Insanity Max 30 sessions, studying more for the WCNA exam , enjoying good health. Then yesterday a colleague of mine opened the window, and a wind current stroke me while I was sitting in the middle of it. Needless to say, I am sick since yesterday. So I missed yesterday’s and today’s session of Insanity Max 30, and very probably tomorrow, since my health is still deteriorated. And I could not be as productive as usual at work. Yeah, I could have gone to the doctor. But it helps neither me nor my job to go on a sick leave now. And I could have pushed further and did the workouts anyway. But I know from experience that it would deteriorate my condition even further, because then I would have not given my body the chance to recover completely. Life is like that: just when ...

Every now and then I read an article about the value of Cisco certifications, and how they are declining over time. Depending on whether the question is from a perspective of advancing in career through another Cisco cert, or from the perspective of choosing a network certification between Cisco and another vendor. The question can have two or more logical answers. If I had to start from scratch once again and study for a Cisco certification, I would consider this set of thoughts before engaging in the cert journey. Is the Cisco certification relevant to my job? In the previous CCNP Security curriculum for example, we had an exam for each Cisco security product: one for ASA, one for VPN, one for ISE, etc. You get the idea. So if you work with Fortinet or Juniper instead most of the time, those Cisco security certs won’t be as much of value as you think. But, one of the reasons that Cisco certifications are in constant demand, is that Cisco continuously adapts its exams to the ma...

In November I slept, ate and worked more than spent time with family. This makes me uncomfortable because family should have been more important to me than fucking eating alone. And the Invest time in Myself project went to the bottom, which is a sign that I was not disciplined during November. Time Tracker November 2020

In this article I explain how I am preparing for the Wireshark WCNA exam. Study resources 1- Laura Chappell’s WCNA Official Study Guide ( here ) This is one of the best certification study guides I’ve ever read in IT. I loved Laura’s writing style. She sounds friendly and relaxed. No dry text. It sounds as if she is blogging not writing a technical book, which is nice. 2- Stevens’ TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol.1, 2nd Edition (here ) Preparing for the Wireshark WCNA exam requires solid TCP/IP knowledge. Unfortunately, this is one of missing points in the official study guide. So I searched the internet for a reliable source for TCP/IP knowledge. Richard Stevens is to me the best TCP/IP teacher that ever lived on Earth. He explains the TCP/IP stack to a T, using Unix. Even though I have a basic Linux experience (yet), I had no big difficulties following along with his examples. I was excited and ashamed at the same time. Ashamed because I graduated as a network engineer...

In Germany there are many opportunities to invest money. But for a Moslem like me, finding a Halal option is not an easy task. After intense Internet searches and countless hours, I stumbled across two companies that seem to offer halal products: INAIA GmbH Halalcheck4u.de The first one specializes in creating gold saving plans. The second one is a sort of personal finance focused company that analyses contracts and guides the customer to Halal alternatives. Here is my experience with both of them. INAIA Gmbh experience After booking a meeting I received a confirmation E-Mail with a link to a Zoom web conference. All details were there. The day of the meeting I found no issue dialing into the call. The voice quality was bad. The financial advisor did not wait a second and asked me to call on my mobile phone. The conversation went on both channels simultaneously: voice went on the phone, and the video presentation on Zoom. Since I have done my research, I was familiar with 75% of the pr...

On my way home I saw a man jogging in a shirt and shorts. It is 3°C outside. He was running the inclined trail going by the pedestrians, whose attention was caught for seconds. I also was a bit surprised to see such a thing in this weather. But soon I regrouped my thoughts. It did not make a sense to me. I do not want to judge this guy of being a pretender or a show-man. But I am not that impressed after all. I only saw him once and I take the same road home everyday and pretty much at the same time. To me, if he were to look really disciplined, then I should have seen him at least two times. It reminded me of my years in Tunisia, when I was jogging each weekend. I used to see a lot of new faces each weekend of spring time. Some of them were young guys “training” their muscles near the bar. I won’t forget that one guy who did pushups with a cigarette in his mouth! But very few faces were familiar from a weekend to another. I only remember one old man, jogging constantl...

If you ever listened to David Goggins in his audio-book, you would have heard about the 40% rule. Basically what it stipulates, is that we operate at our perceived maximum potential which is really no more than 40%. Since I was taking the Goggins model to heart, I started constantly pushing my limit physically. And yesterday, I reached my 40%. I did my shopping, did my Insanity Max 30 workout, took a shower, ate my dinner and started doing research on money investment. I read charts, studies, general financial tips, etc. This continued until around 10:45pm where I got a strong headache and I could not fixate my eyes on anything! I got very dizzy. I could neither stand still, nor sleep. Whenever I tried to lay my head on the pill, I got stronger headaches and a strong sense to vomit. I started breathing deeper. Many images are flipping in a circle around my head. They did not want to stop. I did not want to wake up my spouse. I literally crawled on the floor towards some medicines in ...