HPUX CSE exam is coming

I emailed the HP certified people on Friday asking about the HPUX CSE Networking and Security exam. I passed the first half of the exam in October, I have been waiting for them to write and release the second half. (It will likely be a difficult exam...) Anyhow, they emailed me back and told me I can expect to see it by the end of this month. Good news, but I haven't even looked over the exam topics, to see where I need to study to plug any holes. (My bet is that they have NIS on the exam, we have never run it here, I have never used it. Same with HP IDS.) The book for the different exams on the core is 1600 pages, the parts I need to look through total about 600 pages. I have started reviewing it. Another reason I am motivated is that someone at work studied for a month and went out and took the HPUX CSA exam, which is the one I have held for 5 years. (I thought it was pretty easy at the time...) He doesn't actually do anything involved with the OS, really, but he took the exam. I just can't see staying on the same certification level as him, and there is no way in the world he will be able to pass the CSE just by studying. (Unless he's one of those photographic memory people, which I doubt based on the amount of email he used to print out and save for future reference.) Anyhow, he's provided extra motivation.

I am also reading a book called "Joseph Smith - Rough Stone Rolling". It's interesting, but it seems to read kind of slow. I am reading a book called "The Planets", (self describing) and a book called "Dean & Me (A Love Story)" by Jerry Lewis.

Coming home tonight, I wondered why I was reading 4 books at once. It's not like I don't have anything else to do.

I figure it's because I am starting to feel better in general. (I got a larger dose of thyroid medicine yesterday.) Added to that, at work I have been working on a number of different things at once, and sometimes it's hard to stop thinking about it. At least when I read a book I can fill one of the lanes of that multi track I have in my head. If the TV is on, or I am walking somewhere, and another is taken up. Anyhow, that might not be it at all, maybe I just shook something loose again and need to ingest a large amount of information. I don't think it's the fact that it's winter now, I sometimes do it in the summer.

On my web browser, I have 9 different sites as my home pages. (Another plug for firefox here.) A couple of them are for work, 4 of them are pages in the forums, just so I can see what people are posting, if a topic is interesting I will follow it all day. (I use the Firefox "refresh every" extension to reload the pages for me every couple of minutes. Yet another plug for firefox.) Anyhow, at work, some of those things keep me busy. (In addition to the large number of things I do at work.)

I try to keep these posts fairly short, now look what I have done.

Anyway, I have these 4 books to read, then 4 more lined up right behind them. If you have book suggestions, I think I'm open to them. (Unless I have read them already.)