I’ll call this day 0 since the main conference starts in earnest tomorrow. Today is similar to Sunday at Cisco Live US where it is mainly purchased labs and techtorials.
Location, Location, Location
Cisco Live Latin America is being held this year at the Moon Palace resort in Cancun, Mexico. I’m fortunate to be here through the generosity of Cisco and the Cisco Gateway program. I won their contest earlier in the month. For those of you that don’t know, the Cisco Gateway is an influencer program run by Cisco through Influitive. There are challenges that you can earn points by learning about Cisco and their products. Social media sharing is also a big part of the Gateway.
I arrived yesterday, Sunday, to Cancun and the conference site. Transportation was provided by Cisco from the airport to the hotel. I was able to check-in for the hotel, get a bite to eat, and register for the event in quick succession at the Moon Palace Arena. By the time I got to my room the bell hops had already gotten my luggage to my room very much like they do in Disney. All in all it was a really smooth and easy way to get from the airport to my room and be ready to go.
So we meet again old foe…
Today my only scheduled item was to take the TSHOOT exam to renew my CCNP. After the crash and burn on this test at Cisco Live US, I was glad to get a second crack at it. One thing I learned at Cisco Live US was that the second version of TSHOOT is nothing like the original and deserves a ton of respect. The bullseye method of old is no longer an option and there are many more tickets to complete. I will say that whoever this engineer named Junior is he shouldn’t be allowed to configure network devices.
The good news is that this time with only about 2 weeks of notice I was able to sharpen my troubleshooting tools and passed the exam. My kudos to the Cisco Learning digital library course and Boson’s ExamSim. Both were worth the money. One word of note, if you take an exam in Mexico, it may be in English, but the keyboard won’t be. Certain keys like / are in totally different places which makes a touch typist go nuts.
Get off my lawn…
So far the scale of the event reminds me a lot of the “good old days” back in the early 2000’s when Cisco Live US was under 10,000 attendees. I’m really hoping that some of the interactions with Cisco are similar. I really miss the days of having a Birds of a Feather session with 100 people and a panel from Cisco taking live questions.
Tomorrow I will be spending most of the day in a Cybersecurity summit. I’m really looking forward to this. After the summit and lunch will be the opening keynote which should also be good.