May 8, 2003
Dear Everyone:
Happy Mother’s Day to all you Mothers out there.
In other news…
Right when you figure out just where it’s at, somebody moves it.
I’d gotten pretty familiar with the new document management system. We had all the training materials all sorted out and arranged to where we could just take the originals down to the copy center and have them print the number of User Guides needed for a given class.
Then, last week, the project managers decided to get ready to release a bunch of “enhancements”. Which, of course, means all the instructions will be out-of-date when the enhancements are released in a couple of weeks. Not that this is a problem. Rewriting all the instruction materials will keep me nice and busy over the next week or so.
But I had a training session today, with the “old” instructions. And the training environment is the same as the testing environment, which means the enhancements are already in place. So training kind of went like this: “This is how you’ll do it for the next two weeks, then this is how you’ll do it today (in the training database) and after the next two weeks.” As if things weren’t confusing enough as it is.
Luckily, the only people who would use the most complex tool in the system won’t really be coming online until after the enhancements go into effect. So I think we dodged the bullet there.
We’re also planning on additional training over the next two weeks for all the people who have already been trained, but who need to know about the enhancements. This training will be done over the Intranet, using NetMeeting, a handy little application that lets multiple people hook up together via computer and hold a “virtual class”.
The downside to “virtual class” is that you can’t see the trainees, so you don’t know if they’re really “getting it”. The upside is that you can give the instructions sitting down. In a regular classroom setting, you’re on your feet all day, and projecting your voice so that the people in the back of the room can hear you. And jumping around from one person to another, when people get lost, or have questions. Or both. This can get quite tiring. By the end of the day, all I want to do is sit down and shut up.
So I will.
Last Sunday, “Jeannie” and I went to see X2, the sequel to X-Men. This is your basic, based-on-a-comic-book-series movie. Lots of special effects, virtually no plot. But hey! Hugh Jackman, no clothes. Need I say more? Or, as “Jeannie” said, “I just love a man in spandex.”
The Mutants have super powers. The humans feel threatened. Someone is trying to start a “sub-species” war. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan play the wiser, older opponents, rather like a pair of retired men playing chess at a gentlemen’s club. Eventually, they realize they must work together to combat a greater evil. Yada, yada, yada. Someone gives in to the impulse to do something utterly heroic. Relatively happy ending.
“Jeannie” has already declared this one a “renter”. Wait for it to come out on video or DVD. That way, when Jackman’s big scene shows up, you can hit “slo-mo”.
Apart from all that, the weather here in “sunny”
Love, as always,
Pete
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