May 10, 2006
Dear Everyone:
Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there.
Still working on turning training for our Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) over to the “Learning Solutions” people. These are the folks who handle training for the applications and products offered by the Information Technology Company (ITC) of which I have been a part for just over a year now.
But the person (I’ll call her “Jane”) who has this assignment is not exactly jumping at the chance to take it over. Instead, she’s using the opportunity to evaluate a software application that helps you to develop what’s called Web-Based Training (WBT). This is the general direction that all training is heading in because then people can take the training whenever it fits into their schedule, instead of driving all the way to “Pleasanton” and taking four hours out of a busy day to take a class.
The drawback to WBT is that you can’t raise your
hand and ask a question the way you can in a hands-on classroom.
On the other hand, if you’re in
Yesterday, when I had my bi-weekly “update” meeting with my supervisor, he wanted to know when “Jane” could be expected to take over basic, generic classroom training. I told him the end of June. Then I went back to my office and sent her the bad news. Not unexpectedly, she called as soon as she got the email, but I was on a conference call and didn’t get back to her until almost the end of the day. (It’s been a very busy week, meetings-wise. I had two conference calls this morning, a driver safety class and a meeting to talk about, guess-what?, training this afternoon.)
We decided that we should spend all day Friday working on the training for Beginners. I even offered to drive up to her office in “Pleasant Hill”. It’s not that I’m all that eager to get rid of training; I actually enjoy the sessions, exhausting though they can be. But there are other projects on the horizon and we need to get this stuff off our collective plate. So there.
In other news…
“Jeannie” and I went to see
MI3 is better than your typical summer thriller in that you can actually follow the plot and it makes sense. There are plenty of chase scenes, but there’s a reason for them; everything from “I can’t make it to the roof! I’m coming out now!” to “They’re the security agents and they want to stop us.”
Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, the same character as in the previous two movies. But he’s no longer an active agent, he only teaches now. And he’s about to get married. And he can read lips. But then one of his protégés gets caught by the bad guys and he has to mount a rescue.
Which leads to snatching the really big bad guy, which leads to some spectacular pyrotechnics and a whole lot of other stuff. The bad guy is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in last year’s Capote. This time, as dead-eyed, pear-shaped evil incarnate, he’s right up there at the top.
It’s all a good enough excuse to sit in air-conditioned dark for a weekend afternoon.
Love, as always,
Pete
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