January 28, 2010
Dear Everyone:
One month ago today, my home
laptop crashed, taking my checking account,
in MS Money, with it. I was
able to get started in Quicken, but it only pulled the last three
months, beginning with October, 2009, from the
Credit Union’s online
site. And I suppose I could
have just used that. You
don’t keep all your returned checks and banking statements for more than
four years.
But I liked having the complete history of that account, which I opened
in June, 2003, and had always monitored on the computer.
So I pulled the backup, which I had completed on December 27th,
into a “free” trial copy of MS Money.
Once I had all six years of transactions restored from the
backup, I was able to make a “report” of everything in MS Money.
I captured a screen shot of each screen in MS Money, cropped it in
MS
Paint and pasted it into a
Word document.
73 pages worth. Every
weekend, and most evenings, I’ve been adding all those older
transactions, starting in June, 2003, into Quicken.
By last Monday I had entered all the transactions.
However, there was still a problem.
According to Quicken, I had a current balance of $155,000+ in my
checking account. Don’t I
wish! Also, according to
Quicken, I was living about $20,000 in the hole all through 2007.
I know that didn’t really happen.
If I’d been that far in the red, I’d have been saying, “Good
morning, Deputy” as they hauled me away for bouncing checks.
So Monday evening, I started going through the MS Money “report” with
Quicken line-by-line. Pretty
soon I spotted the first of many instance where I had transferred money
from my savings account into my checking account because I knew I had a
large check to write. Like
when the credit account got a little high, or I was planning on writing
a lot of checks to charitable organizations near the end of the year.
Next thing you know, everything’s back in the black and Quicken and the
online account summary are in agreement.
Hallelujah! Now I can
start paying bills again, without having to write everything in the
checkbook.
In other news…
We had a “status” meeting this week with all of the people who are
working on creating a Computer Based Training (CBT) of the
SharePoint for
Power Users training that is currently only available in Instructor Led
Training (ILT) in “Hobby” and here in “Pleasanton”.
The classes are so popular that we had to add an additional class
last month because there were so many people on the Waiting List.
We even had three people who flew all the way from
Kazakhstan
just to take the two-day class (and do some sightseeing in the
Bay
Area.) The non-US locations
are eagerly awaiting the CBT.
The Director of the IM Academy wants to get the first four Modules of
the new CBT out to the testers as soon as possible.
It was decided at the last such meeting that one person would
produce the “movies” of all the mouse-moves and typing that illustrates
each set of lessons in a Module.
Once he “produces” the “movie” of each module, one of us goes through
it, drafting a “script” for the voiceover that will be recorded to go
with each “movie”. Also in
the meeting this week were the two Information Technology Professionals
who currently present the training here in “Pleasanton”.
They had already recorded videos of them reading scripts to a
camera. We call them “the
talking heads.”
I explained the process we go through to draft the scripts.
First we go through the “movie” to get familiar with it.
Then we type in the “stage directions” (“Click Next”, "Click Site
Actions”) that show what the “movie” is doing with the mouse and
keyboard. Next we add any
information that appears in the exercise as it is done by students in a
physical class.
Finally, we watch a video of the two “talking heads” as they were
conducting an actual class back in October.
This is to mine any additional “nuggets” that came up in the
class. An example of this is
where the script points out that “if you see the ‘Settings’ button on
the Action Bar, that is a clue that you have Site Administrator rights
on this site.” The “talking
heads” told us not to waste any more time watching the videos as they
would “nugget-ize” the scripts themselves.
Modules 0 through 3 will be “produced” together for some testers to try
out. We don’t want to get
too far down the road if something we’re doing now doesn’t make sense to
the testers and has to be changed.
In the meantime, I’ll be starting on Module 5 tomorrow.
And I’ve already let it be known that I’m interested in teaching
the Power Users class here in “Pleasanton”.
Even when we do have the CBT in place, there are always people
who learn better in a classroom setting and will be willing to pay the
cost of it.
Remember, we still need rain and lots of snow in the mountains.
Love, as always,
Pete
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