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Your Worst IT Workshop?
suntory writes "I am a lecturer at a Spanish university. This week had to attend a workshop on 'Advanced HTML and CSS' for the university staff. Some of the ideas that the presenter (a fellow lecturer) shared with us: IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website; you can view the source for most CSS, Javascript and HTML files, so you can freely copy and paste what you feel like — the Internet is free you know; same applies for images, if you can see them in Google Images Search, then you can use them for your projects. Of course, the workshop turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of time. So I was wondering what other similar experiences you have had, and what was your worst IT workshop?"
I submitted this post in 1997 when I used the slashdot id suntory. I can't believe the admins are THIS slow. It still was a bad conference then.
I took the How to be the Web's Best Editor workshop offered by Slashdot. What a disaster.
I submitted an article on it a few months ago. They posted it to the front page 3 or 4 times. Just search for keywords: bestt editer
Microsoft?
It was an AskSlashdot session which was full of the worst possible examples.
**Whoosh**! The woman instantly tears into the instructor's hard drive like in one of those hacker movies and starts moving and deleting files! The instructor dived for her own laptop and yanked the Ethernet cable. I'm still not all sure what really happened there.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
However I DID have an IT guy tell me with a straight face that windows out of the box is more secure than any given Linux install out of the box. He backed down pretty quick when I suggested that we install both OSes on a machine connected to the open Internet, though...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While not exactly a workshop per se, it was the biggest waste of time. My employer basically paid for me to have people try to sell me stuff. Aren't the sales people supposed to be paying me for my time in the form of free lunches, dinners, blow and strippers?
If it happened in 1997, chances are very good they no longer exist. Problem solved. No cost.
I once attended a Windows 3.1 seminar back in 1994 where some jackass kept complaining that I sat in HIS chair (out of 300 identical folding chairs) after the lunch break.
He was about a foot taller and at least 30 lbs heavier than me. I finally told him to shut the hell up or we could go outside and I would kick his butt. He shut the hell up and apologized later.
That's about all I remember from that seminar.
5 minutes later, by accident, he clicks on the link, triggering a cascade of pop-ups with naked men in front of the class, which was laughing it's lungs out...
This was a class offered internally by Intel --
...... I lasted until the morning break - then went back ot my office to get some work done .....
So this total propeller head who's teaching the class says "Perl is the easiest language to learn - very natural and logical syntax"
Its not the years, its the mileage
I once had an instructor at an introductory level programming class (which I was required to take and they refused to let me test out of) try to insist that in C and C++ the int in the line:
int main()
stands for initialize. No amount of arguing with the instructor could convince him that it was declaring the return type of the main function as an integer. As it happens the instructor was also head of the computer science department. I spent the rest of that semester teaching the entire class after the instructor left because I felt bad for them. They all agreed I did a much better job than the instructor. I would have gotten a job as a teacher there, but they couldn't afford my rate.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I was at a conference one time where an HP guy gave a lecture, and during the Q&A people asked why HP hasn't moved to 64 bit yet, like DEC had, etc.
Guy got really mad and started pretty much yelling at people, saying that 64 bit has twice as many bits and is therefore half as fast as 32 bit computing.
People didn't even bother laughing at him. Everyone just looked at him like he was an idiot.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
At least the name is truth in advertising.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I went to this PLC (Programmable Logic Controller, that's industrial control for you computer geeks). It started OK, with some drone showing off Schneider Electric's new Contactor (the TeSys U, a "smart" contactor with a LCD display, over/under load protection, short-circuit protection,.. whatever). Later on comes this guy, making some really bad jokes and then laughing himself -- the rest of us just laughed at the way he laughed, he was really loud. So, he shows some PLC basics. All was fine...
Next day he said, well, we're finished with the PLC stuff (actually we were finished with some really really bird's eye view of Ladder diagrams), now we'll see some SCADA. So the guy start showing this REALLY CRAPPY 16-bit app, and he showed ONE BY ONE every single widget (buttons, bar graphs, even some motors that changed colors to show when the output was running). And the library was H U G E. THOUSANDS of widgets. And he showed them "oh, look at how many of them there are! Just see how flexible this program is! See! We even have traffic lights! Buttons! Little trucks, big trucks, cars...".
I went outside and came back in 1 hour, and the guy was STILL SHOWING the fucking widgets and how to place and connect them. Needless to say, I didn't stay.
If I went to a Web seminar like the one described in the story, and it didn't mention building sites on top of a CMS, I'd question the presenter and the company that paid for me to go. There is no reason that your average person needs to know HTML or CSS, as those should be handed over to DESIGNERS, people skilled with making things look good. If you want to see what it looks like when everyday people do design just go over to MySpace (akkkk).
No, that would be "by Dummies."
Or some such similar nonsense.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Apple developer conference, I think just before 10 came out. In every session during Q&A we would tell Apple what was wrong with the OS and things that didn't work. The answer in each session was "That's a third party developer opportunity". Everyone was so pissed. It still makes me mad.
I was in a training session where the 'instructor' was asked what a double was and he explained it was called a double becuase it held two variables. I almost walked out of the class.
we had a guy once that SOME HOW managed to shove a P8 connector into a wd hard drive with out realizing it, turned it on and went to the bathroom while it booted.. all i remember was sitting at the register checking someone out and seeing smoke coming from behind the tech bench.. walked over and the damn thing had caught on fire.... thank god they fired him a few years later...................
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Needless to say, the talk contained no useful information at all.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I swear to God, the first words from the presenters mouth: "That Exchange thing Microsoft is building is no threat to us, and here is why....."
Yeah, similar thing happened to me. I had a database luddite for a lecturer and he failed me for using temporary views to solve a certain problem as he'd rather I did subselects, even though my SQL was simpler to read, and scaled a lot better for huge datasets.
As this was part of the final project, of course I failed the subject...
The Ironic part was, my solution turned out to be be THE ONLY way to do some complex data mining in MySQL 3.something for my first IT job. Imagine the lulz that were had by my boss when he found out that the solution that got the CFO off his back was also responsible for me failing databases 1001...
oh the humanity
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
I worked for a corporate training company in the early 1990s. One client was moving from mainframes from UNIX and the unhappy employees were forced to train on UNIX or find work elsewhere. Naturally they took it out on the instructor. The worst was a guy who didn't touch type, but did all of his typing with the eraser end of a wooden pencil. The only thing more terrible than watching paint dry is watching the pencil-eraser-typing guy learn vi.
Have you considered a career at Microsoft?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.