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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?"
Then once I got there it was a week of "If you encrypt your traffic," (thusly losing the ability to QoS that traffic), "you only need to firewall your management boxes and vlan off all of your VoIP endpoints!" Cue the rest of the class firewalling off their management boxes from everyone else (including themselves) *sigh*
with another member of the IT staff from the college I worked at, back in the early PC days. Think it was the fall of 89. It was a half day thing on a Saturday for PC maintenance. In those days power supply to the motherboard was tricky, my co-host found out the hard way when she hooked one up backwards and it kinda went boom when she powered it up.
;)
That was not quite as spectacular as the time a prof at the college hooked up two PC's via serial cables, one of them being on an AV cart (and plugged into it) - seems the cart was wired wrong, when he fired those up there was an small explosion, a fair bit of smoke and some actual pieces of the serial card from one of the pc's strewn about the case.
Ah, the good old days - I worked on Tandy machines that had fully exposed power supplies, took one apart once (the PC not the power supply!) and wondered what the whirring sound was, thing was still running
Oh that I could go back to the day of swapping floppy disks to run stuff.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I've GIVEN some great, and somewhat bad talks in my day - every good speaker will tell you the same thing.
Most of the bad talks were situations where I was asked to sub for someone - or an area where I "WANTED" to be an expert - but really wasn't.
Many times, after a talk, I find that something I said was just plain wrong - it happens - to everyone - even the best speakers out there.
They key is, as an attendee, to not sit around and waste time listening to a bad speaker. I just quietly walk out, picking up an evaluation form in the process, and making sure the instructor gets my feedback.
As an occasional bad speaker - the best thing an audience member can do for me is to let me know if I have gotten it wrong! In the end, the only way tp turn a bad speaker into a good one - is through feedback - even if it is "YOU SUCK!"
I'm attending a course on web design in my college this semester.
The TA that's giving the lectures:
However, two years ago I took a course given by a guy who told a friend of mine "Stop surfing the internet! Or else you won't know how to use Internet Explorer!" (yeah, it loses a bit in translation).
He could spend two hours explaining how to navigate to a bloody webpage from IE 6. And then how to add a crappy link to whatever IE calls bookmarks.
And when I said "could", I mean "did".
Repeatedly.
By the FSM's noodly appendage, I wish I was making this crap up.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I felt bad for the presenter of a two day course on SOA. No one told him that our business model revolves around building totally custom solutions that are rarely, if ever, allowed to talk to the open 'net. I finally explained this to him and he looked crestfallen. He asked the class (of engineers) and everyone agreed that we couldn't use any of it. A waste of time for all involved, costing many thousands of dollars.
The university for which I worked promised an "advanced" email workshop. Thinking that I might learn something halfway interesting or useful about the filing system or filtering or whatever, I signed up. After all, I act as my department's tech rep and have to keep up on things in order to counsel my colleagues!
So I waltz into the computer labs one sunny August afternoon, ready for my "advanced" workshop fun. And what awaited me was the most painful IT experience of my life as the instructor walked us through the "advanced" complexities of logging in, clicking on subjects to read messages, clicking on buttons to reply or delete. We didn't even get to Reply All, CC or BCC, let alone folder, filters or the rest of the software options I'd expected them to cover.
I asked why this was considered to be at an advanced level. The woman running the workshop said that this was as much as anyone needed to know about the system, really. That's when I tuned out and starting making some ASCII art to pass the time.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
I took the advanced C++ class at my university the first quarter after they made the class transition from Pascal. I had prior work experience as a C++ programmer, so I figured it would be an easy A. Boy, was I wrong!
The professor was like 80 years old. He must have been around before they developed the one in binary and only had zeros. That in itself isn't so bad, except that he didn't bother to even crack the book to teach C++. He'd give examples and try to work problems on the whiteboard in some kind of pseudo language that wasn't Pascal, definitely wasn't C++, and that hopelessly confused the students who didn't have a really good grasp of the language. Oh, it gets better, though.
His TA, the girl who graded our labs, knew even less. We had a lab where we had to implement a complex number class, ho hum. The instructions stated that we had to develop methods to do things like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. complex numbers, but they didn't explicitly state what we had to call our functions.
Any C++ programmer worth anything would know that the obvious thing to do is to overload the +, -, *, and / operators so that they could accept complex number arguments and return the appropriate result. I spent a few hours working on it, churned out my class, and when I got the lab back, she had failed me!
I asked why she gave me an F, and she explained that I was supposed to implement the functions using names like add, subtract, etc. I told her that that was nowhere in the instructions for the lab, and she admitted that it was okay to use other function names, but operator overloading was a no-no. Of course, I asked why, and her answer—I kid you not—was that because if you overloaded the operators, other programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between your class and built-in types. I argued vehemently that that was the point of operator overloading, that it was an extremely common practice in C++, but she wouldn't be convinced.
It was toward the end of the semester, so I took the lab to my professor and explained to him what was going on. I even took a C++ best practices book with me to show what I was talking about and to prove that I'm not some crackpot stupid student trying to eek out a few extra points. The professor proceeded to explain to me that the university had just informed him that they were letting him go after the semester, that they were firing him. (His words exactly, not mine.) He said that if I had a problem with my grade, I needed to take it up with the TA, because he wasn't going to override anything she said.
In all the programming classes I took at the university, that was the only one in which I got a B, and I was absolutely furious. Not so much because of the negligible impact to my GPA, but because it's the only time I've ever gotten a grade that I truly felt like I didn't deserve, and it was all because of an idiot professor who didn't give a damn about anything (gee, I wonder why they fired him) and a TA who didn't know crap about the subject that she was grading us on.
It's too bad, too. All of my other experiences at the university were relatively pleasant, and I'm a life member of the alumni association today. But that one incident still sticks in my mind as the height of stupidity. I wish now that I had had the balls to escalate it to the dean or maybe even higher. I can't help but wonder how many students failed or otherwise did miserably in that class because of him, and I can't help but wonder if any of them gave up computer science because of that bad experience. God, I hope not.
Got similar from the "Intro to C++" professor I had. "I'm now showing you an array, which the school doesn't want me to teach," he said. When queried why, it turns out that the morons that the "guidance counselors indicated had high computer aptitude" couldn't wrap their heads around a basic, simple array. We had OUR education dumbed down 'cause of some kid that shouldn't have been in the class to begin with.
Oh you're telling me. In Ontario, Canada about 4 years ago we were using PII-400s with 4GB hard drives and 64MB of RAM to install Windows NT Server 4 as part of our Advanced Operating Systems course component. Suffice to say it took all class to format/install the OS. Then the instructor informs us that the next class's itinerary included formatting and re-installing NT so we could become more familiar with the installation routine.
A few of us who were expecting to delve into Linux, Windows XP, domains, etc. at the time asked if we could divert and do some other activities or atleast explore the NT server we'd already installed and he told us no, he couldn't set up individual lesson plans for select groups so we'd have to follow with the rest of the class. So we all developed mysterious illnesses the next day.
This class was an advanced component covering operating systems in an industry grade (and "industry developed") three year program and it listed no pre-requisites. Some of the people in our course couldn't even type letalone operate a modern PC - forget servers, switches, routers or the like - a word processor was fascinating and the rest of us had to suffer for it.
Our Telephony course had a mid-term required 30 page (double spaced) report due on the history, present, and future of telephony (one could easily write 300 pages but I digress). So here I am busting my hump, dissapointed in myself for only managing 26 or 27 pages, which I hole punch and hand in in a nicely coloured duo-tang on the prescribed day and what do I see from my classmates? 2, 3 and 4 page reports with a staple at the top corner, pictures galore (lots of photos of Alexander Bell, pictures of old telephones, new telephones) and due to the overwhelming complaints of the students the teacher had to give these people 'A' grades. So 4 pages double spaced with extra wide margins and 25% images with huge headers printed with 30 point font get an 'A' which completely invalidated my 27 page hand-in.
n.b. Our final exam in that class was open book in absurdia. Anything you could bring in on paper was allowed. If you could wheel a filing cabinet into the exam room it was permitted. The failure rate was more than 60% until the students whined.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Oh, it was around. It was back rub for a while and Google.stanford.edu for a while. The google.com domain was registered in 1997 or so and it was moved there.
:## wasn't just a joke.
I actually remember hitting the Google.stanford.edu implementation a few times. My ISP had a BBS that I used to connect with because I didn't have the Internet connection kit yet. That's what they called the early web browsers. They packaged the browser and some Compuserve 3 month trial thing and called it a kit. (windows still didn't have one stock at that time) The big search thing back then was aggregates like BigFoot where they presented you with what you wanted instead of doing a web search.
Those where the days when the E-commerce buz meant a business having a single page web presence and a few email addresses they had to check on dial up. It was more like a page in the phone book but without a fancy way of finding entries. But that was when outlook did the mailbox thing and you could basically use it as a fetchmail server and an interoffice messaging system without needing exchange.
Yea, Good times. the days when C: enter
I always wonder why so much traffic on SlashDot ( or web based public interfaces like this ) can be so confrontational. That was never my intention. I guess, yes, I defend the Notes development process after it got past version 3.x. Internally the first decent Notes was 2.15a and it still used a flat namespace. With Notes 2.15a a person could click on a link on a document and the client would go retrieve the linked to document from some other server and some other database if needed. That was pretty cool when NCSA Mosiac was just getting into the hands of people and Netscape did not yet exist. People could develop applications in a flash, with basic fields and then just drop it on a server and it worked. Debugging was sometimes horrible. Development of more complex applications required some real tricky knowledge at times. Version 3.0c ( a stack of floppies that I still have somewhere ) was a pretty decent revision and I made a ton of money with it. Version 4 was even better with the scripting ability.
I was at camp Microsoft in 1997 meeting with the Exchange team as well as the early Microsoft Transaction server teams and I am happy to say that I got to meet some really brilliant people. Truely gifted software engineers and developers that impressed me completely. My host was Jeff Raikes and he made sure that the Lotus Notes team people were very well taken care of at a five star golf resort. It was pretty cool to meet a real software billionaire that got up every morning to go to work for another billionaire. He asked for input and he got it, straight from people that lived and breated Notes for years. I was one of those people that had to guts to tell him that Exchange was crippled in many ways despite the lavish hotel. I ended up with a few Microsoft people sitting with me on the plane and we all worked over a business issue and they went off to code it all up in Exchange. I did it in Notes in two days flat.
So, to make a long story short, I defend the Notes process because it works very well. Today and yesterday going back years. I think that IBM has dumped their business units that can not longer show profit ( like PCs anymore ) and they are sticking with technologies that have real serious value longterm. I see Lotus is still in there and Notes just keeps on going and going. I stand by my words that in the event of a complete atomic meltdown there will be cockroaches, UNIX, Lotus Notes and Cher. Not necessarily in that order
I'm sorry, but I think you were saying that Exchange was potential competition way back then. It wasn't. Still isn't. In my opinion.