I am currently developing technical training materials for a customer engagement for rPath. I had been looking forward to an opportunity to do something like this as a branch of my technical writing, and I have enjoyed the challenge. Also, with each new section of the training material, I can envision another approach to the training as a whole.

There are several different approaches to training, each based on a philosophy about training best practices. I typically see training three categories: informative, persuasive, and procedural. Informative training is hardly what I would call "training"; it is really more like reading a reference guide or spec sheet. Concept documents and product overviews fall into the informative category of training. Persuasive training is the sales or marketing pitch for the subject matter. Unlike the informative training goal of simply conveying information to the student, persuasive training tailors the message to persuade the student that the subject is a worthwhile investment. Finally, procedural training minimizes or eliminates the persuasive message and provides concise instructions on how to do something.

Most training that I have developed has been a combination of informative, persuasive, and procedural. The balance between those three is determined by the audience, and the content and style used to train the audience is the art of training development. For technical training, the presentation, handouts, guides, and other materials should carry the course, allowing the presenter to be a facilitator to the student learning, not the sole resource for training.

In my current materials, it is often hard not to put a marketing spin on some of the information. My initial approach was to give high-level all-encompassing information about rPath technologies, combining informative and persuasive approaches, before going into the technical procedural portions of the training. However, after better understanding the needs of the audience and the expectations of the customer, the persuasive and high-level material was minimized, informative materials were changed to links for more information, and the focus became the procedural material. This also meant that any supporting information was only provided in the course if we perceived it necessary to understand the procedure; otherwise we provided links to learn more about it beyond the scope of the course. The result is a very customized presentation and hands-on training that caters to the customer's needs and expectations.

I love custom training! Customers appreciate instruction that is tailored to meet their specific needs. Even when presenting general information, I like to draw examples from the customer cases in the audience to make it meaningful to those students. Developing such training, though, can be time-consuming without a good basic, modular document structure on which to base the instructions. What I am working toward is a good base of instructional documents in modules specific to particular rPath technologies and appliance building activities. Eventually, some form of web-based training could make use of these modules. My enthusiasm for developing training is a sure lead-in to creating and employing these modules as rPath continues to address its customers' training needs.

Sitting down at my desktop PC, named Holly, the moment I get home from work is a dangerous thing. I often stay there for hours taking care of long-put-off tasks. Last night I was still sitting there when Letterman went off the air at 0130...

I started the evening running conary updateall on my Foresight installation. Because I had some installLabelPath issues on my ThinkPad, Newcastle, that was throwing wrenches in my updates, I checked that before I started. Everything seemed to work fine, and I shutdown and restarted the system after the update before continuing.

After the update, I could not connect to my wireless access point. I initially thought it was an issue with the system, but a wired connection also failed on both that system and another system. I rebooted my router and all connectivity issues were resolved.

Lessons learned:
* I have to add a setting to NetworkManager I use to access my company's VPN without losing access to servers that aren't behind the VPN. The setting I have to add is "Only use VPN connection for these addresses," and I seem to be the only one in the company to run into this problem. This is a baffling issue, and not likely related to my system as it has happened on both Newcastle and Holly.
* Having deleted /media at one point a couple of months ago broke the HAL+pmount behaviors of automatically mounting any USB media and restricted all read/write access to manually mounted vfat volumes to root only. I recreated /media, and everything just worked again, "automagically!" \o/
* The iPod works on Holly the same way it has been working on Newcastle: it mounts and launches Banshee quite nicely; the Banshee eject fails entirely with the message "eject failed for /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_89CF_4C12: Unknown failure"; the unmount volume on the desktop icon unmounts the volume and yet displays the error "eject: unable to open `/dev/sdb2'"

When I took my IT training at ECPI in 2000-2001, I admired one of my instructors, Dave Billings, a great deal for his effort to make our experiences as "real world" as possible. He would also provide us with words to live by with regards to particular technologies and for our IT careers. He said our two goals in IT were:
1 - To find a job
2 - To keep a job

This stuck with me, but what I didn't connect to was the damaging effects of finding a comfort zone in an IT career. I recall a COBOL programmer, who had been within a couple years of retirement, was in my class hoping to learn the new skills necessary to get a new job after being downsized by the company where he had put in so many years. Today, the comfort zone and years of dedicated service are not as important as the types and extent of experience the of individual in current technologies. IT rewards the individuals who are constantly moving and improving, not those who have found a comfy spot and stay with it.

Finding a job for me was not terribly difficult. I learned not to look for system and network administrator jobs for which I had been trained. I had very little professional experience in those areas, and it would be a long time in some tedious entry-level positions I could make a name for myself and progress in my career. When I learned to look for writing and training, where I already excelled and had strong references, I found jobs that I could love and a career path that brought me hope and happiness.

Keeping the job became a new matter entirely. Work consumed my thoughts, and I would get focused on the niche. I was keeping up with the industry, but only in the narrow areas where my efforts were applied. After office closings, company bankruptcies, potential layoffs, and limited budgets, I learned that the only way I would move forward is to avoid the comfort zone and constantly prepare for my next direction.

Today I spoke with a former coworker who recently left a job, recognizing the need to make his own path instead of expecting the company to reward him for his service. He sounds much happier now, and I'm glad he has been able to move forward.

That conversation was my periodic reality check. I have once again found a job I love, that is quite consuming, and that has provided a comfort zone of sorts. The difference now, though, is that as I carry on my job responsibilities, I am also ensuring I have the necessary skills/contacts/portfolio for the paths ahead of me. I LOVE where I am working now and the opportunities and responsibilities it offers, so here's hoping my paths include more of the upward instead of the outward ones. :-)

(This is the sort of mentality conveyed in the bestselling book Who Moved My Cheese?, which I received as a gift and enjoyed and appreciated a great deal.)

So I've made some progress learning all the little things I can do to configure a GDM login theme. I finished making changes to my first theme and I'm now working on adjusting the second one. After I do these, I thought I'd play around with a couple for rPath Linux and Foresight, for those so inclined to use them. I'll get those packaged and into an rBuilder Online project at some point, too.

Love doing this stuff. :-)

I have discovered I cannot run gdmsetup with sudo in Foresight. The sudo call hangs with no results. I have only been able to run it if I log in as root either initially or in a nested window. Ah well... another reason to echo that I'm grateful for nested windows. :D

Okay, I don't really have the "GDM Login Fu" yet, but I'm working on it. After my own futile search for docs, I was directed to some docs that helped me in better understanding the nodes used in my Gnome.xml files and applied them to one of the two themes I've been working on. I discovered that two labels in the same box will not align independently. Hopefully in the next week I can take time to learn the rest of the code and finish editing Gnome.xml for each my themes.