Worms!
I’m not exactly sure why I feel the need to share this. I was walking through a local variety store (think Target) that has a large sporting goods section. They had a big white fridgedator with the following sign:
Seems to be an excellent example of good marketing.
Tis The Season For Bad PowerPoint!
Bad PowerPoint! Bad! Bad!
This actually came from a white paper, but it supported a presentation at ASTD — so I suspect this appeared in a PPT deck. I’m hoping the red/green color scheme was for the holidays, and not their idea of great readability.
I’m Selling Offsets For Bad Training — Do You Need Some?
I was reading a magazine in the doctor’s office yesterday, and there was a long article about how we should all be using business jets because we get there faster, don’t have to stand in line, and can get those little bottles of bubbly as we cruise along the skyway. There was the obligitaory sidebar that mentioned that a few folks pointed out that sending one corporate exec (or former vice-president) on a trip created more pollution than was really necessary. Good news — you can buy a carbon offset for your sins, and plant some trees to suck up all that CO2.
It got me to thinking. Sometimes I produce some training that is pretty awful. (Clients with shrinking budgets, morphing specs, or just a total lack of a clue will cause this.) It would really make me feel better if I could purchase some kind of AwfulTrainingOffset(tm) that would help build a school in Arkansas or provide a scholarship for a beauty college student. Maybe it could fund a home for old bloggers, a drug to make people listen, or just a paper sack that learners could use to get their shit together.
How about you? Have you produced anything that you’d rather not remember? Were there times that you snuck in and removed your name from the “page properties” or deleted yourself from the team alias? Much like the Catholic Church, I’m here for you. Just admit to your sin in the comments below, promise to do better, and I’ll try to teach my dog to sit.
Bless you.
Out, Damned Software! Cleaning Out The Weeds From Your Windows Garden
I tend to be hard on computers. Not the shiny little boxes — but the soft, squishy insides. My wife, who’s a network tech, says I can screw up a 
perfectly good ‘puter faster than anyone she knows. (And she spends all day working in a middle school with teenagers.) So I’ve pretty much resigned myself to having to “lather, rinse, repeat” my entire box about every two months. Windows gets sluggish, I watch the little hourglass, and the BSOD comes to visit me.
But I may have found salvation. I just ran across a little freeware app called Revo Unistaller and it’s pretty neat. It takes the place of the Windows “uninstall” function, but goes far beyond. It searches your registry and drive to find all those little tendrils that were left, and lets you snip them off and kill them dead. I’ve tried it on some stuff that was causing me grief, and it got them gone.
I also read (in a MS blog, of all places) that another little trick is recreate your profile:
- Back up everything
- Log off
- Log on as admin
- DELETE YOUR LOGIN (Danger, Will Robinson!)
- Recreate your login
- Enjoy
That will be the next one I try. Stay tuned.
Rule #1: Don’t Cause Me Pain!
Losing football coaches always talk about how they didn’t deliver 
on the fundamentals. I’ve been annoyed, lately, by the number of web interactions that seem to fail on the very simple metric of pain. The more pain you cause me in your process, the less likely I’m going to complete the experience.
It’s often the little things that are just completely unnecessary, that some coder or anal-retentive type thought would be a good idea. So just to make sure that nothing could possibly go wrong, they put up a silly barrier.
Example #1: Entering The “Year” For My Credit Card I buy lots of stuff online (well, too much) and each time they want to know the month and year of my card expiration. OK, fair enough. Buy why must you make me enter a four digit year? I lived through the Y2K non-event, and I understand the issue. But wait a minute — is it possible that my card actually expires in 1910? 3010? Not Freakin’ Likely
So just write a little script that lets me enter two digits, and then adds “20″ to the front. I can’t imagine that we’d have a lot of trouble in the next several hundred years.
Example #2: Phone Numbers
I often find an online form that errors out because I entered a dash in my phone number — the way the entire world does — and the system wants only numbers. (Don’t believe me? Try to log in at T-Mobile!) If your developer can’t write a script that filters this, fire him/her and I’ll get you one with a brain.
Example #3: Skip To Next Field When I’m entering a series of items (like a software serial number) and you have five fields, after I enter the first characters the entry point should automatically skip to the next field. Again, if your dev says “no” just give me a call — operators are standing by.
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How are you performing on the fundamentals? What grinds your gears?
Staying Connected With The World
I’m in Minnesota this morning (a balmy 10 degrees), connecting using my new Verizon Wireless Broadband. It is wireless, but “broad” may be a bit too strong a word for the level of connection. I’m on the third floor next to the windows, but only get a piddly two bars of connection.
It’s funny how you have to re-set your expectations as life changes. I’ve got a couple of browser windows open so I can let stuff trickle in, I’ve set 
Outlook to “Headers Only”, and I’m saving those video links for later viewing. But I can adjust, once I re-set my expectations. I’m seeing learners doing that in a variety of situations lately.
For quite a while, e-learning was expected to be entertaining. Lots of flash (little “f”), lots of glitz, and things flying around on the screen. Peppy music, learning games — learners were king and expected to be treated as such. But I sense that some of that is coming to an end.
There is a renewed questioning of what we’re doing in the online learning world, and whether the expense (both dollars and organizational) are really necessary. Is it important that people are “happy” while they’re learning? Do we care whether it’s easy for them to stay engaged? Should this experience be any easier than learning fractions in the third grade?
Maybe it’s ok to have different levels of instructional quality depending on the needs (and resources) of the organization. Maybe sometimes it’s supposed to be hard.
I’m here to help my mom make a final transition to something better. We’re all working on making it easier, and I think we’re making a difference. But, in the end, she’ll be making the decisions on the journey.