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?"

Wow!

[dada21 (163177)]

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.

Re:Wow!

[Pharmboy (216950)]

At least it isn't a dupe.

Yet.

Re:Wow!

[johnw (3725)]

Sad, but I do remember when I finally registered here (after months of lurking, I'd say), I felt like my UID was _really_ late compared to a lot of the 4-digits that were posting.

Wonder where they all went.

If you get here really early in the morning and keep very, very quiet then you may just spot one.

HTH
John

Re:Wow!

[HBK-4G (2475)]

<david_attenborough>

The low_uid is primarily a nocturnal poster, but can sometimes be coaxed into daytime efforts by a higher_uid making 'old man of the forest' claims.

</david_attenborough>

Re:Wow!

[fahrbot-bot (874524)]

You've only changed jobs twice? Sheesh, I'm on job 17 since joining Slashdot.

Hmmm. Seventeen jobs since joining /. Perhaps there's a correlation? :-)

My personal worst

[by Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:My personal worst

[myrdos2 (989497)]

I was taking a University course on C++ and data structures. Big class, maybe 150 people in a theatre-like room. At the front of the room was a PC, connected to a projector so we could see screen. This was a Solaris system. The prof had emailed the lecture slides to himself.

So to get the slides, he opens a terminal, and types pine. A big list of all his email fills the screen. He starts looking for his lecture notes... at which point some guy noticed one of his emails had the subject "Enormous Pussy". The prof stammered and said it wasn't what it sounded like, that's just a big cat one of his friends has, and his friend likes to send email with provocative subjects.

At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility.

The lecture itself was great.

I was a co-facilitator at one...

[sherpajohn (113531)]

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.

Let's go the other way

[PHAEDRU5 (213667)]

Since the difference between intelligence and stupidity is that there's a limit on intelligence, let's try naming the *best* conferences we've been to.

I've been to OOPSLA a couple of times. Very enjoyable and informative. More recently, I just attended a "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conferences in Atlanta. Lots of good information, especially on Groovy and Grails.

Not the worst for *me*...

[Otter (3800)]

We were getting trained on some desktop sharing / presentation software. The instructor was getting increasingly frustrated with one woman who couldn't seem to manage even the most basic steps. ("Click on the icon. No, the picture thing! Click with your mouse -- no!) Finally she gave that woman control of her own computer...

**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.

Re:Not the worst for *me*...

[by Anonymous Coward]

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" - old adage that my PhD advisor used to repeat all the time ;)

That adage is complete crap. Effectively passing knowledge on to students in a way that results in them actually learning something is nontrivial.

I Don't Get IT Workshops, You Insensitive Clod!

[Greyfox (87712)]

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...

HTML, CSS and Websites

[Archangel Michael (180766)]

While HTML and CSS are important to know still, I can't help but wonder how many people actually still build websites with HTML and CSS and Java and such? I stopped using plain HTML at least four years ago, when I discovered Content Management Systems (WebGUI back then, now using Joomla). I've built or helped build dozens of sites, all part time, using CMS, and most of my clients couldn't be happier. They have access to add content all day long, and don't have to worry about "design".

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).

Just my $.02 (actual value subject to market forces)

Re:HTML, CSS and Websites

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

Your post really only applies to static html, which is not what most seminars are geared towards. If you're doing anything dynamic with a page, then doing the HTML and CSS by hand is almost always the best option. Using any WYSIWYG editor is going to give you shitty html that's nearly impossible to edit after the fact, and very few are able to work around code. I've had php CMSs that stripped out all the php and javascript in the files when it saved them, so customers or dumbass designers would use the CMS to change the design on a dynamic page and suddenly it's not dynamic anymore.

the fool - or the fool that follows him?

[lawman508 (969924)]

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!"

Not my worst, but one of my best...

[Pig Hogger (10379)]

In University, in a web design class. The teacher was demonstrating coding a page. As he was entring links into URLs, I start spelling "P-L-A-Y-B-O-Y-.-C-O-M", which the teacher dutifully typed. When he realized what he wrote, he backspaced over "BOY" and typed "GIRL", then went on with his demonstration.

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...

Perl class

[HW_Hack (1031622)]

This was a class offered internally by Intel --

So this total propeller head who's teaching the class says "Perl is the easiest language to learn - very natural and logical syntax" ...... I lasted until the morning break - then went back ot my office to get some work done .....

HP

[Jethro (14165)]

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.

PLC class

[hjf (703092)]

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.

Re:IDIOT

[orclevegam (940336)]

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.

sometimes training is not done for the training

[wikinerd (809585)]

pay me the $750 and I'd purchase and read the appropriate book

You are of course correct, but if you speak with some business people you will be surprised why some businesses (and even individuals) take courses and enroll their staff to workshops and training sessions. Sometimes training is done not in order to actually learn something, but only because of various external requirements (eg legal, or requirements imposed or recommended by professional bodies), obscure accounting motives, publicity or advertising reasons ("we spent a million in staff training last year!"), hierarchical or careerist reasons ("manager: I will enroll my staff in extensive training so that my boss can't use their lack of skills as an excuse to fire me for hiring incompetent employees" or even "I, as the training manager, must make everyone attend training sessions because it's good for making me more important within the company"), or sometimes even irrational psychological reasons ("if we lose, it won't be because we didn't try hard but because out training was useless, so it's the trainer's problem not ours"). Yea I know all this is completely anti-productive and irrational, but I have actually seen all this being done in dysfunctional companies (sometimes even required by external agencies or bodies).

Re:Blah...

[cp.tar (871488)]

I'm attending a course on web design in my college this semester.

The TA that's giving the lectures:

1. allegedly copied those lectures from the lectures given by our academic research network (I was told that by a fellow student who took the course given by said network)
2. once actually explained we could use <div> tags as line breaks
3. teaches all kinds of utterly wrong stuff, including advising us to encode our work in Windows-1250 instead of UTF.

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.

Re:Fistfight

[flaming error (1041742)]

That was you? Let me apologize again.

I had just returned from my Peace Corps stint in Ghana, and I was suffering from highly virulent dysentery. During lunch I discovered my containment garments had a rip in the seat.

  > I finally told him to shut the hell up or we could go outside and I would kick his butt
As soon as I saw you had symptoms, I decided it was too late to try and convince you.

But you really should seek professional help. Sounds like you haven't gotten over it yet.

Re:InterOp

[Quiet_Desperation (858215)]

Aren't the sales people supposed to be paying me for my time in the form of free lunches, dinners, blow and strippers?

Here in aerospace, we're not allowed to accept even a freaking mouse pad from a parts supplier.

Which is probably best, because I'd totally be whoring myself out for meals and gadgets and, if the salesperson was a cute woman, whatever I thought I could get before getting slapped.

"Yeah, sell me some FPGAs, bitch. Yeah, you like it when I talk like that, don't you? Tell me those gate counts again, you dirty, dirty girl."

I know. I need help. :(

Re:InterOp

[dave562 (969951)]

I know. I need help. :(

Sounds to me like you just need $1000 and 24 hours in Vegas. ;)