Tag: Teaching
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Upcoming Events, and “The Streak”
I’m really not a workaholic. I prefer days off as much as anybody. The problem is that there are all these things I want to do, so I volunteer to do them, and suddenly I’m overbooked so much I don’t have time for a break. I think part of it comes down to an acronym…
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Start With A Story
Way back in the early 90s, I decided to revisit a notion I’d toyed with for years, which was to become a science fiction writer. As part of that effort, I subscribed to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, which was (and is) the best short story market available. Back then, Isaac Asimov himself was semi-retired (he…
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NetBeans 6.1 is a lot better than I thought
This week I’m in New Haven, CT, teaching a class that combines UML and Java Web Services (an odd combination to be sure). The client wanted to use NetBeans as their primary IDE, and I always try to accommodate that if I can. My last exposure to NetBeans was back in version 5.5, I think,…
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Our last, best hope … for message digests?
So I’m teaching my course in Securing Java Web Applications (my third one in the last six weeks) and we got to a section that discussed the MD5 algorithm for generating message digests. One of the students asked, “whatever happened to MD’s 1 through 4?” I simply couldn’t resist saying, “MD’s 1, 2, and 3…
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Eight years and haven’t missed a day yet
On May 31, 2000, I officially left my job at United Technologies and became a full-time technical trainer. It’s now been eight years since that day. While I don’t like to talk about personal things here very often, I thought that was worth a mention. That, and the fact that in all the training classes…
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One of the best things about teaching
I’ve been very busy teaching classes recently (The last four weeks have gone Ajax, Spring, Struts 2.0, and XML and Java) so I haven’t had much time to blog. Every once in a while, however, I try to stop and smell the roses, such as they are. You want to know one of the best…
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My winding career path
I got a question today about why I left the aerospace engineering to become a software developer and trainer, especially when the aerospace field is so popular at the moment. I’ll assume for the sake of argument that the questioner is right about the popularity of aerospace engineering. I don’t know any more, for obvious…
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Focusing on what’s important
At the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference I attended last week, I managed to talk to a couple of the presenters and quietly ask about the rates they charge. That’s always a dicey subject, of course, but it’s very hard to get good information about that. Software trainers don’t have a union, or anything like…
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Always trying to make contact
I guess this is more of a Xander story than a holiday story, but it has the benefit of being true and even cheerful. My son Xander (short for Alexander — calling him Xander makes him unique in a crowd full of Alexanders and Alexandras) enjoys playing baseball, but he never had a chance to…
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Some things I’m happy about
I realized I’ve been doing some complaining lately, probably because I’ve been fighting a cold recently and that makes everything harder. (Aside: In almost seven years of full-time training, I’ve never missed a day due to illness. This week I came awfully close to breaking that streak, but pulled it out somehow. Now if my…