Burlington Vermont’s Champlain College is definitely on the cutting edge of  I.T. Education, so it does not surprise me to see this new degree program that they are offering.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I had the good fortune of having Melanie Spiller edit a recent article for the upcoming CoDe Focus issue on Tablet PC and Mobile PC Development. (Free issue by the way, subscribe here).

One of the habits she noticed was my use of the word “actually”. We talked about it a bit and she happened to mention that another problem word is “basically” which, she told me, people use when they are guessing. That actually (see, I use that a lot) makes a lot of sense. Of course, being THE editorial blogger for technical authors, I was able to find a blog post where she talks about “actually”, “basically” and some other oft misused adverbs.

I wonder what she thinks of the infamous “So…” that begins every sentence of Microsoft employees when they answer a question…

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I had to laugh when I read this post. It all sounds so familiar!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Everyone has them – the performance anxiety dream. You know, the one where you are back in college or high school and walk into a class to find there is a test or pop quiz. Then suddenly you realize that you have somehow managed to not have attended any of the classes all semester and are totally unprepared. This dream has shifted for me recently because of my nasty habit of presenting at conferences. I have had the new version of the dream more than once and had one yet again last night. This time it was my Indigo talk at TechEd South Africa. I was up on the stage with one minute before I had to start. My computer wasn’t even started up. Then suddenly I realize, though I have my deck prepared and written all of my demos,  I have never once practiced them. I will be doing it totally cold. (Worse yet for this conference – the talks are only 45 minutes to allow 15 minutes for Q&A.) And Don Box is in the audience. Egad! I’m sure I’ll be using that many many many hours of travel to go over it about a thousand more times. And that’s only one of three, no really 5 (including an Atlas and an Indigo demo at the Futures panel), that I’ll be doing. I’ll be the crazy person talking gibberish up in the front of the plane.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org