The webMethods training continues tomorrow and Friday, for a total of four days of training. Since there were only nine computers that met the training requirements (512Megs of RAM among other things) I got to take my machine down to the training room on the sixth floor on Monday, and install the training software - Oracle, and the full webMethods server plus development tools. It’s a fairly large amount of software to be running all at once on the same desktop machine, but as a result, I got my machine upgraded to 512Megs of RAM, which is nice. That’s just the back story though.

Anyway, the main thing to know is that Monday afternoon I installed RAM into my machine, and took it down three floors to the training room.

The thing about the training room is that it doesn’t have great air circulation, so with twelve computers, twelve monitors and twelve students, plus the projector, and the heat-lamp style lights, it gets quite hot and stuffy in the room.

Ok, enough background. This morning (Wednesday) I was in the training room checking my email before the course was scheduled to start (at 8:30) Someone came in and asked me if we were moving the computers this morning. I had no idea, figuring that this person was kidding, or at the very least in the wrong room. Turns out that one of the other participants was having trouble breathing in the stuffy training room, so we were going to move all the computers up to the ninth floor, into the board room that’s down the hall from my office. After a lot of hustle and work, we managed to get the computers all set up in the slightly smaller, but better ventilated board room. The monitors are packed in cheek by jowl, the keyboards are sitting on the edge of the table, and we’ve basically got room to put our mice and a drink between the machines. Apparently the air on nine is no better than the air on six though, since the person who was having trouble with the air only stuck around for around 45 minutes all day.

We thought everything was working out ok, but then we got to an exercise where we needed to connect to the Oracle database on the local machine, but for whatever reason, it didn’t want to work without being connected to the network. I’m no Oracle expert, so I don’t know what the problem was, but it apparently had something to do with name lookups or something, so once we networked the computers, all the problems went away.

So, more training to come this week, then things should be back to normal next week, with a more regular posting schedule for this site - maybe I’ll even have time to import all the old comments into the new system.

Since I got a comment posted razzing me for not mentioning the Habs clinching the playoffs last night, I thought I’d explain, while I have a second or two between exercises.

You see, while I was doing that last entry, I was also getting ready for work, and watching the highlights from last night. I didn’t actually know that the Habs had won at that point. At any rate. The Habs Won! Ok, it doesn’t really need an exclamation point. Last night was a very important game though, since Saku came back for his first game since being diagnosed with Cancer. If they hadn’t won, it could have spelled trouble for the playoff run, but they did, so I’m sure this is the next step towards a magical playoff run, culminating in a 25th Cup.

So that’s why I didn’t mention it.

I did get the netscape thing fixed up, tested, and I’m even posting this from netscape.

Last night I played “Evo” which is a strategy game based on dinosaurs, in which you have to try to get your particular strain of dinosaur to survive better than the rest of the players. I won, which was nice, but the game was fun anyway. Relatively complicated, but fun nonetheless.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals… except the weasel” - Homer