* Microsoft's 'free' training - give or take a $50 registration fee
Often, when I open my e-mail inbox on the morning a newsletter has been delivered, I’m greeted with one or two messages carrying a subject line relating to that newsletter. This means that the topic has “pushed a button” with one or two readers who wish to share a thought or experience. Sometimes there’s a dozen or so notes referring to the newsletter. That usually indicates that I asked a question at the end and folks are responding quickly, before they forget. Anytime there are 20 or more e-mails awaiting me, I know I’ve made a mistake, an error, a faux pas.
Last week there were over 50 e-mails lurking in my inbox to point out the egregious, um how would Roget put it?
“aberration, bloomer, blooper, blunder, boner, boo-boo, bungle, confusion, delusion, erratum, false move, false step, fault, faux pas, flub, fluff, gaffe, goof, howler, illusion, inaccuracy, inadvertence, lapse, misapplication, misapprehension, miscalculation, misconception, misinterpretation, misjudgment, misprint, misstatement, misstep, misunderstanding, muddle, neglect, omission, overestimation, oversight, slight, slip, slip-up, snafu, solecism, trip, typo, underestimation” (Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus)
In the newsletter entitles “Microsoft offers free training,” I said that “Microsoft has a couple of free one-day, hands-on labs coming to a town near you in the near future.” I also said that “The actual cost, in and of itself, isn’t an important factor in evaluating a training opportunity,” and that may be what saves me. Because in the case of the two hands-on labs I mentioned, the “actual cost” is only free after you’ve paid the $50 to register. Somehow, I overlooked that little detail.
As the altar boys used to respond to the priest at a Latin mass, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Roughly translated, that’s “my bad, my fault, boy was I ever wrong!”
The Active Directory Fundamentals Hands-On Lab as well as the one on Migrating from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2003 are still great buys at $50 each. They aren’t for everyone. The Active Directory lab is really an introductory course for computer literate (but not directory savvy) folks while the migration class won’t do much for those who no longer have NT 4 servers. Still, for those who can benefit (and I think you know who you are), the $50 is a small price to pay for such valuable training.
For everyone who took the time to point out the error, and especially to those who believed me rather than Microsoft, my thanks go out to you. Keep scrutinizing what I say and what everyone else says, too. There’s a huge amount of data traversing the Web every day and not all of it is 100% accurate.
