The End of Year Rant">The End of Year Rant
- Why am I good at keeping friends but bad at starting businesses with partners? I’ve been married for over twelve years and we still love each other. I’ve moved several times across the country with my expanding family and I’ve been able to hold onto friends from everywhere I’ve lived and worked. We talk/IM/email/tweet almost every day. I’m even finding friends from the long long ago when there was no Internet to speak of. I’m an a**hole, but the evidence clearly demonstrates that I’m the kind of a**hole that has a lot of real friends with high tolerances for a**holes. That said, two times now, I’ve tried to start a business venture with former co-workers (who were also friends), and it hasn’t worked out. The first time was like six years ago, and the chips were stacked against us with everyone physically moving so far away from each other, and I went passive aggressive in trying to deal with the frustration (mea culpa). I thought I learned from that experience, but I guess there’s something more for me to learn as my new consulting business went from a partnership to a solo effort barely a month after launching. So in 2009 I’ll continue to be a company of one. I still love the idea of partnering in business — maybe not with former co-workers? It seems to fly contrary to logic…
- What the hell happened with Rhymefest’s second album, “El Che?” It was supposed to drop in April of 2008. The Michael Jackson tribute “Man in the Mirror” was so fantastic, I was really looking forward to it — and the album never came out with no news (not even news on MySpace) as to why it was delayed.
- Why is so much E-Learning content done in Flash if there’s no Flash “coolness” going on? Don’t get me wrong, the more maintenance on your old courses are chores and pain spots, the more sidework I’m going to get updating it and converting it to SCORM or AICC — but if a page-turner is a page-turner, there’s a lot of easier (and cheaper) ways of creating E-Learning content than putting it all in Flash. This is a topic I hope to explore with Learning Ninjas in 2009 (more to come on that).
- Why is growing old so painful? Seriously, this tendonitis I have? Everytime there’s precipitation this last month (and there’s been a lot), my left leg/foot and back hurt like hell. I could accept it, I guess, if I was some kind of athlete with a storied career that was hard on my joints or whatever — but I’m a nerd whose joints for the most part have been mostly guarded from anything that might cause them stress or harm.
- How many life and career coaches does the Internet need? It seems like I get followed each week by a new career coach (on Twitter). Some punk just out of college is going to coach me on my career? Really? Try having a career (or 3) first before imparting me with all the wisdom from your BA in English (note: not ranking on English majors — I’m married to one). I know of one career coach who’s doing “something” (that’s you, @melissapierce) and she’s not even trying to coach me.
Technorati Tags: twitter, life coach, career coach, tendonitis, pain, growing older, e-learning, flash, page-turner, scorm, aicc, learning ninas, consulting, sidework, business, partnering, partnerships, friends, relationships, rant, opinion, 2008, 2009
Whenever I get my living situation under control, I’ll be able to help you with freelance without any problems. Hit me up.
It’s also hilarious how true this line is: “I’m an a**hole, but the evidence clearly demonstrates that I’m the kind of a**hole that has a lot of real friends with high tolerances for a**holes.”
@Will,
I’ll be happy to shop work out to you whenever I brother. Just let me know when you’re straight. I value your friendship above all else; I’m one reflective a**hole.
i’m totally with you on #3. i’ve stopped using Flash in my courses except for videos and the occasional interaction/animation. it’s actually pretty liberating to not be constrained by Flash all the time, and the courses become much quicker to produce and update.
@philip,
I love working in Flash. Love it. I love working in Flash for lots of reasons — as a developer. But as a “maintainer” — not the person who initially creates the media but the person who is now charged with maintaining it — it is not easy to work with. I’ve been thinking a lot about the “maintainability” of E-Learning content because “disposable” content has been pretty much a myth for me.
I worked on two projects recently that got me thinking: one project was a content engine driven by XML. Lots of class files. No documentation. Lots of code that at the end of the day through hours of investigation was simply unused. It took me something like 50 hours to get that project to report score, bookmarking and completion status to an LMS — most of that time was trying to figure out just what code had to be changed.
The other project? Frame-by-frame along the main timeline with nothing dynamic. I was able to upgrade the content to report scoring, bookmarking, completion status and every interaction in less than 8 hours, and most of that time was spent figuring out just the right syntax for the interactions since I haven’t done that in years.
There’s something to be said for transparency. It’s not sexy, but it’s a lot easier to maintain because given the way everyone’s career is in this industry, the person building the content is most likely not going to be the person maintaining it.
I have to say, I was surprised that your rant was so short. As for Flash. There’s no reason to use it if it’s just a page-turner. I’m happy (and sad) that we’ve realized that at my company, and we’re basically just rapidly churning out mildly engaging page-turners.
Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, as you have to find a balance between value and effectiveness in training, especially with compliance pieces.
I’m very intrigued to see the future of this industry and all the tools being created, and what developers and IDs do with it.
As for the partnership thing. Been there, done that. It’s tough. I think it’s tougher with friends and/or co-workers. Not for any one reason, just because it is.
Lots to pursue in ’09. Looking forward to being a small part of it with you. Much frustration, adventure, risk and fun awaits.
Happy New Year!
@Brian,
Well, I didn’t write it was everything that was bothering me. I will still high on the comfortable silence of being back in the office when I wrote this rant. I mean, there’s a lot that gets under my skin — I just picked the first five things that came to my mind.
Number 3, i really think it’s about skillsets I know guys who can crank out flash stuff with a nicely maintained/reusable AS library for the scorm data model. Throw in needing to deal with browser diffs and i think it’s faster to push everything through the flash player filter. Toss in flex framework and a lot of data mgt is done for you and you can play more with simulations and animations. So for some flash is faster. Alas we cost money and middle mgt does not always have that.
Things like articulate, captivate, qarbon and adobe presenter make it REALLY fast for middle mgt to produce ppt based page turners with some nice extras. For them that is really fast. Boot up PPT, make changes, re-export. So it really is your skillset and the time you have-a lot of those roads end up running through flash player.
For guys who have invested the time to get the ajax thing down-using jquery or rolling their own etc then they will be faster with that. But in my experience-something like Lectora was a pain in the butt to build courses for Chrysler a couple of years back. The output of a couple courses was over a thousand html files. Just awful to maintain and patch.
@ethan,
I agree that the potential increases the more skilled a developer is. But I know a whole lot of very talented developers that don’t comment their code — period. Someone else can’t easily maintain code that has no documentation. I comment the hell out of my code, which looks like amateur hour until someone who’s never touched my projects has to inherit it. I’ll take a copy-and-paster who at least documents well over an ActionScript deity who’s insanely versed in design patterns but can’t relate to a project manager what the hell his/her code does.
The development is fast for a developer in their chosen platform. I guess what’s bothering more than the arbitrary use of Flash for E-Learning development is the development that’s done with no thought as to the maintenance of the product.
I think I may have just added to my list
Oh, yeah not commenting code IS annoying for us who have to make changes. When you get into developing in “flash ide” and writing a bunch of code that they don’t comment it can be a real PAIN. So many developers, at different levels, pumping the stuff out and long term maintenance is not priced into the original job most of the time. I know i had to back off commenting on a job as it was not in the budget that we were worked down to, by the client. It bugged me, but working for free bugs me more. It’s a tough balancing act.
I think a lot of courses end up in SWF as many of the “easy-bake” tools output that format. Those tools make it faster for the non-developer to make changes. It’s not so much arbitrary as focused on the short term cost (gotta get this done on the cheap) and less with the long term issues of updates/new features. Although i know people who have full catalogs built with those tools and update them each year. But their expectations are measured and they know the trade-offs they accepted when they standardized on the tool. So i think for Phillip not using flash speeds things up, for an SME not using articulate in PPT will slow them down and cost them more since they need to build the elearning some other way. That was my badly written point.