I still use two 24" 1920 x 1080 in my environment, primarily because my sight is not as good as what it once was. However several team members have upgraded their video equipment. One has a 55" 4K monitor, and one has a 40" 4K monitor. When they screen share, I take responsibility as the viewer to zoom in on my end, and pan around as needed to see specifically what they are looking at. Make your meeting attendees aware that they can do that and put the responsibility on them.

Bill Butler www.xcent.com

What a nostalgic post for me. I had a contract engagement back in '97 where I architected and implemented a distributed database system for an inbound call center that insisted that they track 2.3 million names and their orders on the back of MS Access. I sharded the data across 8 database instances to maintain some sense of usability. When the contract was up and the work was completed, I conducted knowledge exchange with the staff and CIO. The system was highly modular, and the whole OO bag of tricks. The system had sub-second response times for all transactions. The CIO told me at the end of the session that he couldn't in good conscience hire me back because I produced something that was out of the realm of his staff, whose normal dev environment was FoxPro. :(. Therefore they would be at my mercy to maintain anything I produced. I have been leery of working with any person or group who doesn't understand the plumbing.

Forward thinking schools these days have a website where teachers are required to post homework. If you are in a district that has these resources, maybe they already have such a thing.

This is going back 20+ years. We were writing software for a Diagnostic Imaging Center--one of those places with MRI, CAT, PET Scanners, and X-Ray machines. The business was still using IBM typewriters and hand faxing diagnostic reports to physicians. We wrote a system for them to compose diagnostic reports from templates, and automate the faxing. (C, dBase and Novell if anyone cares). I was in there one day debugging and had both a hex dump up and some source code. One of the radiologists (MD) comes over and asks how do you know how to do that and what all that means? I promptly responded, the same way you know that gray shadow on the mammogram is a mass and not an artifact. She got the point.

Sounds like an old Management-IT story I heard, it goes something like this. Man #1 is walking along the desert. Man #2 appears overhead in a hot air balloon. Man #2 calls down to man #1 asking "Where am I?" Man #1 calls up to man #2 replying "You are in a balloon, about 50 feet above the ground." Man #2 calls down "You must be in IT, the answer you gave me is correct but of no use to me." Man #1 calls up "You must be in Management. You ask a vague question, and blame others when the answer is not what you wanted."

-Bill

I watch Scorpion too, and have to gag at the variety of gaffs. I understand some of the technical ones, but I found it grating when they introduced a pronunciation error. They used the term SCADA in a recent episode about an offline nuclear reactor that came under terrorist attack. All of the actors pronounced the first 'A' as you would the 'a' in father, when the correct pronunciation is long 'a' as in way. Certainly all they did here was do some online research without understanding the lingo.

I crammed in three for MCAD in 6 weeks, mainly because we were encroaching on the exam retirement dates.

As a business owner as well as a certified developer (MCAD) having certified people is necessary to maintain Microsoft Certified Partner status for the organization. For those of you that don't know being more than a registered partner requires at least two certified personnel on staff (which certifications depend on which "competency" recognition you seek from Microsoft). Because of this Certified Partner requirement, myself and one of my lead developers went through the cert process despite believing in the general concensus voiced here that experience will generally trump certifications on a CV. Why you might ask is that of value? We didn't want it for validating ourselves to our customers--they already know we are good at what we do--we did it for the boatload of use licenses and support you get from Microsoft on just about every product they publish including all of the betas and RCs which we need to stay "good". Bill. www.xcent.com