[This message is likely to be of interest only to those in or near
California. Please do not reply to the list - reply to me directly.]
I am starting to plan a vacation in California sometime between the
middle of May and the middle of June this year. Primarily, this is to
visit my son, who is studying at UCSD, but as my wife has never been to
California, we are also going to travel around a bit.
In the past, several people in California have asked about Exim
training. If there is still interest, I could run some kind of course
while I am on the West Coast. However, this can only happen if somebody
volunteers to take on the job of organizing it - finding a venue,
registering attendees, sorting out the finance, etc. This message is a
call for such volunteers, and also a call for expressions of interest in
attending a course, so we can gauge if it would be worthwhile putting it
on.
Please respond directly to me, and I'll put people in touch with each
other if/when necessary. If there are several volunteer hosts, perhaps
the work could be spread. Let me know (a) if you can help host a course
(and where you are, possible dates, etc) and (b) if you are likely to
consider attending a course in California at that time.
I'd also like people's views on the sort of course they would like to
attend. This is what I have done in the past:
. I have run some in-house courses for ISPs here in the UK. These
have been two-day affairs, approximately 10 hours of me lecturing (5
hours in one day is enough for anybody). The first 1-1.5 hours is a
general introduction to Internet mail, with the rest being a basic
introduction to the way Exim works and how you configure it.
. The one-day lunchtime-to-lunchtime course I ran here in Cambridge in
September 1999 was 6 hours of talking, with the general introduction
being given in one hour before the first lunch. Thus, I reduced about
8.5 hours into 6 hours. Some material was cut out; I also went faster
(and with a bigger audience, there were fewer questions and less
discussion).
. The one-day lunchtime-to-lunchtime "advanced" course I ran in March
2000 followed a similar timetable, but I concentrated on a few issues in
depth (for example, SMTP authentication). I spent 45 minutes just
talking about regular expressions.
I'm please to say that the feedback from these courses has been positive
(I've been back to one ISP several times). For all of them I work with
overhead projector transparencies (old technology; I'm not into fancy
audio-visuals, and I don't have a laptop). The "course notes" are just
copies of the overheads for the audience to scribble on.
So, the basic questions are: what format would you like (one day, two
days, lunch-to-lunch, or anything else) and what material would you like
covered (general email, basic Exim, advanced Exim)? As far as time goes,
two full days is about as much as my voice will stand.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
