When you attend a good training course, you'll be asking pertinent extra questions - interacting - to make the very best of your time with the tutor. But inevitably on a subject as big as open source programming, you'll come up with other good questions after the course, either soon after ... or long after as you gain experience. And so I go out of my way to make myself available to answer questions later. I can be emailed (perhaps the most common way people ask), you can post onto our "ask the tutor forum" - actually the least used method these days - or you can click on the "ask the tutor" link on our pages.

Who / what will I answer? I have far more time for our delegates than for people who aren't our customers. I have far more time for people who are polite than those who demand an answer. And I have far more time for those who ask clear and logical questions that those who are fuzzy. But even a rude, unclear question from someone I don't know will get at least a short answer (to their first question anyway) - after all if they have taken the time to get in touch, the least I can do is to quickly point them in the right direction.
Some questions, though, provoke thought and take me completely by surprise. This landed in my mailbox today:
via page - /mouth/1309_Dates-for-Easter-2008-to-2015.html
Why do you look like Jesus?
Well - there's a picture of me alongside this article - thank to Tim Chinnick, the photographer, for his permission to use it. (See
early April blog). And the first question I ask is "How do you know that there's a resemblance to Jesus here? Do we actually have any photographs of Jesus?"
Now - let's assume that I DO look a bit like Jesus for a second. Does there have to be a reason? An answer to the question "why"? Could it simply be something of a coincicence that there's a similarity?
I can't turn around and answer the question "I model my look on Jesus because ..." because I don't. I don't model my looks on anyone. Not Jesus, not Bob Geldorf, not Hugh Grant ... nor Eddie the Eagle, Charlotte Church or Shrek, come to mention it. So - why do I look like Jesus? If I do look like Jesus, the reason is that it's just a co-incidence.
(written 2010-04-20, updated 2010-05-14)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G305 - Well House Consultants - Post Course support [136] Please tell us - (2004-12-01)
[199] Post course support - part of the service - (2005-02-02)
[244] Getting your examples, my examples and the data files after your course - (2005-03-13)
[248] Use me, but use me effectively - (2005-03-16)
[293] Course follow-ups - (2005-04-27)
[327] How far should our support go - (2005-05-28)
[336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
[389] Tough Love - (2005-07-25)
[509] Snippets from Geekmas - (2005-11-28)
[516] Open source questions? Anyone can ask. - (2005-12-03)
[569] Instructions for bright people - (2006-01-19)
[609] Been on a course, but still not got it? - (2006-02-16)
[651] Please Register with Opentalk - but just once! - (2006-03-19)
[1245] Ensuring that our tutor answers YOUR questions - (2007-06-25)
[1874] Is it worth it? - (2008-11-07)
[2102] What do people think of our Apache httpd / Tomcat course? - (2009-03-24)
[3045] After Course Resources - do we publish sample answers. Example from Java Exceptions module. - (2010-11-13)
[3391] For programmers who use Internet Explorer as their browser - (2011-08-13)
[3419] Data that we use during our training courses, and other training resources - (2011-09-04)
[3701] Refresh and Revision training class days - Perl / PHP / Python / Lua / Ruby / Tcl / C / C++ - (2012-04-19)
[3770] Sample answers to training course exercises - available on our web site - (2012-06-21)
[4588] What teach you in a week stays with you for a decade - (2015-11-29)
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