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)

 G305 - Well House Consultants - Post Course support
  [4588] What teach you in a week stays with you for a decade - (2015-11-29)
  [3770] Sample answers to training course exercises - available on our web site - (2012-06-21)
  [3701] Refresh and Revision training class days - Perl / PHP / Python / Lua / Ruby / Tcl / C / C++ - (2012-04-19)
  [3419] Data that we use during our training courses, and other training resources - (2011-09-04)
  [3391] For programmers who use Internet Explorer as their browser - (2011-08-13)
  [3045] After Course Resources - do we publish sample answers. Example from Java Exceptions module. - (2010-11-13)
  [2102] What do people think of our Apache httpd / Tomcat course? - (2009-03-24)
  [1874] Is it worth it? - (2008-11-07)
  [1245] Ensuring that our tutor answers YOUR questions - (2007-06-25)
  [651] Please Register with Opentalk - but just once! - (2006-03-19)
  [609] Been on a course, but still not got it? - (2006-02-16)
  [569] Instructions for bright people - (2006-01-19)
  [516] Open source questions? Anyone can ask. - (2005-12-03)
  [509] Snippets from Geekmas - (2005-11-28)
  [389] Tough Love - (2005-07-25)
  [336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
  [327] How far should our support go - (2005-05-28)
  [293] Course follow-ups - (2005-04-27)
  [248] Use me, but use me effectively - (2005-03-16)
  [244] Getting your examples, my examples and the data files after your course - (2005-03-13)
  [199] Post course support - part of the service - (2005-02-02)
  [136] Please tell us - (2004-12-01)

Back to Training Courses - time of change

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Travel Troubles and Jesus again

Perl Course FAQ
Type checking, Java arrays and collections
for and foreach in Java
Travel Troubles and Jesus again
Asking about Jesus
Training Courses - time of change
Bird Watching on the Melksham Avon
Uploading a document or image to its own URL via a browser
Redirecting a home page using mod_rewrite
Making a Lua program run more than 10 times faster