Don't sweat the fire drill thing again. In 10+ years of training, it's only happened to me once.
I don't count on the facilities being OK, even when I'm teaching for a trusted client of mine that has 10 of their own facilities. I'm hosting the class. I'm the host. It would be nice if the facility took that responsibility as seriously as I did, but I don't leave my responsibility to their employees, or worse yet, their non-employees since some sites are not staffed by full time employees and are often inadequately stocked by other contractors. In short, I make the hosting my responsibility. I bring my own coffee and milk (preferring *not* to rely on powdered non-dairy whitener even before I moved to hyper-javinated Seattle). I also bring my own pastries and fruit. I also bring my own salty snacks, sweet snacks, hard candy, candy bars, cookies, and crackers because I've found that to be the mix of snacks that covers most students. I've been fortunate in that I can usually leave these behind and invoice the client for "site provisioning". If you figure that most hotels charge 5 - 10 USD per student per day for a continental breakfast, you can see that "drinks and snacks" can add up quickly. But it also pays dividends in customer satisfaction. Armys aren't the only things that move on their stomachs. I often get asked to set up in a hotel (like I'm doing this week). I have to call ahead to make sure that they don't try to set up 18 inch tables. Students need 3 feet to have reference material, caffeine, sugar, a keyboard, and a mouse. Don't try to skimp on workspace; if you're tempted, read the "Furniture Police" chapter in "Peopleware", DeMarco and Listner's great book on software development. As far as machine specifications, I can't remember having a machine that's too barebones to run an intro or intermediate Perl class. The beauty of the language is a beauty of teaching the language -- it's not a resource hog. Linux vs Windows -- I don't care. The Perl constructs are so far above the OS that any old notepad/cmd.exe or vi/ksh combination will work. (I have found some notepad-like editors on Linux to be helpful if I've got some non-Unix folks on a Linux platform. We're using Kate this week. I guess Kate ::== K Advanced Text Editor). That is, while teaching Perl, I get beyond the editor, command line interpreter, and operating system. Most students can get beyond them pretty effectively if I focus them on the power of Perl. Hope this answered some of your concerns. (Sorry it's so long since the original posting. This draft fell into the cracks.) -- Michael R. Wolf [EMAIL PROTECTED] **NOTE** new, shorter spelling of obsolescent MichaelRunningWolf-at-att.net
