I've been slowly but surely going through an online project management training class. There are ten modules, each about some aspect of the pm process. Each module is broken down into two or three dozen two-minute content points that each contain a few screens of lists or important points.

There's a picture on each screen--pictures of people (models) that look really busy and happy. Sometimes they are in a group looking at a computer monitor or taking seriously but most of the time it's one person acting like they are doing something. Really, what can you show people doing that goes with project management? I've read hundreds of these screens by now and the pictures repeat over and over. I might start tallying them to see if the picture of the woman holding a Blackberry-like thing is used more than the picture of the happy meeting of young men and women of various nationalities.

There is a narrator who happily explains everything. "Scope management" he cheerfully tells me "is the sum of the products, services, and results to be provided as a project." I can just see this guy finishing up the hours and hours of taping this course and either bursting into tears or heading to the bar to try to forget what he does for a living. Maybe he was sedated the whole time.

(Once, when I lived in a foreign country for a time, I did English language-learning tapes as part of my job. It sounds like that would be interesting but it was so incredibly boring to read these really simple phrases into the boombox (third-world country). The funniest part was when my hosts corrected my English--I would just roll my eyes and read it the way they wanted. The sessions could take hours.)

Is my online class interesting? Welllll, I am learning stuff. I've come across business terms I've heard before but didn't understand and I'm learning about things like estimating methods that are relatively interesting. But it's all just a step on the way to getting my certification.

The real downside is that my method of typing notes fast while I listen to the happy narrator has inflamed my usually dormant carpal tunnel syndrome. That damn repetitive-motion assembly line job from decades ago can still come back to haunt me.

**Geek alert**Today, I finished my training sessions for the new XML-based content system. It's not a content management system, it's a repository that huge amounts of data can be loaded into and searched very efficiently. They also have an interesting way of externalizing relationships. It all sounds relatively simple but the problem seems to be reconciling the features of all the applications that want to display and search the data with the data repository services. I think the developers in the audience signed up for the hands-on class but all of us are going to get read-only access to the data GUI where you can see what they were talking about in the class.