PLUG: OT: ADV:ETC - Good training for mouse-challenged *nix people

[John Esak]

Most of us *nix people don't use mouses... and we never use mice. Whichever
type you are, let's say you hate MS and XP and all things to do with *that*
platform. If the occasion comes up for you to actually use the system, here
is a way for you to learn it very easily... and learn it in a special way
that will keep you from ever having to use a mouse. (And, you will learn it
so much quicker than it took JP to do it grudgingly in 3 years... and he
still doesn't know 1/10th of what this DVD would teach him. :-)

I'm talking about my friend Cathy Anne Murtha's new "Immersion Into XP" DVD.
She created it in the same way that I built my filePro Survivor Series CD's,
all with movies of the information and step-by-step demonstrations. Her
training style is extremely polished, having probably 15 years experience
teaching off and on the net. Her company, Access Technology Institute, is a
leading provider of service to the blind community.

This DVD she just sent me (I'm on a buy-everything-she-does arrangement with
her, because everything she has ever done is utterly great).  Anyway, I
started taking the course. First, stupidly, I kept putting it in my CD drive
expecting it to play like her other CD textbooks... but no dice. Would you
think I would drop it in my DVD player? Guess again. After a message to
Cathy with the sad tale that the CD she sent me was blank, she sent me back
a very nice message saying "Try putting it in your DVD player." Duh! (The
duh was implied... but I could almost hear it through the email. :-)  I had
no idea she had branched out into such large scale things. To my delight, I
see that she did this entire course in full sound and video. Her DVD has an
excellent layout, you can play the lessons all in a row, individually, just
the audio mp3 part, view just the text parts. It's truly amazing.

I started the course the way any one of you might start my courses on
filePro, from the Beginning... thinking I wasn't going to learn very much at
first, if at all. Happily, I was wrong. Cathy Anne came up to her usual
standards, and honest to God, I learned something I didn't know in every
single chapter. Just unbelievable. As I watched Cathy Anne fly through the
motions of the basic configuration of things, and listened to her throw off
hint after hint, and trick after trick, I realized, as always, that she is a
complete Master. What does that mean? A Guru-ess? Whatever... it all
applies. She shows you the system from the ground up telling you what each
dialog box, window, button, checkbox is and what it does. After a little
while you are in the flow of things with movies coming up automatically,
seamlessly, teaching you all the procedures you've been struggling with for
years.

This DVD is directed at blind people who use either of the two major screen
readers, JAWS or Window Eyes.  She is planning a DVD directed at the regular
sighted consumer soon. However, she states very clearly at the head of this
course, that she will be teaching 3 things, the concepts of the operating
system, keyboard strokes needed to access it, applications and their
keystrokes, the screen readers and their keystrokes. It is important to keep
them all straight and not just learn them by wrote, but by understanding the
concepts behind what you are doing. Lots of time is spent on the two screen
readers, but it is always separated clearly from XP itself. So, I was
thinking, if you could ignore, or just listen through the brief JAWS/WE
explanations, you could use this DVD to gain the very best "programmer's"
viewpoint of XP and learn more keystroke operation of it than even Fairlight
could teach you in a year. (Even he gets tips from Cathy Anne through me
once in awhile. :-) Seriously, this DVD might be just the thing for those of
you who are solidly Unix, but have to learn XP for the obvious reason of its
ubiquity. It's just a thought.

I don't even know what the DVD costs. I stopped myself from going to look
right now... so I can finish this unreservedly. If it costs $150 or $300, it
is worth it. It's been a just a fantastic experience for me so far, and I
actually know XP pretty well. I haven't been through even half of it yet.
The last thing I must say is this. Usually, I never tell people that Cathy
Anne is blind and has been from birth. It's just something I never do. I
mean imagine me saying something like "This is my blind friend Cathy Anne."
How dumb, but people do this kind of thing all the time. I don't, and
normally, it is days, weeks, months before anyone meeting Cathy Anne in the
FP Room for example finds out or realizes that she is blind. Now, I bring
this up because as I was about a quarter way through all the movies (and
there are 11 hours of them!), I realized (for the billionth time since I've
known her) that she is spealing off every single Window, control, button,
text string, graphic, icon, etc. that she is dealing with at the time. After
a while, hearing her real off the items in a giant listbox, and then flash
through 10 different explanations of 14 other things, each with window
titles, boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, sliders, and on, and on, and on,
you just start to have your breath taken away. I mean really, it is the kind
of thing that just gives you pause... ... and you say to yourself... "HOW IN
THE HELL IS SHE DOING THIS!!!!!!"  :-) At least, I do this about every 15
minutes while running this course. Your mileage may vary.

Allright, just a thought. If you have the least bit of interest, go check
out the thing at www.accesstechnologyinstitute.com. It would probably be
under a section or link called "Textbooks" and it's called "Immersion into
XP".

By the way, she also sent me "An Immersion Into FireFox" and this is just a
regular CD textbook of hers... still completely amazing. I think I will be
switching to this browser immediately if not sooner. You should see the
things you can do with this thing.

Have fun, if you ever buy one of her textbooks, tell I sent you. That would
be cool. She doesn't know I'm writing this.


John

--
John Esak
(570) 384-2444

Author of:
The filePro Survivor Series
Complete Video Training For FilePro On CD
See samples at: www.valar.com/training