Training called

over the last two working days, which I hope excuses my absence. (nothing can excuse my presence, so I'm not going to even attempt it.) I zoned out of much of the class - he got into stuff that I certainly will never need to adjust. Unless I suddenly have to rearrange the servers and access permissions, in which case we're in a whole heap of trouble.

Happily, after six months talking about the Magic Software that would be worth all the cows we could trade for it, I finally got to try & make it grow into a beanstalk. The results are somewhat encouraging - I have been able to get the thing to do some of what I want. Navigation out of the box (and by the way I have grown to loathe the phrase "out of the box") kind of sucks, but that's why we have to learn to do our own stuff.

The best part? I now have a Virtual PC setup with a virtual server, and I can finally get in to muck about with the software anytime I want. It has no practical effect on what we'll eventually be doing, but now instead of asking "hey, can we do that?" I can actually see for myself if we can do it.

There's work ahead to be sure (and several more training classes to go), but I'm no longer flying utterly blind.