journal features

professional development

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2012.05.26

Today I went to a "PMP" related "professional development day" - at $280 I think it might just have been worth the money.

Overall, I'd give it a B for content (e,g, one session was cancelled because the speaker didn't show up) but it wasn't so much a professional development thing but a networking thing. Which, despite the opening keynote speaker's topic being clearly focused on networking, I hadn't really "got". I get the sense that PMI is actually much less about project management than it is about the organization itself.

Turns out, I was under-dressed. Not unacceptably so, I hope, but I certainly wasn't wearing a tie, and some of the attendees were in pin-stripe suits and I saw a woman in pearls. The irony being that every week I get comments about wearing a tie in the office. Nice to see that even in Toronto people can dress up once in a while.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)