Lynda.com - Lynda Weinman

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Professors insists on furthering your education. Keep the engines warm as they roll down the road. When the economy is down, go back to school. Lynda Weinman represented Adobe Systems. She taught seminars at events for Sony Corporation. Lynda and her husband Bruce started a software school in Ojai called the Ojai Digital Arts Center. I flew to LAX, my brother drove me to Ojai, and I lived at a hotel near the Ojai Digital Arts Center where I attended class from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm with a break in the afternoon. The afternoon break consisted of networking with web engineers around the globe who were also studying with Lynda. Lynda taught us her expertise. A high tech genius named Garo taught us the most recent software. Bruce published books on color, web graphics, and technology. These experts spent hours going over the magic within software from Adobe, Macromedia, and Allaire’s Coldfusion. Macromedia was just releasing UltraDev, short for Ultra Development. The programs are all owned by Adobe now, but pirates have taken the software and distributed the programs for free across the Internet. Before Adobe bought Dreamweaver, Microsoft bought magazines. The Microsoft publishers began telling programmers with insistence that dynamic web pages be designed with ASP.NET, short for Active Server Pages. I was single, new to the area, so all I did was read these technical notes. The publishers did not understand the technology. The editors had their facts wrong. I laugh when the Human Resource Manager wrote on a job site, “Seeking ASP.NET expert with five years of experience.” The technology surrounding ASP.NET wasn’t one year old. How could an engineer possess the required five years of experience?

In one week at Lynda.com’s school, my new friends and I were networking with the premier Flash programmers from Switzerland, leading executives from Sony Europe, and a Webmaster working with the studios in Hollywood, California. Two days after the last class finished, I was asked to work for the world leader in Nanotechnology. They never had a Webmaster before, so I was hired as the first administrator for three sites: One public website and two internal websites: Semiconductor Marketing and internal website for staff only.