I've spent this last week teaching at Guru Labs' local training facility in Bountiful, UT. As in the past, Guru Labs contacted me because they had one more class than they had full-time instructors to teach. I haven't been able to help the last couple of times this has happened, but this time I saw no reason I couldn't make it work, especially given that it didn't require me to go out of town for the week.

The class I've been teaching is GL 120 -- Guru Labs' introduction to Linux course. It's a five-day course that gives the students a very good knowledge of what Linux is, how to use it, and what it's good for. It doesn't delve much into system administration tasks, but it does give them a taste of how Linux systems are used and managed.

Teaching this class would have been like any other class I've taught for Guru Labs or anyone else except that last Friday, while preparing for the Utah Arts Festival, I came down with a bad sore throat. I treated it with regular doses of ibuprofen and sudafed and it seemed to subside, but it still lingered on.

On Monday, the first day of the class, my voice was pretty hoarse as I taught, but I was able to get through the day's lecturing. I told the students I was channeling Tom Shane. If you've ever heard his ShaneCo radio advertisements, you'd understand what that means.

As soon as I was done lecturing, however, my voice disappeared for good.