Personal Training Plan (personal, advice)

As part of next year's review process, and also part of the new director's "look what I can do!" peenstroking, all members of my team have been informed of our need to complete "a minimum of forty (40) hours per calendar year of job-related training, skill increasing, and / or branching."

Simply put, it is, as I mentioned, the new director's pet toy, as well as "busy work" because let's face it, paying 7 people for 8 hours of work when they take 45 minutes of calls each is poor economics.

So... My job entails the following:

Engaging in phone and email support for users of our accounting and tax-based software products.
Internal office desktop and network hardware and software support.
-I have no control over AD administration, Exchange, Notes, or profiles, but I -am- able to add containers for new PCs.
-I also have physical and direct access to our file servers - NT and 2003 - as well as our quote-unquote "phone system" - a Siemens based, PC-resident phone switching setup that has more kinks than a Rastafarian's hairdo.
-We have three Cisco 3500 series switches and a 2600 with CSU/DSU as our T1 tunnel to our "home office." We have no control over the 2600, and only marginal reporting available via the others.
We support, via our users, Win2k+ - since MS quit supporting 98 and ME, so have we. We work with some clients who use Novell or Citrix-based networks, as well as quite a few terminal server installations, even though our system requirements do not state compatibility with those environments. We might have less than five users who have a Linux-based network.

I'm pretty proficient in desktop support, and in fact as I've mentioned before am the sole technician who fills this role. The Senior Support Lead, my co-admin of the local network, maintains most of the extra-office connections (inasmuch as calling someone to say "it's broken") but we share the remaining network-related duties we have access to. We perform very little day-to-day maintenance on our servers, as generally it is not needed.

Our local network-based apps are few:
-Three Proprietary database systems used for order tracking, call tracking, and code tracking.
-Goldmine under an SQL database (we have no control over this)
Lotus, Exchange, and all Internet traffic go through "the home office."

Our products are created using a proprietary database engine; the interfaces and such are created using Delphi.

Our resources are as follows...
The company provides Flash- and Shockwave-based tutorials for a vast variety of subjects. They are SO dry, I've fallen asleep during them. Monotonous, low interaction... major boring shit.
Our wallets. That is, we can buy whatever training books we think we might need. We get no reimbursement.

What I don't want:
I have no desire to learn how to program. BASIC was kind of fun. I did try C+ and C++ a few times, but could never get into it.
I don't want to learn accounting or tax law crap. I wouldn't be in computers if I did.

What the options might be:
As an example... One of the other techs has taken the opportunity to increase his PHP knowledge by first setting up a bulletin board for the office, as well as taking advantage of the time to increase his personal business sales by touting his increased knowledge.

So my first thought was, try to learn CSS, since I've been trying to do that for over three years now. (I have a lot of issues with CSS books. When I first started to learn HTML it was quite easy. The books I had gave you explanations for what would happen if you changed x to a certain point, or y, or both, as the results of changing something just a little was immediately apparent, where with CSS, it's not so cut and dry. I have thrown my CSS book many times when getting frustrated because of a change that makes sense - to me - doesn't cause the intended effect, and I can't figure out why there's no explanations that say "this does that, and if it doesn't, here's why.")

Then I was thinking, "learn SQL". All fine and good, but again, theory and booksmarts are nothing to me compared to practical experience. (I learned more a few years ago trying to install PHP4, PHPBB, and MySQL on my Mac in twelve hours of frustration, than I did in three weeks of reading an SQL book.)

So, that's about it. I have three whole ideas of how to fill 40 hours of "major boring shit." While I have no plans to remain here til the end of the next review period... Does anyone have any further suggestions?