OK, so today over lunch Mike Taulty and Benjamin Mitchell gave me a hard time about being behind on both reading and writing blogs. I tried to deflect this by pointing out Benjamin's choice of the pink PDC t-shirt created questions around his sexuality however his point was valid - I have been so busy with Sentient and Mobile GPS software for sports people that I hadn't kept up.
So, this afternoon I've downloaded the latest version of SharpReader and started adding blogs to read. By accident I found a fantastic SharpReader feature - you can drag and drop RSS urls directly into SharpReader's Subscribed Feeds list. Extremely cool and saves me loads of time messing around. I thought I'd share!
J.
OK, I'm here sitting in my room in the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel.
Yesterday was spent getting here. A very early start to catch the 6.35 flight from Heathrow to Amsterdam to join the Microsoft PDC Jumbo to LA. The PDC Jumbo was due to leave Amsterdam at 11.15 however security look a little longer than expected so Benjamin, Clemence and I found time for a quick pre-flight beer! Actually Benjamin wimped out and took a coffee complaining about already feeling a little rough after the night before.
The flight was nearly 12 hours but passed relatively quickly with the help of my new PSP and Ridge Racer - it rocks! I also completed reading Richard Branson's Autobiography (seemed polite to read his book since he's paying my wages currently).
Having fun already bumping into people I haven't seen for a while. It was great to bump into Benjamin during check-in at Amsterdam. He only lives about a mile from me but we never seem to find time to catch-up. He also managed to get us both bulk head seats which was nice! Also, managed to grab a quick chat with both James Pratt and Steve Swartz already which is cool.
Today is pre-conf day which I wasn't planning to attend but I did pop along to the Conference Centre to collect my conference pass and goodie bag. The goodie bag is OK but not great. First of all it's not a rucksack which is a shame and it's just stuff full of the usual marketing guff and magazines. The three cool things are the Channel 9 foam toy, the Universal Studio Party invite and the PDC t-shirt (so long as you didnt get a girlie pink one!)
I did think I might attend the pre-conf afternoon session but wasnt prepared the full-day $300 for just the afternoon but was informed I couldn't pay $150 for afternoon because the "computer says No" !!! (Even Microsoft have this problem).
Another thing which made me laugh was the instructions from the hotel to the conference included a streetmap which was clearly taken from Google Maps! Steve is going to kill someone if he sees it.
It appears that Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) is the worse kept secret from the conference already. Supposedly not announced until after Bill's keynote however it's already being discussed in the sessions and the WinFX developer reference poster included in the goodie bag details the System.Workflow namespace!
Tonight is bowling night with UK DPE so I'm looking forward to hooking up with the UK DPE people and friends. http://mtaulty.com/FlexWiki/preview.aspx
Tomorrow I'm going to attend pre-conf to find out all about:
PRE08 Adding Integration, Analysis and Reporting Functionality to Your Application through SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence
Speaker(s): Bill Baker, Jason Carlson, Lukasz Pawlowski, Alex Payne
More rambling tomorrow.
J.
You've got to love those people at Microsoft.
They've kindly invited me to attend PDC in LA next week as their guest. Something about a "key influencer" :-)
So, next week I return to blogging possibly for one week only due to the madnesses of my regular work life juggling Sentient and Sportsdo activities but at least for next week I plan to geek out totally, get some geeky R&R and get blogging.
Yippee, LA here I come.
J.