Update from Stockholm
Well, I know I said I'd keep my blog updated and I didn't. So far, it's been one of the coolest experiences in my life. Tobias Thernstrom invited me out to do an ADO.NET 3.5 presentation course for AddSkills. We had over 40 people show up and it was an impressive audience. I was really impressed with the audience b/c there was a good bit of adoption already and they questions showed that they really knew their stuff. I'll talk about this more later b/c some really important issues came up but the one thing that seemed to interest the audience the most was using LINQ/Entity Framework in a N-Teir environment. Although most of the books and info out there right now on LINQ is solid, you don't see a lot on the N-Tier story and if you're using LINQ as your DAL, well, it's definitely something that needs to be addressed. I have done several presentations on LINQ so far and it's never come up yet. Well, that was probably the main area of interest which is going to give me a good bit to blog about in the future.
So far, I've eaten at an Indian Restaurant, two Thai Places, a Mongolian BBQ, a BBQ at Tobias' house and I've grabbed lunch at Burger King. I was shocked to see Burger King's, MacDonalds and 7/11's everywhere here. There's also a good bit of Subway and Pizza Hut. You can tell a major difference in food quality as the meat is all much leaner and vegetables are a lot more fresh. Soda comes in cans for the most part, very few places have fountains and most drinks don't come with Ice. I live off of Diet Coke and I prefer fountain drinks so going to a 7/11 and not seeing a Big Gulp was strange but well, that's probably the only complaint I have about Stockholm which means I love it.
From the media reports, I was expecting to hear people give me a hard time about being from the U.S. My experience though was just the opposite. Everyone speaks English which makes it easy to get a long and although I've tried to pick up Svenska, you get out what you put in - so three weeks doesn't result in much. The Swedes are pretty quick to pick up on my accent and usually just answer in English so as to not make me suffer. I was eating at an Indian Restaurant named Mumbai and watching the soccer matches. The owner lived in Coral Gables for a while and has relatives in Atlanta so he was chatting about both places with me. At that point, a really really drunk Swedish woman came in and started chatting with me. She gave me a little bit of a hard time about the US, global warming mainly but it was all very benevolent. Other than that, politics hasn't come up at all.
It gets dark here really early and it's 6 hours ahead of Atlanta so I had some pretty bad jetlag. My hotel room is awesome and right in the middle of downtown Stockholm so it's been very easy getting around. There are some great cars here and my host Tobias is a car man. The first day here I got to see a Scuderia, and a Koenigsegg. He's selling his Porsche so we didn't get to tool around it in it much. The seat on the Gallardo is a little small as was the seat on the Scuederia which left a nice brusise on my right hip. Glad I've been losing weight or it would have been really hard getting in any of them.
We went to a pre-launch party yesterday that Tobias was hosting - on Sql Server 2008. The T-Shirts were awesome and I had a blast - for what it's worth, the MS office here looked identical to the one in Alpharetta.
I've got a ton of pics, from the castles, to Tobias' two killer Chihuahuas, to the Gallardo, to the Scuderia and much more. When I get home I'll consolidate them and stick them on twitter.
As it stands now, Kim and I are planning to head back in August and hang out another week. I tried to get out for another week but work wasn't hearing any of that. Will update when I get some more time...