Atlanta Code Camp

I'm late to blogging this one, but I'm sure everyone else has covered it.  All in all it was a great event.  Had a rather hectic beginning though.  5:00 Am on Saturday, Kim and I haeded to the airport to rent a car.  Unfortunately, Greenville/Spartanburg is the only airport (even friggin Augusta's airport which is a grass patch with a few Cesna's has 24/7 rent a cars available) that doesn't have 24/7 rentals.  So we headed out in her car and got to Atlanta about 2 hours later.  For once, i didn't get lost.  Got to the Microsoft building in Alpharatta and was very impressed.  Checked into code camp, and Kim hung out for a while, then headed over to the W Atlanta.  As a side note, if you have never stayed in a W, trust me on this, it's a must.  From the first time I visited one I was addicted to it.  Atlanta is the most mainstream of the ones I've been to , but it still ROCKS.  Anyway, she took off and rented the room.  I got a new Lacie USB Drive just for this presentation b/c the week before, I had my visual studio install go bad on me.  So about 11:30 I was prepping for my prestentation and the Virtual Machine started up, VS popped up, and then just went away.  No error messages, no nothing.  No sign whatsoever that there was a problem other than it just disappeared.  I had another demo on Tablet PC, but after talking to Michael Earls, I decided to just run through the Speech Server demo again.  I asked everyone attending and they were all cool with it so I did it instead. 

Before I continue, let me say that I met some really cool people.  Tammy Pettway was doing a presentation on the Enterprise Library and I saw the slides she was working on but her presentation was the same time as mine.  I wish i could have seen it b/c she was impressive.  Got to rap with Maxim Karpov again but dammit, I still haven't get to hear him speak.  Everyone that's heard him is like totally captivated by his presentations, so I really hope sometime I can hear him speak.

I sat in the speakers lounge for about 3 hours with Michael Earls, and a few other guys from Magenic.  I really like working at Tiba, but just listening to the dialog between the magenic guys, it seems like it's got to be one of the coolest places on earth to work.    I got to speak to Steve from Aspsoft who was an awesome guy... wish I had more time to talk to him.  Shawn Wildermuth was there but I didn't get a chance to talk to him - and one the off chance he's reading this, I definitely would like to have him autograph a copy of his book for me ;-) The first time I read it, I wasn't that impressed with it, but the more I've read through it, and the more I've followed Shawn, the more I realise that he's a definite bad a55.  Wally was there and I got to rap with him for a while.

Mark Dunn was there and I got the chat with him for a few, as well as Todd Fine from RDA and a few other folks, including Chris Williams . Chris gave me a really killer idea.  Michael Earls has been doing a lot with X10 and Windows Media Center.. so when he saw my demo, he recommended combining XP Media center, X10 and Speech Server to manipulate stuff in your house.  This is my 1st objective next week when I finally get some free time.  If I don't have  a working demo using XP media Center editiion, X10 and Speech Server by June 1st, please feel free to write me and remind me that I am  a lazy procrastinating windbag.  As an aside, Todd Fine has a really impressive Avalon demo which is beyond cool.  Chris has some of the coolest Tatts that I've seen in a while.  i got to thinking that with a litte, you could use Avalon and do some really cool stuff that corresponded to someone's tattos. Gotta rap with Chris about this. 

Anyway, I started to feel a little ill toward the end of my speech, and some people had commented that I lost my voice. Kim came and got me and I hit the bed for a quick nap.  Was planning on hitting Mortons  for dinner.  I hit the bed at 4:30 and when I woke up, it was 9:00. Unfortunately, I didn't get to hook up with Jeremy Brayton b/c I slept right through everything.  Kim is a great girlfriend but Terrible alarm clock.  So we hit Trio's which was ok.  Next morning we hit the cheesecake factory and it was awesome as always. Then we headed home.  I let Kim drive for the first leg and well.... check out my pictures in the gallery (all of them begin with Atlanta Code Camp).

Finally, when I got back to the office, I got this message from Steve Ballmer:

“Thanks to you  give everyone in code camp my thanks and respect “

So now all I need to do is finish the remaining parts of the chapters I have outstanding, get my webcast done, and then get cranking on the X10 Speech Server project.

BTW, I've done more and more with Speech Server recently but can't really guage interest in it.  Commercially, I know that adoption is limited to essentially really large installs out there and to date there aren't any books on Speech Server (I may be changing that)  .  Michael has got me mega impressed with his Media Center stuff and I've seen that http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/ on it, so God only knows what kick a55 implementation he'll come up with.  I definitely need to get on the bandwagon too  but would apprecaite any feedback in general about what everyone finds interesting (or if there's even interest in Speech Server outside of simple techonological curiousity).  I know I'm probably leaving a few people out, but i'll update if I did.  All in all I had a great time and would like the thank the Atlanta folks for having me (and giving me an excuse to spend some time at the W again).

P.S. All pictures (many didn't come out unfortunatley, are in the gallery if you're intersted)