Microsoft TechEd 2010 @ New Orleans, Day Zero

Hey everyone, I’m in New Orleans for Microsoft TechEd North America 2010 – so for the next four days and nights, I’ll be doing my best to photograph and blog about what I’ve seen, heard and ate in the deep South.

The conference begins early tomorrow (Monday) morning, so today is a travel day for Microsoft zealots all across North America. My connecting flight in Houston was a 737 loaded to the brim with guys (and a few gals) dressed in not-my-very-best-because-I’m-traveling business casual and chunky laptop bags. I guess Fashion 101 will continue to be one badly needed but missing breakout session topic.

Houston to New Orleans was all of an hour’s flight, after which we collected our bags from the medium-sized and easy to navigate Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. There we collectively encountered our first surprise of the day: Everyone seemed to have assumed that an airport-to-hotel shuttle service was part of the TechEd package, something airport employees deny. This led to long lines at the taxi stand, which my two coworkers and I were savvy enough to bypass by heading to the second terminal and use its stand instead.

Check in at Le Pavillon was a snap (actually as I write this, at 10:19 PM, the hotel still seems pretty quiet) so we headed right back out into the 4 PM heat to walk the twenty minutes to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. And boy, it’s hot in Louisiana. I’ve seen hotter in terms of sheer temperature, but the humidity down here is incredible. It’s like a thin jacket of moisture you put on as soon as you walk out of an air-conditioned building. It’s enough to cause condensation on your camera lens and eyeglasses immediately. It’s kind of shocking.

We’re at the convention centre for a purpose: To get our identification badges before tomorrow’s crush, and to pick up whatever swag Microsoft’s got on offer this year. (Bearing in mind, of course, that the conference’s not insubstantial entrance fee makes calling this stuff swag slightly misleading.)

Swag this year? Let’s see:

  • A Microsoft TechEd 2010 laptop backpack
  • A Microsoft TechEd 2010 metal water bottle (this will come in handy and is much appreciated)
  • A t-shirt with “Windows Embedded” printed on the breast and “Microsoft Business Intelligence” on the back, along with a silhouette of New Orleans – in size medium
  • A Microsoft TechEd 2010 notepad
  • A trial CD of Microsoft Forefront Business Ready Security
  • About forty pieces of glossy advertisements by sponsors of the conference that I automatically placed in the recycling bag in my hotel room

We grab a free pop drink on our way out and head for a closeby restaurant – for all three of us, this will be our first meal of the day. Strangely enough, most of the city seems to be closed down and our first choice and recommendation is a bust. Off, then, to Mulate’s, The Original Cajun Restaurant, selected by virtue of its location directly across the street from the convention centre. I have the fried alligator (better than the grilled alligator, which my coworker orders for comparison) and the hamburger steak lafayette. It’s passable.

Back to the hotel, then, for the night. I pledge to visit the hotel’s rooftop pool and still might, but a shower and bed seem more likely as we’ll need to be up and out the door tomorrow at 7:30 AM. Perhaps I’ll take a quick peek just for the sake of seeing if what the views are like from the top. In other case, this’ll be all from me tonight. Goodnight, and on to Day One tomorrow!

Apple’s lost founder: Jobs, Wozniak and… Wayne?

Apple’s lost founder: Jobs, Woz and Wayne

[Ron Wayne] was present at the birth of cool on April Fool’s Day, 1976: Co-founder — along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — of the Apple Computer Inc., Wayne designed the company’s original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer, and drafted the fledgling company’s partnership agreement.

That agreement gave him a 10 percent ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it.

But he didn’t.

Afraid that Jobs’ wild spending and Woz’s recurrent “flights of fancy” would cause Apple to flop, Wayne decided to abdicate his role as adult-in-chief and bailed out after 12 days. Terrified to be the only one of the three founders with assets that creditors could seize, he sold back his shares for $800.

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Tiger Woods’ golf swing in slo-mo

I’m no golfer so this could be totally fake (staged), but it’s beautiful to watch.

mail2web.com

[image]https://yllus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/mail2web.png[/image]
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myhosting.com

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My primary focus was upon myhosting.com, in which I developed the site structure, domain search functionality, plan configuration functionality, the order placement / billing / account provisioning middleware that interacted with the Parallels Business Automation (PBA) backend, and the PayPal Payflow based real-time credit card transaction middleware.[/description]

What do Socrates and Obama have in common?

Barack Obama’s rant against technology: Don’t shoot the messenger

“WITH iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations—none of which I know how to work—information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”

In a speech to students at Hampton University on May 9th, Mr Obama did not just name-check some big brands; he also joined a long tradition of grumbling about new technologies and new forms of media.

Socrates’s bugbear was the spread of the biggest-ever innovation in communications—writing. He feared that relying on written texts, rather than the oral tradition, would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls…they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

Enos Hitchcock voiced a widespread concern about the latest publishing fad in 1790. “The free access which many young people have to romances, novels and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth.” (There was a related worry that sofas, introduced at the same time, encouraged young people to drift off into fantasy worlds.)

Cinema was denounced as “an evil pure and simple” in 1910; comic books were said to lead children into delinquency in 1954; rock’n’roll was accused of turning the young into “devil worshippers” in 1956; Hillary Clinton attacked video games for “stealing the innocence of our children” in 2005.

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The best hangover cure? Coconut water

I’ve been pretty happy with the greasy food approach, but next time around I’ll be giving this a try.

Time.com – Coconut Water Is Sweet Hangover Relief

Coconut water, which is extracted from fruit too young to have formed milk, is low in calories and has no fat and a lot less sugar than most juices. But its most important attribute, at least among barflies, is that it is an excellent rehydrater.

Bit of bar trivia: 10 years ago, when the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was granted a patent — the first ever given to a U.N. agency — for bottling coconut water in a way that preserves its nutrients, an FAO official noted that the drink contains the same five electrolytes found in human blood (Gatorade has only two). He called coconut water “the fluid of life.” Indeed, in medical emergencies, coconut water has been used intravenously when conventional hydration fluids were not available.

Most hangovers are less dire than that, but the killer headache that follows a night of drinking is essentially the result of being really dehydrated. All those $2 Pabst Blue Ribbons act as a diuretic, flushing the water out of your body, which then has trouble absorbing more. That’s where those electrolytes come in, according to Lilian Cheung, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health.

How (and why) to stop multitasking

Harvard Business Review – How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking

A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQs. What’s the impact of a 10-point drop? The same as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don’t actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.

You might think you’re different, that you’ve done it so much you’ve become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

But you’d be wrong. Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this case, works against you.

I decided to do an experiment. For one week I would do no multitasking and see what happened. What techniques would help? Could I sustain a focus on one thing at a time for that long?

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The “life settlement” bond market

This is one of the odder reads I’ve had lately, though it makes perfect sense that a market would have sprung up in this space: It allows the elderly and otherwise gravely ill to get cash now and ease their last days on Earth, and an “investor” gets a substantial payoff somewhere down the road. The topic arose due to a discussion in my province of whether these types of transactions should be made legal here: Serious concerns about preying on the old and ill, whether or not life insurance in general would shoot up as a result of this new market.

Canadian Business – Insurance: Dead set against it?

Right now, somewhere in Toronto, someone is dying. He has congestive heart failure and diabetes. He has spent time in the hospital, and almost passed away last year. It seems he is not long for this world.

That’s sad, of course. But for someone else in Toronto, his death will mean a windfall because this man has a $350,000 life insurance policy. Or, at least, he had it. He sold the policy some time ago for a fraction of its value. Now the buyer of the policy is in need of some quick cash and is looking to sell it again. Don Jones, an insurance broker in Seattle, is trying to facilitate the sale — asking price: $175,000.

If he can swing a deal, Jones will collect a handsome finder’s fee. The seller will get a quick, six-figure payout. And whoever buys the policy will double their money, just as soon as the insured man passes away. It would seem to be a win-win transaction — if a pesky ethical quagmire, and some thorny legal questions, didn’t come along with it.

Life settlements, a booming, if somewhat misunderstood, multi-billion-dollar business in the U.S., are illegal in most Canadian provinces. All but four (Quebec, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) have laws explicitly prohibiting trafficking in second-hand life insurance policies. And even in provinces where there are no laws expressly against life settlements, securities regulators are suspicious of them, which makes finding seed capital tricky.

Critics — with insurance companies being foremost among them — say such a market is ripe for exploiting the old, the frail and the desperate. Not only that, many warn a secondary market would drive up insurance premiums for everybody else, since current rates are based on the fact that some policies will default.

Proponents, however, point out that life settlements provide insurance policy owners with financial options they wouldn’t otherwise have. Although most insurance companies already provide people the option of buying the policy back, life settlement advocates claim that people often get 400% more cash for their policy through life settlements than they would get from their insurers.

It’s a three page article that I’ve cut down to the little shown above. Click through for a full viewing.

Note to self: Get one of these

Luxurious Art Deco 1964 Imperial LeBaron Coupe. This automobile represented the finest Chrysler had to offer in terms of style, luxury and comfort. The powertrain is an Overhead Valve 90 Degree V-8 engine producing 340 horsepower at 4600 rpm. The transmission is a torque flight fully automatic Pushbutton controlled. The exterior is a gorgeous Black, the interior is a white vinyl. Car shows normal signs of wear. Options include Pwr.Steering, Pwr.Brakes, Pwr. windows, Pwr. seats, Pwr.locks and factory A/C, currently not working. This car runs and drives well. Art on wheels! Taxes not included in the price. Gentry Lane Automobiles – 416-535-9900

1964 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron Coupe