4:15 PM: My first choice is Rm 276’s “DPR304: FAIL, Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices”, but twenty minutes before the session starts the entrance to that seminar room is already jammed with traffic. I turn around and instead enter the near-empty Rm 272, “WEB204: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for Web Deployment” by Vishal R. Joshi. Less laughs, but probably more applicable to my day-to-day routine.
4:20 PM: Internet access in the conference centre still doesn’t work. It’s been two or three hours now?
4:24 PM: We’re starting early! The presenter abruptly introduces himself while standing in the middle of the room, making us all search around to find him. He’s in the middle of the room.
He asks that we provide examples of what kind of setup we’ve got going, and what challenges we face with them. He picks the first person at random and forces him to speak, but after that people volunteer themselves. It runs the usual gamut of multiserver deployments with complicated XCOPY scripts. I can relate.
4:30 PM: We’re given notice to finish checking our e-mail and get ready to pay attention. Joshi plays Louis Armstrong as a sort of Emmy-wrap-up-your-speech music cue, but for writing e-mail.
4:32 PM: Room is about half full.
4:37 PM: One cup of broccoli has only 43 calories. We’re told that this talk has broccoli in it. This is our fair warning that this is a unsexy topic which Vishal will try to counter by being as cheesy as possible. Thanks!
4:40 PM: An old deployment document of Vishal’s is 52 pages long, and doesn’t even have any code in it. And it uses XCOPY. Ouch.
4:41 PM: The centre of today’s discussion: Replacing XCOPY.
Because I missed the seminar I really wanted to attend in the earlier timeslot, I’ve parked myself right outside of Rm 349 in order to attend “DPR05-INT Developers Are from Mars, Testers Are from Venus”.
2:14 PM: I’m the second person into the room, and seat myself near the back to ensure access to a wall power outlet.
2:15 PM: The presenter of the last seminar in this room, “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks” has a line four deep full of people wanting to ask extremely technical questions. He’s looking around in desperation wondering how he can get out of here.
2:17 PM: The crowd up front dissipates. One of the presenters of my seminar asks him how it went. He says, “Fine, just answering question after question… Slides are boring!” I tend to agree, though a seminar doesn’t strike me as the right place to ask how to solve bugs I run into at work. He wishes her to “break a leg!” and leaves in a hurry.
2:20 PM: It’s quiet now, so I continue to work on turning my keynote scribbles into something approaching readable.
2:21 PM: The conference hall’s Internet has been down for more than an hour now. I overhear that supposedly a main trunk is down and it’s actually an issue affecting the entire city.
2:40 PM: The seminar room is half full; maybe testing isn’t a popular topic. We’re told we’ll start in 5 minutes.
8:35 AM: I head into Hall F for the the Microsoft TechEd 2010 keynote by (a name previously unknown to me) Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business for Microsoft. A coworker beeps me to let me know the doors have been opened at 8:30 AM, so I walk a long mile guided by dozens of red-shirted Microsoft ushers (enforcers?) to the far right side.
8:40 AM: Almost as soon as I take a seat, the band that’s been quietly setting up on the stage kicks into their first song at full volume and startles everyone. It’s a nine-man band composed of all your expected instruments: Guitar, saxophone, drums, trumpet, chainmail-washboard shirt. I fail to catch the name of the band on any of the screens and also forget the name when it’s mentioned at the presentation’s close by Bob Muglia. Sorry guys.
8:45 AM: The lead singer seems to be wearing a sort of chainmail shirt which he also plays as an instrument (the washboard). How great would this have been back in Ye Olde England? You could be both a minstrel and a knight. Maybe instead of being a great knight or a great minstrel you’d be mediocre at both, but the flexibility would have been enticing.
8:47 AM: The lead singer rather abruptly attempts to get the audience to sing along. We fail miserably but at least have a laugh at ourselves. My section is quickly deemed the lead singer’s favourite due to its higher than average energy level (not me, I’m typing, but Dmitri yells loudly at one point).
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!
[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.
[image]https://yllus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/mail2web.png[/image]
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At SoftCom Inc., I developed the revamped site structure based on a .NET / MS SQL / Windows 2008 platform. On the backend, I developed SoftCom’s proprietary real-time provisioning system, as well as the PayPal Payflow based real-time credit card transaction middleware.[/description]
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[description]Between August 2007 and December 2010, I was the primary architect and led development of all SoftCom Inc. web properties on the .NET / MS SQL / Windows 2008 platform.
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]
“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.â€
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.
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.
