Archive
Past and Present Events
So as my involvement in the community has grown I get to attend some pretty cool events. The latest was the EVC Venture Capital Event this past Tuesday, March 19th, at the Madonna Expo Center. I’ve got this neat idea that I don’t want to put out there in public too too much, but if you know my background you wouldn’t be surprised to find that it is a new web site idea. But it’s only an idea, so I went with my little placard of mockups, some business cards, and a fact sheet, and crossed my fingers that some angel investor might write me a check.
That went ok. What was interesting, however, was the level of technology that is being developed here on the Central Coast. Aeromech, who will be presenting at the next Softec meeting, builds Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for both commercial and military applications. They were in the booth on my left. Phoenix is looking to upgrade the Kit airplane to a “sexy” two seater plane that actually kneels so you can get in like a car. They were in the booth on my right. Fleet Management Solutions, who does asset tracking via GPS, a company that is building the next electric car, and New Image Technologies’ Elements, a custom networking website platform, and another company doing specialized wireless video, were all there. And while I was personally outclassed, I was also amazed and proud to be part of the tech industry here in SLO County and beyond. There’s a lot of great stuff going on around here if you know where to look. Hopefully you will all come to the Softec meeting and see Aeromech in person. It’s well worth the visit.
In addition, Microsoft’s CodeTrip will be coming to Cuesta College on March 31st. CodeTrip is basically a bunch of code geeks on a bus, touring the West Coast in support of some new, really cool Microsoft technologies. Through my contacts via the San Luis Obispo .NET User Group, we were able to get them to visit us here in SLO on their way from LA to SF, where they will be stopping by VSLive the first week of April.
They will be giving presentations to student classes and then holding a general session at 6 pm at the school. Another great opportunity to expose yourself to the great technologies available to you.
Hope to see you there,
Robert Hope
Founder, San Luis Obispo .NET User Group
Tom Brokaw at the Microsoft 2008 Launch Event Celebrates Technology Heroes
It’s not often that you hear people who are involved in technology referred to as “heroes”. Most of us are just techno-geeks trying to do the best we can. And while I don’t necessarily drink the kool-aid as far as those of us who are using the newer Microsoft technologies being called heroes, I have to say I was struck by Tom Brokaw’s opinion of what technology has meant to our world and our society.
I went to Microsoft’s Los Angeles Launch Event 2008 this past week in celebration of the release of their three new products, Windows Server 2008, Sql Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. Lots of great advances, lots of awesome stuff, and their theme was “Heroes Happen Here”. By that, they mean that the people who are using these new technologies are the heroes of technology.
But Tom’s keynote speech (I was actually surprised when he came out on the stage at the Nokia Theater) revolved around what technology has meant to people in other parts of the world. He admitted to not being very computer savvy…and admitted he would probably never write a line of code with Visual Studio, or manage a Hyper-V Virtual Server Farm…but he did recall the importance of technology in making our world smaller, and hopefully better. He talked about the people who went to Pakistan to help during their last devastating earthquake, and how that when they came down from hiking into the deep mountains they were able to put fingers to keyboard and let the world know what had happened. He talked about how technology was helping to improve farming, and irrigation, and what that meant to the lives of people living in Africa. He talked about surgeries being led remotely by doctors via videoconferencing. I can’t recall all the stories he told, but they all held essentially the same meaning: that the people, the programmers, the administrators, all of us who help make technology what it is, and make it available to the true heroes of the world, we all have a stake and a helping hand in that heroism, and he wanted to thank us.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, gave the rest of the keynote address as the event moved from true heroism into our own personal versions of “code heroes”…but what Tom Brokaw said does ring true. Technology helps in ways that sometimes we never know about, and our role in that is crucial, and we shouldn’t take for granted what we do with it. We’re all heroes.
Jekyll and Hyde Code Camp Experience
So I went to the Deer In The Headlights Code Camp in Waltham, Mass at the end of March. I’m originally from New England so I thought I would take a long weekend, see my parents and a few friends, then give a talk or two at the Code Camp, stop in to see my twin neice and nephew, and then head home. Coming out of this I’ve decided something for sure at Code Camps in the future: I am never again giving more than one talk at a a code camp.
For starters, the car I rented decided to blow a tire just after all the businesses closed on Saturday afternoon. Now, I’m scheduled to give two talks in succession the next morning at 9 am, two hours away. I considered driving down to Waltham on the spare donut, but I’ve done that in the past with disastrous results. Which leads me to being up all night worrying and finally deciding to borrow my dad’s Impala, drive the two hours to Waltham, give my two talks, drive the two hours back to my parents, get the tire repaired, the drive the two hours back to Boston to spend the night with my sister and the twins before flying home to California the next day.
In addition, I hadn’t given either talk in months and I realized looking at the schedule that while my talks were built around 60 minutes speaking and 15 minutes questions, the schedule indicated I would need to speak for closer to 90 minutes…and now with a flat tire I had little time to prepare and adjust.
In any event, the first talk I gave was on Generics and I decided to scrap my entire powerpoint and just do code samples, and it went fantastic. Even though I was on 4 hours’ sleep it had to be the best talk I ever gave. People afterward were even coming up and telling me it was the best review of Generics they had ever seen. I was very satisfied.
And then I followed it up with the worst talk I had ever given. My talk on Reflection is very dry and hard to do code samples because you either get it or you don’t. You either understand the situations where you would use Reflection or you don’t. Reflection can be a very powerful tool if you can recognize it. In the past I’ve had audiences who had enough people in the crowd who understand that enough dialogue was generated to demonstrate effectively. However, I felt that I was not communicating well enough this time to draw out the group, and I had not had the time I had put into my Generics talk because of my tire issues. I felt like no one really got anything out of the talk, and because of the lack of dialogue, the talk ran well short. Basically a disaster and I owe everyone who saw that talk an apology.
So the moral of the story is, don’t do more than one talk unless you know they are both crisp and ready to go!
I’ve attached links to the Generics code samples and the Reflection demo. Someone asked me to port the Generics code over to VB.NET but 80% of my demo was based around leverage anonymous methods and VB.NET doesn’t support them, so it didn’t make much sense to do the porting.
Also, sorry about the delay in getting these to you…it’s been a hectic month. My wife is due in 8 weeks and my company is about to put its first major project into QA and I’ve just been swamped, but in a good way 🙂
Thanks for your patience!
Rob
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 