Valuable at Cambridge

I'm a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), which is nice. Always good to be considered valuable. Amongst the benefits of this status are invites to MVP Open Days, which are always interesting. Today I've been at one in Cambridge.

..and that's just the local public toilet.

Anyhoo, we set of bright and early, as shown by the clock below, and went down to Microsoft Research where they showed us a whole bunch of good stuff, only some of which I'm allowed to tell you about. There is a lot more to Vista than a pretty interface, oh yes, and mobile development is just going to get more and more interesting.


Town clock?


On the way back to the college we noticed that the bluebells were out.


..and they do have the most impressive garden sheds I've ever seen.

Every now and then you find out that someone you have admired for being very good at one thing is also extremely good at another. Our MVP Lead (the person charged with looking after our valuableness) has always impressed us loads. Turns out that she can also carry a tune, as she proved by donning a blonde wig and belting out a whole bunch of Eurythmics tunes at the meal at the end of the day. I managed to get a photograph of her in action but it is a bit dark because as a serious photographer (ho ho) I eschew such modern frippery as flash :



Good job Lorna, great stuff.

Winding Up (or is it Down?)

Last few pictures from the San Jose experience.

On Friday night we went to Fry's Electronics (seemed somehow appropriate). While we were waiting for the taxi back I snapped this. And I didn't buy that much really. Honest.

This is where I've been working all week. The dog is called Jake (you can just see him on the Smartphone screen).

Jon said he was not really trying to get T shirts from the stands. Yeah, right.

This is the offical vehicle of the San Jose Aviation Special Police. Please try to keep a straight face when you are being cuffed and stuffed.

Travelling Ages your Brain

When we were at the Nintendo GDC keynote we were given a copy of the new DS game which trains your brain and works out its age. I fired it up on Friday and managed to get a brain age of 52 (which is not great but close enough to my real age to not frighten me too much). And it does give me scope for improvement.

Today, in a heavily jetlagged frame of mind, I fired the game up again. 68. Oh well.

Actually, I've just been thinking, if the better you are at the game the younger your brain age is, the best way to win is to set there going "Goo Goo" and sucking a dummy.

Note : this is not the case. According to the book, your optimum brain age is 20. I'm going to head for 12.

Missing Day

As far as I am concerned today does not exist.

Crunch Day

Today was the day that I did my talk at the GDC. After some last minute tweaking I set forth at 9:00 with 41 slides and 8 demos to deliver in one hour. At the end of it the audience seemed happy enough. Only one demo failed on me because I'd left a file open by mistake, but the rest worked OK and at least this failure gave me the chance to tell "my favourite joke in all the world" while I tried to recover.

If you want to get hold of the resources from the talk you can find them here. I'll be using the material as the basis of a talk at the MEDC (the Microsoft embedded developers conference) in May. If you are serious about mobile development (and who isn't) I'd strongly advise you to go along and take a look. And I promise to tell my favourite joke again.