Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 09:24PM 
Italian Designer Water
Made it to Milan this evening for Italian leg of the Nokia Windows Phone 7 Tour. Despite standing in the queue for the flight to Madrid for 20 minutes…….
Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 09:10PM 
Went up town in Hull today and took some more pictures in Hull Holy Trinity Church. Great place.
pictures Friday, September 23, 2011 at 08:51PM 
Spent some more quality time with Windows 8 this evening. I’m still a bit confused by the user interface (I keep wanting the Start button to show me my Programs menu), but I am impressed by the way that it just seems to work.
I put Windows 8 on the machine last week and I don’t regret the move. I made a DVD from the ISO image and installed the 64 bit version of the operating system. Since then I’ve been fiddling around with the platform and it works fine for me, the touch side of the experience is especially impressive. I’ve even had some updates install themselves and this evening I added the Bluetooth drivers from the Acer site. They are supposed to be for the 32 bit version of Windows 7, but 64 bit versions are in the file you can download from the Acer product support site.
I’ve now got a working keyboard and mouse and the system might even become useful in the future. I can’t track down 64 bit versions of the accelerometer drivers and the display seems curiously unhappy to flip to portrait mode but apart from that the machine seems quite useable.
I’ve installed Windows Live Essentials (the install went off and fetched .NET 3.5 half way through) and I’m now typing this blog post on the tablet using Live Writer. The only snag really is that I’m down to only around 9G free on the 32G hard disk, but I can plug in a 32G SD card if I want to store some more stuff. Then again, Live Writer has crashed a few times so I don’t think Windows 8 would be a good place to spend real life.
However, if you are looking for a way to get a tablet with Windows 8 I can recommend the device. I can fire up Visual Studio 2011and have a go at writing programs, but it is a bit slow. I didn’t spend much time in Windows 7 after I got the machine but I think it would even make a reasonable portable Windows platform.
Windows 8 Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 09:20PM 
We had our second day in Paris as part of the Nokia and Windows Phone tour. Great fun. At lunch we ended up right on top of the building, looking out over the river and the Paris skyline.
Photogenic train
Taking lunch
Nice afters too….
The delegates were another great bunch, and were even kind enough to laugh at my “favourite computer joke in all the world”.
Some of the audience.
CDG airport terminal on the way back looking good.
We are taking the roadshow, and my favourite jokes, to Milan next week.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 09:43PM Andy, Gregg and myself have just had a great day talking Windows Phone.
Hi to the audience, great job folks
This was on at the same time in the conference centre. I was able to use the line “It’s not Rocket Science. That’s next door….” I said I’d put links to the content we described. You can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx
The ones you want are:
01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications
There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:
After the sessions we went up the tower. Used the stairs. Cheaper and no queues. Great fun
More tomorrow. Looking forward to it.
Rob
Julie from Nokians.fr has posted a very nice sequence of live tweets from the event. My French is not that good, but it looks like she enjoyed the day, which is nice. Read the whole stream here:
