Windows Phone in Brno

 

There are some great places to wander round here, and some superb pavement cafes.

Today we spent the morning wandering round Brno and then in the afternoon I went out to give a couple of Windows Phone talks.

As usual I took a picture of the folks who turned up, there is another on Flickr which shows the rest of the room. The talk was great, really good audience. You can find slide decks and demo programs for the two sessions here. The sessions you want are the Introduction to Silverlight (02) and  Introduction to XNA (11). The decks are part of the Windows Phone Jumpstart series, you can find decks on lots of other interesting Windows Phone topics as well.  In a little while there will be some videos as well.

After the talk we went out for a drink and then headed for a walk around Brno by night.

Enjoying a drink..

The bar had these really cool speakers

These folks were really (and I mean really) good.

Brno station by night.

Thanks for doing such a great job of guiding us around folks, it was a really splendid evening.

Lies and Weather Forecasts

Today’s weather forecast for Brno for the last few days has been confidently stuck at “heavy rain”. So we put on all our waterproof stuff and headed out to explore the city.

No rain. Wonderful (and very hot) sunshine. We were torn between happiness that we had good weather and annoyance that we had far too many clothes on to be properly comfortable. Brno is great. Big squares, lovely looking buildings, a cathedral which is beautiful (although you’ll have to take my word about the insides as they don’t allow photos) and lots of those cafes you can sit at and watch the world go by. Which we did.

The even better news (I guess) is that ten minutes after we got back to our hotel it really, really, rained. Not sure what we are going to wear tomorrow though…

Heading to Brno

Taking artistic pictures while having tea…

True story. I was invited to speak at the Mobera mobile development conference in Brno in the Czech Republic. It was in the week that we normally have for holidays, but, seeing that it looked like it was in a nice place (never been to the Czech Republic before) I said yes and bought tickets for myself and Number One Wife. I was looking forward to speaking about Windows Phone development and then spending a few days looking around the city.

Then the conference was postponed. Oh well. Since we’d booked holidays and bought flights we thought we’d go anyway. Good move. The city (what we’ve seen of it) is very nice, the hotel (Hotel Europa) is super and great value, and we seem to be surrounded by great restaurants. I’m giving a talk to a user group on Tuesday night, so I even get to do some performing while I’m here.

Number One Son Falls Out of Plane

Number one son today took it upon himself to fall out of a plane in aid of charity. I don’t have any pictures, but I’m assured that the chap he was strapped to will vouch for this. If you want to make a contribution to his good cause, then head over here and give him some cash.

Spam Overload

For some reason I’ve been getting a lot more span recently. The university filter is usually pretty good, bur over the last few weeks I’ve seen an increase in people wanting me to help move money out of shady countries and I have had lots of attacks on bank accounts I’ve not got.

I’ve been pondering the best way to deal with this and I did start to wonder if the best thing to do would be to reply to every spam message that I get, but give invalid information each time. If everybody in the world did this then the spammers (who rely on getting responses from just the few folks daft enough to respond) would have a denial of service attack of their own to deal with...

Actually this is a very bad idea though, in that the best approach really is to not do anything, since it is best if they don’t know whether or not your account is active and if you make yourself visible it marks you as someone worth chasing.