Flying Home from Seattle

Time to fly home today. It has been a very brief visit but well worth the trip.  Best MVP Summit ever. Thanks to all the folks at Microsoft for being so forthcoming about the future.

Windows Phone 7 Fun

Today we found out some more stuff about what’s coming for Windows Phone in the future. I reckon the only way to improve it would be to give away a free pie with each phone. Great stuff.

Steve Balmer Speaks

Say what you like about Steve Balmer, head honcho at Microsoft, but he can work an audience. We saw him in action today at the summit keynote. At the end of it I was left feeling that at the moment Microsoft doesn’t have all the answers, but it is certainly asking all the right questions.

In the evening we headed out to Jillian’s Billiards for some fun and games. The weather was dark and wet, something of a Seattle speciality it would seem. I got a bit carried away taking pictures of the traffic through the bus windows.

I think I was lucky to get this shot, which has the Space Needle in it – perhaps with a bit more post-processing I can actually make it visible….

We had a great time, I even managed to get a go at table tennis. And no, I didn’t fall off the table. On the way out to the taxi we were talking about business cards for some reason and I said that I thought it would be really cool to be able to whip out a playing card and say “The card you chose was the three of clubs” when someone gave me their business card. Well, I thought it was mildly amusing. Then Jeff produced this:

I think he had the other 51 cards with him as well.

Kudos to the Microsoft folks for a giving us such an interesting day and responding so constructively to the stuff that we said. Special shout out to Stephanie who is one of those organisers around whom the right things just seem to happen as though by magic.  Thanks for making everything work so well.

Return of the Midnight Coder

I’ve got this cunning plan for my trip to Seattle to avoid the dreaded jet-lag. The idea is to go to bed early each night and then get up around 2:00 am and spend a few hours awake doing stuff (which usually means writing some software). I then go back to bed around 4:30 and get a couple of hours more sleep before rising for the day. This should mean that I don’t actually adjust to local time, so when I go home I shouldn’t suffer too much.

Unfortunately this plan was somewhat sabotaged tonight when I ended up out and about until 10:30pm…. But it was a good night though.

This is what you see in the hotel lobby if you look straight up.

Seattle Shopping

We started the day with breakfast at Lowell's. If you ever go to Seattle you should just go there. Have anything, it is all great.

Good view of the bay too. I thought I’d take some pictures of signs.

I don’t think the sisters look that happy…