Speaker's Life

For the last few days I've been living the life of a speaker at TechEd. I've not been to any sessions yet, unfortunately I've been too busy concentrating on the presentations.

My universe

It is a great place to work, they bring you food and bits and bobs all the time, and you can even go for a massage (although I daren't).

Balanced TechEd meal (and network cable

Final Talk

Dave Baker and I gave our final talk at TechEd 2007 today. The session was a deeper dive into the .NET Micro Framework and had the title "Small is Beautiful", which was not my idea..... We gave out our second free Embedded Fusion board away at the end for the best technical question.

Another satisfied customer gets the goods from Dave Baker of Microsoft.

The chap who won a board at the session on Monday came to see us.

"I'm having a problem" he said.

"Oh dear" we replied, wondering what would have stopped the board working

"Yes" he continued. "I've written a pong game for the board and I get this strange error message sometimes".

I hope we can sort him out, I reckon that if he has just taken a couple of days to get that far he is doing pretty well. If you want the resources from the talk I'll be putting them up later.

Update on Friday, November 9, 2007 at 11:08PM by Rob

The winner turned up at the stand and we managed to sort out his problem.

This is his board, along with a few other MicroFramework devices

The solution.....

Telephoning Exam Papers

While I'm away I installed Skype so that I can phone home cheap. 1.2 pence a minute sounds like a good deal to me. Of course, today when you install applications you often get more than you asked for.

I've just gone on to our departmental Sharepoint pages to look at some past exam papers. All the files are indexed under course codes, which in our department means that we have links that start with numbers like 08101. A Skype browser plugin (which I didn't even know I had) converted all these into into buttons I can press to call each exam as a phone number, which is not terribly useful.....

Update on Saturday, November 10, 2007 at 05:37PM by Rob

You can get rid of the problem by going to "Tools->Manage Add-Ins" within Internet Explorer and disabling the Skype plugin. Or you can just remove Skype entirely, like I have just done.

Sexy Computer Science

I've been thinking a bit about how "sexy" the subject of Computer Science is. In her intro yesterday Karen Young from Microsoft mentioned that it was being seen as less attractive as a subject for students to take up. Applications to study computing are presently falling in Europe and the USA and for the life of me I can't understand why.

A few years ago there was a bit of a dip in the business, but at the moment the demand for computer literate people is as strong as it has ever been. If you are looking to move into a field where you get to shape the future and also build it then you should enter computing. If you like working with people, finding out what they want and creating answers to questions then you should enter computing. If you like puzzles and working in an environment where things just get more interesting every day, then you should enter computing. I can't think of any other field where you have the potential to have so much impact on the future. Computers are already a huge part of people's lives and that is set to accelerate.

For me the question is not "Why should I study computing?", it is "Why would I not?".

Professional Idiot

Sometimes I wonder how I manage to be as daft as I am. I must remember that not everything that seems like a good idea is actually a good idea. Here at TechEd they have a "Diary Room" in a kind of tribute to the "Big Brother" tv programme. It has a big red chair and a camera, and the idea is that delegates can describe their conference experiences which can then be put out as part of the coverage of the event. I guess the purpose is to get a true delegate perspective.

I walked past it this morning and the idea popped into my head that it might be hilarious to record a piece into the camera asking where the butter was, why there was no milk or cheese and then, after carefully examining the conference guide, look up take say "Oh, so it isn't the dairy room after all". So I tried it. Not good. I then made some other rather silly points and finally, for no sane reason, pressed the save button. Arrrgh. I'm cringing as I write this, I just hope that there is some kind of an editorial layer between my stupidity and worldwide distribution via the interweb.

Then, this afternoon I'd been asked to give a talk about being an valued professional. Karen Young, MVP Program Lead gave a great introduction to the program, finishing by making the point that computing is not seen a sexy any more. I started off my talk by wondering aloud if bringing me on next really was going to show how sexy computing really is. Good thought Rob. I then continued to tell all the students how the internet is "The Biggest CV you will ever have", and that you should regard your internet persona as a brand to be carefully managed so that you always look your best. As I was forcefully making this point the awful vision of me in front of the camera asking for yogurt drifted across my mind.

Idiot.

Update on Saturday, November 10, 2007 at 05:40PM by Rob

They've actually used my "dairy gag" on the end of the show-real for the Wednesday report on the TechEd delegate web site. The good news is that they've blurred it a bit and not added my name.