Victor's Trip to Sydney

Victor and Greg came along to Sydney with me for Tech•Ed, at three months old the trip included a lot of firsts for Victor.

He had his first plane ride which he he slept most of the way through, then on to his first train ride which he wasn't so pleased about, although I think this was more a reflection on how tired he was.
If it wasn't for some much needed assistance from my fellow SDM travellers Ben and Will, Greg and I would of struggled to make it to the hotel in one piece. Even though we only had a pram, 1 bag and a backpack getting around on public transport was certainly a lot more difficult than I expected. On the way back we took the easier option and got a Taxi which was another first for Victor.

While in Sydney we also went on a cruise around the bay. I took Victor outside on the boat but he wasn't very pleased by the wind, i guess when your already struggling to hold your head up that much wind really isn't very helpful ! He really wasn't that impressed by the bridge or the opera house, but he seemed to prefer the water wooshing around the side of the boat !

On saturday we had a nice picnic in darling harbour. Victor certainly liked spending time outside and was amazed by simple things like the tree he was lying next to, we will definately have to head out to the local park more often.





The bit of the trip that he absolutely loved was the aquairum, especially the bits where there was water above and around the walkways.
He really enjoyed watching all the creatures swimming around through the glass.

It was really awesome watching him enjoy all these things for the first time, I'm already looking forward to when we can organize our next family adventure !

Tech•Ed Highlights

There were some great technical sessions up at Tech•Ed this year in fact there were so many that a lot of them clashed with each other. I'm hoping I can catch up on some I missed from the USDVD'ss.

The highlights for me were the MOSS 2007 and workflow sessions. I've recently spent a fair bit of time developing with MOSS so a fair bit of the technical content for me was not new, but I'm sure I picked up plenty of new pieces of knowledge. Also the speakers were so entertaining it made the sessions extra interesting. It seemed to work really well having some of the local Microsoft guys paired with the overseas speakers. These sessions were really popular and itdefinitelyy highlighted how important and popular the release of the Office 2007 server products is going to be.

I also took the opportunity this year to miss out on a few sessions to meet up with speakers in person. I talked to both Arpan Shah and Mike Fitzmaurice about key areas in MOSS and WSS 3. Also I talked to both Paul Andrew and local MVP Mick Badran about workflow. Along with catching up with a lot of the local Microsoft people these sessions really made Tech•Ed for me.

Also it was great to see a couple of SDM people presenting with great sessions by Ben Walters our InfoPath MVP and one of our SQL Server experts Nick Barclay , maybe next year I can get myself a spot presenting !

Finally I also got myself a few nice freebee's with the best being the bags and also the personalized t-shirts given out by Microsoft.

Tech•Ed 06 Keynote

This years Tech•Ed in Sydney was the best one that I have been to so far.
It started off very well with the keynote. I had a reserved seat down the front for being involved in the marketing campaign and my name even got mentioned during the speech by Frank Arrigo which was nice.

The main speaker was Anne Kirah who is ananthropologistt at Microsoft and I found her speech fascinating. She told some great stories about her time at Microsoft and the shift in importance from involving 40 "normal" families in providing feedback during the windows XP beta (including a couple who were 75 !) to having families from all around the world involved with the newer products such as Vista. This really helped highlighted Microsoft's shift towards people ready solutions rather than those aimed at IT pro's.

This focus on designing solutions for people not "users" was something that was repeated in several of the architecture sessions I saw as well. As technical people it is all too easy to give users what we think they should have, rather than what they actually want. This further validated the approach we try to take at SDM which involves planning meetings with all the people involved in using the solution (when the client allows it) as well as an iterative approach to allow feedback to be included in the solution as it is built.

I also found her explanationn of digital immigrants and digital natives really interesting (Digital natives are those that have grown up with technology). One of the most interesting things was her description of how digital natives can and expect to do multiple things at once. This quite accurately describes Greg and I. I've been pretty lucky to have had computers around for almost as long as I can remember. Greg on the other hand didn't use a computer very often until he started living with me. I often drive him mad as I'm frequently doing two things at once (if not three) like watching TV and typing my blog, while he prefers to do one thing at once.

She also highlighted how things change over the generations. For example many parents and workplaces are trying to limit the use of technologies such as IM as for the digital immigrants who are the decision makers they are distracting, but for the digital natives they are such a part of daily life that not having them can even lead to them changing workplaces.
She also talked about the digital natives helping to bring others up to speed, this is something that is familiar to most people who work in IT who have helped their parents or other relatives get a computer and are now on-call tech support. I'd like to think I will be able to keep up to speed with new technology, but I'm sure I'll hit a point where Victor will be on the phone trying to explain very slowly how to use something new to me. I wonder what it will feel like to be on the other side of the phone conversation !