Once a month whether I have something to say or not!

Oh damn.  I'm breaking one of Scott Hanselman's rules that he lists out in Blog Interesting - 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking.  I may have passed suck a few posts ago already.  Oh well.

I'm finally settled in Indiana.  Well as settled as you can be without owning a house.  That's what is taking up all of my time lately.  Just to get a bunch of stuff off my chest, here's a dump of links that I've either consumed or am waiting to fully consume sometime shortly:

Swear Jar. (wmv)  Awesome Bud Lite commercial.

So you want to be a tracer?!  Here's your chance.  Re-inking Thor.

I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I really want to spend some time with the latest Microsoft Robotics Studio.  It looks like they have some Sumo Robot simulator happening.  It looks like it's kind of a big brother to the SumoBots.

I really wish that I could be at TechEd this year.  But between the move and everything else, that just didn't happen.  I can still keep up with some of the goings on thanks to Virtual TechEd.  I thought it was really cool that you could watch the keynote online.  Be sure to check out the video covering Embedded programming.  NOTE: You will need Silverlight installed on your system to watch any of those videos.

If Virtual TechEd doesn't give you enough info, my buddy James is blogging from TechEd as well.

So it has been a busy summer already, and it's just starting.

Over the past month I went to my in-laws in Indiana.  Came back home but left my wife in kids in the midwest to continue their visit.  They finally came home just in time for me to leave for Tech Ed.  Then I got back from Tech Ed in time to go on a family camping trip to the Metolius River.  I think that I'm actually rested now, though.

I've already posted a couple things about Tech Ed.  Looking back, the conference just flat out rocked!  I would definitely recommend going if you have the means.  The local County that I work for should somehow work it in their budget to send a few more people.  At least one developer, dba, and tech services type person.  There is so much information there that it is just exhausting trying to take it all in.  I only took a few pictures there.

Tech Ed was held in Boston this year.  Great town.  Great People.  Not a straight road in the whole city.  Lots of Dunkin Donuts (as I've mentioned before).  The conference kept me pretty busy, but I did manage to take some pictures walking around the city one day.

We spent one evening at Fenway Park.  That night was crazy.  I don't know how much it cost but BillG sure knows how to throw a party.  Pictures.

Finally, the family camp out.  So it has been raining in Oregon since last September.  But the weekend that we decide to go camping the weather decides to wake up and shoot up to 100 degrees!  Actually, it was nice where we were.  I think the hottest that I saw it was 95, and the river helped to cool things down.  Camping pictures here.

...or day 2 depending on how you are counting.  I didn’t really count Sunday since it was a pre-conference day.  So today was the first real day, and it was a full one.  A friend of mine who had attended Tech Ed before had told me that it was like standing in front of a fire hose of information, and he was right.  Today was mostly presentations concerning architecture, Team System, and the different flavors of Visual Studio.  The Architect version looks killer.  The Developer version was nice.  That presentation was pretty ho-hum.  Probably because I’ve either seen the tools being used before or I’ve used some of them already. 

The Team System stuff really stole the show for me though.  When fully implemented it could take the place of a lot of manual processes and help us to cut the cord on an in-house defect tracking system that we use.  It all looked pretty nifty.  But then again in a nice controlled presentation environment things usually do.  I like the fact that at Tech Ed they have all of the on Hands-on Labs.  They let you start to get a feel for the tools that you just saw up on a projector screen.

I probably won’t be posting anymore this week.  Maybe once, we’ll see.  I got back to my hotel room at nine, and it’s looking like this was my early night for the week.  There are lots of activities planned the rest of the week and I don’t plan on missing any of them.  They do a pretty good job of keeping you involved.  Today I hit the last presentation at 5pm and it was over by 6.  I left the room feeling wiped out from sitting through talks all day.  I caught my second wind though when I got back to the main conference hall to find free beer, free food, and all the vendor booths back open.

I leave you with a shot of my loot from tonight…..

What you see before you is the Day Zero take of Tech Ed goodies.  Nothing overly exciting in there.  Mostly magazines and trial software.  I scored a few architecture books.  But most of my day was spent going over the labs, trying out new software, trying to figure out how some of that stuff might be of use to us at work. 

Hopefully tomorrow’s take of freebies will be better.  I just got done going through my stack of entry forms to fill out to get free stuff, be entered for drawings, and just agree to be pestered by telephone and email for the next year or two.

Right now on the main Tech Ed page, you can see the keynote address that we saw tonight.  It was pretty interesting.  Very entertaining.  I imagine that it was more entertaining being there….more so than watching it on a pc.  Dark…fog machines…. lights… loud music.  It was fun.  Geek rock concert.

Microsoft’s big push right now is for collaboration.  They bought Groove a while ago, and now all that functionality is making it’s way into Office.  It looks way cool!  I imagine that it won’t be that cheap though.  Their other big push seems to be on the virtual server front.  They are talking a lot about having big beefy machines with gigs of memory and terabytes of disk space, and running your servers on there.  Then while maintaining those machines you can tweak them on the fly.  If a server is bogging down because of a specific process, you can just throw more memory at the virtual machine in real time.  The possibilities can really get out of hand.  Now deploying another server can be as easy as deploying your virtual machine image to wherever you want it to run.  Sounds crazy.  Probably be hearing more about that stuff tomorrow.