Open All Hours

Had an open day today. Went and did my speech. Rather cunningly overran so that we did not have time to do the Song Star Karaoke which Jon had threatened me with. Although I'm sure I'd have won anyway.

I'm working up to the launch of "www.wherewouldyouthink.com" which is supposed to be a one stop shop for candidates for our department courses. At the moment it is all stop, since I've got to get the infrastructure in place. But when it works it will be great.

In the afternoon we toddled off to Starbucks for a coffee which was nice.

Number one son is packing for a camping trip at the moment. I've just upset him by refusing to lend him my posh Swiss Army penknife. He'll just have to take stones out of horse's hooves with a bent piece of wire or something. He's taking three can openers. Well, you can't be too careful.

 

Football Crazy

The whole of europe is on a knife edge. Teams of warriors have been gathering on fields of conflict around Portugal and the full weight of national honour has been placed on the shoulders of a few young men. Not that this holds much interest for me. And anyway, England got knocked out ages ago. However, that didn't top the TechEd party being football themed. But they did show some movies as well.

In the football area.

I didn't stay to watch the match, instead we snuck out and watched a movie instead.

There is a nice tower outside the exhibition centre.

Nice tower.

 

More Pictures

Sorry about the paucity of pictures yesterday. I've put together a bunch of stuff which should keep you happy (or at least use up a bit more bandwidth).

The TechEd shop has a number of interesting products in store. I seem to have bought most of them.

I thought this was a subtle micky take, but then I found a similarly labeled banana in the other cabinet.

I've seen the toy that I want next. It is supposed to be in the shops "fourth quarter 2004". Just in time for christmas.....

Round the back of the conference centre is a little pond. With swans.

If you turn this picture upside down it nearly works....

Commuter parking

Another tram leaves the master tram central control tower to take on the mean streets of Amsterdam (and drive off just before you get to it).

 

Hotel Lfe

One of the facts about hotel life is that the first trip to your room takes around 20 minutes. After that you get progressively faster until you can find the place in seconds. I'm kind of half way there now, in that I only have to stop and think around five times on the way. The room is nice. It has a thingy by the door in which you must put your room key before anything electrical will work. Of course I didn't find this until after I'd spent around five minutes wondering why nothing worked. Ho hum. The mirror in the bathroom has a special demisted bit which doesn't get steamed up when you have a shower. I was tempted to post a picture of this in action, but you really wouldn't want to see that...

The dutch language is great. I've no idea what anybody is saying, but it sounds fantastic. And people seem to smile when they are saying things, which is nice. I'd quite like to play Dutch scrabble. I usually get all the vowels, with loads more of the letter a than I ever need. In Holland this would be really useful.

Everybody rides around on bikes and there seems to be some kind of national competition to see how many people you can get on two wheels. The record would seem to be a rather low 3 so far, but the rider gets extra style points for using a mobile phone at the same time as well..

The conference is, as usual, scarily well organised. As an example, every one of the 5,000 delegates was given a drum to beat during the keynote. All the drums were made in an ethnically friendly way in Africa (we saw a video of them being put together). The TechEd bag comes with a special fitting with no other purpose than to attach your drum to. And the delegates were instructed in its use during the intro. If you wish, you can leave your drum at the "Drum Store" and claim it back at the end of the day. Anyone can decide to give people free drums. But I reckon that only Microsoft would take it to the level of the creation of a complete "drum infrastructure". We wondered if there there were even people to make sure that the drums were treated correctly - they could make a TV program called "Drumicide - life on the beat" about that. Ho, ho. Anyhoo, my drum is presently in the drum store and I'll pick it up on the way out. All the flights out of Amsterdam on Friday will have have their overhead lockers full of the things.

 

Blogging from Amsterdam

Amsterdam is nice. We have to catch the tram from the hotel to the conference centre.

The stops are displayed on the tram in a really neat way. Although I have no idea where these places are, or if I'm on the right tram or not. Fortunately the people I'm with are OK with this and we get there OK. Before the keynote itself we had a bunch of drummers. There weren't 10, so it can't be christmas.

We got given drums as well, so we could join in. Some bits were really tricky. I now have a lot more respect for Ringo Star.

Mark gives it his all..

One of our students, Andy Sterland, was giving a keynote address. Brave soul.

But by gum, he was good. But we did detect a touch of trans-atlantic twang there Andy. Remember to keep it real!

Andy struts his stuff.

There was also a demo of some superb simulation and rendering stuff. All in 3D.

The audience being gripped by 3D.

Later we went for lunch. Just a few people round for dinner....

The hotel doesn't have WIFI connections. But, thanks to a (perhaps unknowning) generous dutchman, I do - sometimes....

More tomorrow.

 

Early Rise Flyer

Off on my travels again. So this is the place for more silly pictures and daft comments.

Got up at 4:00 am to get the taxi. Lovely sunrise as we drove over the Humber Bridge. Almost makes me want to get up early one day and go out and take pictures. Almost.

I'll have the seat near the big engine please.

And this is some time later.

The conference centre in Amsterdam is very posh. They have kooky lights on the wall.

There don't seem to be many english speakers around It is quite amusing to here "burble burble burble Windows Web Server burble burble burble" when techies from abroad are talking. The bags that we have been given are remarkable. I'll post a picture of them when I've found the appropriate protective filter for the camera.

If you want comments on the technical content (that is the bits that I can understand) head off to my Spoke site. If you want more dodgy pix and daft comments then come back tomorrow....

 

Packing for Amsterdam

Going on my travels again tomorrow. Off to Amsterdam to Microsoft TechEd 2004. Quite looking forward to it, even though I have to get up at 4:00 tomorrow morning to get a taxi to the airport. So today I'm packing. A couple of hours to prep and pack the gadgets. Five minutes to throw a few T shirts into a case. Problem solved.