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I was participating in the workshop on How to Become a Person of Influence, hosted by Jo Miller, at Grace Hopper 2009. Throughout the workshop we were asked to exchange ideas and our assignments with those at the table.  I was lucky enough to have Stormy Peters (of GNOME fame) at my table. During one of these exchanges on increasing our influence, we were asked to talk about things we knew we should be doing but are not. For me that was writing on my blog. I ended up talking about blogging and why I didn’t do more of it. She really got to the core reason why I wasn’t blogging. She said you are trying to emulate other blogs your read and really like, you are trying to be prefect. She told me to “Just post it”. She was completely right of course. I feel it is more important to actually publish the information and experiences that I have rather that trying to write the prefect post. I have using this mantra since I have updated my blog.  I hope she approves of the new blog so far.

I have decided to start moderating comments after being spamed for the last few days. So if you leave a comment, I will eventually approved it if I feel it isn't spam.

I have attended two session where the same repeated problem kept happening to the presenters.

The first SOA201 A First Look at WCF and WF in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 with Aaron Skonnard. For some unknown reason, the slides where advancing without Aaron actually moving them forward. It could have been an evil trick being played on him or just a hardware glitch, but it was truly annoying for everyone. I have seen him in other talks over the years and he usually does not stay still. I think Aaron figured out that if he would go back to the slide he wanted and hold the key it would move forward. Once he figured this out he was just standing behind his computer holding the back key. At least that is what I think he was doing.

In the second DTL314 Understanding Code Extensibility with Jason Olson. Jason got to deal with two problems. Windows 7 was having a problem with his video drivers and windows would restart the video drivers. Also Visual Studio 2010 would crash out on him and he would have restart the web server or in some instances he would have to restart VS itself.

Both of these guys kept their cool and didn’t freak out. They didn’t let these issues effect their entire presentations. They made jokes, talk to audience, and just kept going. Even though they had these problems their presentations were still top notch. Hats off to both of you.

After the expo last night, I took photos of all the t-shirts I collected. I have both the fronts and the backs pictured. If there is a shirt that I am missing and want it displayed here, make a comment and I will stop by and pick one up and add it to the photos below.

At the keynote this morning it was mentioned that there where only seven thousand attendees. I guess with current state of the worldwide economy some of the first things to go is training/conferences, in my opinion it is a mistake. By sending someone to a great confernce, you can learn to better use the tools that you already have at your disposal. Becoming more agile in this economy is key to staying ahead.