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Microsoft Student Insider Training Day 1: Travel
Feb 4th
Greetings everybody!
Sorry for my recent absence from the blog. Between my trip to Microsoft that I am about to tell you about, finals, my grandmother’s cancer and a few other things, my life has been all kinds of crazy lately. Hopefully, starting today, I can get back to blogging regularly like I vowed at the first of the year. Anyway, lets talk my trip to Microsoft!
Since technically, the first day of the trip was the travel day, I will talk about the travel day in this post and then the extra exciting stuff will start in the next post. As of right now, I expect to do a series of at least 4 posts about this trip which will likely have a few other posts sprinkled in and some major news about the Global Geek News Podcast to wrap everything up before we get back to your regularly scheduled blog. Anyway, lets talk the travel day!
Wednesday morning I woke up far earlier than should be allowable by law to make sure I made it to the airport in Colorado Springs with plenty of time to go through the theater that is the TSA and wait at my gate for a couple of hours. Normally the only part of this that I would hate would be the TSA experience but having a bad case of the runs did not make things pleasant. Luckily, I had probably the easiest experience with the TSA that I have ever had. I did have to remove my Kindle from my bag but that was to be expected since they have had issues seeing through it before. Apparently listening to the TSA’s guide on how to pack your bag that is posted on their site is quite helpful if you want to have an easy time getting through their checkpoint. The flights from Colorado Springs to Denver and from Denver to Seattle were nice flights but I was rather annoyed that there was no TV in the headrests of the planes which has always been the case on every Frontier flight I have flown in the past. I am still rather irritated about this but now I know to be a bit more picky about what planes I fly on. Other than this, the only scary part of the flight was when we were over Seattle, getting close to landing when suddenly we hit a bad pocket of air or something and the plane went 45 degrees to the left and then 45 degrees to the right before we leveled back out. I am sure we had a decent drop in altitude with it as well.
After the flight, it took me longer than expected to meet up with my driver that was supposed to pick me up and go to the hotel. After waiting around for a while with no sign of anybody holding a Microsoft Student Insider sign, I finally received a call from the driver wondering where I was and where to meet me. Turns out, he was apparently on the other end of the baggage claim area that was no short distance away, but luckily we met in the middle and headed to the car. At this point, I had the pleasure of meeting up with two of the other insiders, Tom Ziegmann (Twitter) and Joe Osborne (Twitter), a couple of great guys that I felt right at home with.
After a decent drive to the hotel which was the Mariot hotel in the Redmond Town Center, we checked in to our rooms and received a backpack full of goodies like an MSDN cup and some spending money for food and whatever else on our travel days. We then decided to kill some time and go walking around the Redmond Town Center to see what the area had to offer. I was quite impressed with how nice the area was and just what kind of stores where there. They had all kinds of restaurants, and stores ranging from a board game store to a Victoria’s Secret. Yes, there was even a Starbucks. After walking around for a while, we decided to go our separate ways for the night. I went and had dinner with a couple of my cousins at a restaurant in the town center while they went into Seattle to have dinner at Anthony’s. My food was good, but I think they got to eat a lot better than I did that night.
After that, I went to the board game store with my cousins and then called it a night. Having woken up at 4:30am that morning, I was quite tired. That was the end of the travel day and the best was yet to come. Check back tomorrow for day 2, my first day at Microsoft!
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Global Geek News Podcast #54
Feb 3rd
Here are the shownotes for episode #54 for the Global Geek News Podcast.
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Stories:
- Bans on phones and texting while driving shown ineffective
- 70% of employers have rejected applicants over online information
- 3 Strikes coming to the US via the back door?
- RIAA to appeal Thomas ruling
- Microsoft sues prominent bittorrent tracker for $43 million
- Microsoft sued over Xbox Live points
- IFPI loses deep-linking case against Baidu
- CompTIA backs down, old certs still good for life
- War of words between Apple and Adobe heats up
- Amazon caves to Macmillans eBook pricing demands
Tips of the Week:
- 64 things every geek should know
- How to write a viral blog post: 7 real examples
- Reminder: Windows 7 RC shutdowns begin in a month
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Host: Jeremy Bray
For more news, check out the Global Geek News Blog
PDC 2009 Day 1: Three Screens and a Cloud
Nov 20th
Greetings readers! This is the first of a several posts and a number of videos from my experience at Microsoft’s PDC for 2009. Disclosure: I am a Microsoft Student Insider (Find out a little bit more about this in one of my previous posts). Day 1 of PDC started off great despite the fact that a few minutes after arriving that I had forgot my camera back at the hotel (so no pictures from day one). Registration was as simple as handing them my ID and they gave me my badge. I found out the hard way that being there for Microsoft, I don’t get any of the goodies like the Acer bag and whatever came in it. The big disappointment as far as free goodies came on Day 2 which I will talk about in the next post. Anyway, shortly after getting my badge, I followed the signs through the huge maze that is the Los Angeles Convention Center. For those that haven’t been here, this is quite the huge, impressive structure and when you are going from hall to hall, you will be doing a fair bit of walking. I managed to find they hall for the keynote and jumped into the line that was weaving its way down the long halls. Despite the long line, once the doors were open everybody flooded in and took a seat rather quickly. After a short wait, Ray Ozzy, the top architect at Microsoft since the stepping down of Bill Gates, came on stage and presented us with the idea of “Three Screens and a Cloud.” The keynote focused on having the same experience on a computer, mobile device and tv and using Microsoft’s cloud OS, Azure, to do that. Since last year’s Azure announcement was in fairly cloudy terms, I never really got excited about it but after seeing what it can do and how it can scale, I think if all goes as planned, it is going to be amazing. The major announcement in terms of Azure is that it goes into service at the first of the year and billing begins in February and that you only pay for what you use. If you have a company with a large web presence, this is definitely something to look into, especially if you have traffic spikes and want to be able to scale up to those spikes but not have all of the server overhead when you don’t need all of the power.
After the keynote, I spent the rest of they day going to sessions, eating, and having fun with the vendors that were there. Although this was the case all three days, some of the sessions were interesting while others were so far above my head that I thought they were speaking in another language. Although there were some sessions throughout the event focused on aspects of Windows 7, compared to other topics like Azure, there was very little talk about Windows 7 which I found kind of disappointing since it just came out a few weeks ago. I also was disappointed but little to no mention of the next version of Windows. Apparently Microsoft sees the future as everybody having their head in the clouds.
For the sake of keeping these posts short and to the point, I will talk more about some of the sessions I attended and what I learned in a separate post from my daily summaries. I will post the happenings from day 2 at PDC in the next post to likely come out tonight or tomorrow and day 3 shortly after that. I also have a number of photos and videos to upload when I get home too. It might take a few days to get everything up as my school quarter started yesterday and now that this trip is coming to an end (I am sitting in LAX as I write this), I need to focus on making sure i don’t fall behind in that. I also have a number of other things to talk about as well as soon as I get a chance including the new Chrome OS. Stay tuned!
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