Josh (yes that Josh, Gretchen’s husband*) Ledgard spent time with MVPs at the summit discussing Microsoft’s online communities, pluses, minuses, what can be done to make them better. He has posted his notes from these meetings online.
*I’m just kidding. Josh made a joke that (wife) Gretchen, Zoe and Heather’s “Technical Careers at Microsoft” blog is so popular that people now say to him, “oh, you’re Gretchen’s husband”
On Tuesday morning as I was hanging out with a bunch of Scotts in the W Hotel Lobby, and me looking like a good ol’ geek, no – make that hippy geek, in came some of those typical “W-crowd“ stylish, all dressed in black, beautiful people. As they came up the stairs to where we were I looked and realized that one of them was a man I had worked very closely with for a year in the late 80’s. He was a “stylish beautiful people“ back then, too. I was a little closer to that at the time than I am now. But we hadn’t seen each other in 12 or 13 or more years. It was so fun to have our little “oh my god!” reunion in the lobby.
We had worked together at a big ad agency in NY (in the same building that Microsoft is in now) and he now works for another huge ad agency and runs the world of interactive advertising for them globally. Coincidentally they were there for a meeting with Microsoft to talk about some advertising accounts. It’s actually a big deal but I don’t know if it’s all public or not.
The funniest part was that I thought he looked exactly the same as 13 years ago and later that evening, one of the women on his team told me that he had said the same of me. Sorry, try to rid that ego boost out of my little head!! 🙂
Do I need to say the last name ? It’s Maryam Scoble. As famous as her hubbie from his many endearing and occasional “please save me from this totally outspoken chick!“ blog posts about her. I got to meet Maryam when I was in Seattle. First on Saturday night, where I was so happy to meet her, feeling as if I knew her so well, I forgot that she had no CLUE who I was and just threw my arms around her. It turned out to be a-okay. We had a wonderful time and also had dinner together with Alan Griver and Olga Londer on Sunday night – two more of some of the nicest people I know. That was a very interesting and international dinner in so many ways. Here’s an adorable picture of Maryam with Robert in Vancouver. I almost like it as much as this one which I believe was taken on their honeymoon. LOL. Love ya Maryam.
What a great way to follow up to my night of sushi with the XML MVPs and some of the XML luminaries – it is XML night at Vermont .NET tonight!
We have Microsoft Community Champion Joe Stagner coming to talk about securing your XML and also a walk through of XMLSpy by Altova‘s Trace Galloway. We have all been looking forward to this for a while.
I was thinking about something very funny about that dinner. Sam Gentile was way on the other side of the room but I found out that as different as we are, we have one really icchy thing in common. We both love to eat Uni. It is really gross but so yummy and fun to gross everyone out, too. I don’t’ stop with the Uni though. I gotta have a quail egg on it. Eeeeeeeeew! (evil laugh) Holy crap! I just googled Uni to find y’all a link and just read a much too detailed description and will probably NEVER EAT IT AGAIN. aieeeeeeee…….
Lora talks about the obvious technology male/female ratio that played out at the MVP summit as it does elsewhere.
“Not surprising. It’s the tech industry, afterall. Wow – I can say that way too easily, and it is a standard excuse when you’re looking at groups of people who are in their late 20s and older. Is this acceptable with the college age and younger crowd though? “
She brings up an interesting point about the very young MVPs – teens and college students. The only college age MVP female I konw is Stacey Yasenka from Ohio. I met her when I kept asking “isn’t there even ONE girl in the Student Ambassador program.” She now proudly tells me there are three!
Ambrose has a great collection of pictures.
For links to Ambrose’s, here are his blogs:
Day 1 pictures
And thanks to Kirk Allen Evans for inviting me to the XML dinner on Monday night. As a general “.NET MVP”, I had a hard time picking and choosing where to go during the day and the evening. I was fortunate enough to spend time with a number of different groups, including ASP.NET, VB, Tablet PC and XML. Here is Kirk’s photo from the XML dinner (I was hardly the only non-XML MVP there…) which was a blast. Thanks also to Don Box and Dare Obasanjo for picking up the tab which must have actually required a Sumo wrestler’s strength – imagine Sushi for 45+! Of course, that means thanks BillG. It reminds me of a job I once had, with an expense account. Anytime I paid a bill, the joke was “Thank Hugh” rather than thank you, since Hugh was the name of our boss. I thought I would link to the company, but geeze, I might get fined by Congress or something.
I hung out with the tabletpc folks on Thursday at Microsoft and was lucky enough to hitch a ride back to Seattle with Geetesh ________. Geetesh is on the Mobile PC team. I thought at first that this meant handhelds but in fact it just means Notebooks/Laptops – though not Tablets. Apparently, there was a Microsoft application in the past (similar to Journal) called Notebook, so they couldn’t use the name again.
So remember, with Microsoft “Mobile PC” = notebooks/laptops.
Just thought it was notable.
Okay, back upstairs to continue the installation of XPSP2 (with latest lonestar bits) on my tablet…
I met Dare Obasanjo last night. If you have ever written something with the words xml, remoting or web services on you blog, you may have had a comment from him and wondered how on earth you got on his radar. I think he must google a select group of words daily to find ANYTHING written on these topics because his mission, he tells me, is to stop the dissemination of misinformation about anything xml! So be careful out there – but the worse that can happen is that you’ll get a great education.
Or don’t wait – just educate yourself here msdn.microsoft.com/xml!
(caveat – if I got anything wrong here – just keep an eye on the comments for my education!)
I guess with all of the Microsoft/SUN buzz, poor Google Gmail has already been forgotten!
And so he should – as a Java Guru AND a .NET guru, Ted has amazingly been straddling both sides of the fence for a long time. This (news of Sun & MS today) is what we call vindication for a guy like Ted.