I’ve been geeking out lately. To start with, I've finally entered the cellphone age with a nifty Treo 650. Our relationship had a rocky start, to the extent that I'm now on my second Treo 650 in 30 days. The first one was flaky and kept resetting on me. I've got the replacement loaded and I'm pretty happy. My favorite Treo pastime right now is checking out websites to see which ones are usable on the Treo and which ones suck. This site is usable... not because I meant to design it for a PDA, but because it's just a simple site.
Last week's Geek Moment of the Week was PDA related: A colleague and I were wrestling with a database table, trying to update fields that just didn't want to be updated for various reasons. At the same moment we blanked on the syntax for a particular SQL query. I mourned the lack of my handy SQL Pocket Guide and said, "Wouldn't it be cool to have all the O'Reilly's Pocket Guides on a PDA? You could carry it everywhere, that would rock!" She agreed and we laughed and decided we were pretty big geeks.
What else have I been up to... well, last Thursday I went to a SSDotNet meeting to listen to Jason Mauer tell us all about the new language features present in VS 2005. Jason is a MS Developer Evangelist and a great presenter. He's got Yoda as his laptop wallpaper and compared generics to Disneyland: "It's magical or something, like we're in Disneyland." Indeed, Jason, generics are magical. I'm pretty sure I remember Julie expounding on generics before but I didn't get it at the time. Watching Jason demonstrate how to use generics with various data types got me excited ... but then, I'm a geek and we're easily excited about shiny things.
But wait, there's more geekery to come. I might have already mentioned in an earlier post that I've been listening to lots of DotNetRocks back issues while I work. It's the perfect accompaniment to a lot of my work. Sometimes the subjects are a bit complex and over my head, but I like the geek humor and it gives me a chance to get used to new vocabulary. It's a great way to get introduced to new tech and find out what all the hype is about. So I’m going to continue listening to them until I’ve heard it all and then I’ll move on to archived MSDN webcasts.
Speaking of hype, I went to a MSDN Spring Event yesterday given by Rory Blythe. It was held at the lovely Indian Summer Golf Course and we were bathed in natural light throughout... and you know how rare that is for a geekfest event. I was first introduced to Rory through my earphones while listening to DNR. He translates well to the live presentation forum. He's got a quirky, offbeat sense of humor. He really knows his stuff. He's taken the time to rework some of the samples so they work even better live. The room was mostly middle aged state worker types and it took them a little while to warm up to Rory's humor, but by the second half they were laughing, too.
There were tons of great quips and quotes and I tried to catch them as they came by, but he talks really quickly. Talking about XML, "it's CSV with angle brackets, CSV for the 90s." And, Julie, he used the work "performant" and it made me think of you ;-)
I attempted to snap a picture of Rory on the Treo, but like a vampire or other unworldly creature, it was impossible to get him on film. The photo was blurry, as if he was vibrating at a slightly different frequency than the rest of us, or perhaps his holographic program had a random shimmer in it.
I got a free copy of VS 2005 Beta 2 and SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 from Jason Mauer and a great Developer Resource DVD at the Spring Event (was that Chris Sells handing swag out to us or a different Chris?). I put the 2005 Beta stuff on my laptop so I can monkey around with that stuff and not mess up anything else. The Resource DVD has all kinds of kewel stuff on it, it'll take me a while to dig into it. The one thing I've opened on that disc so far is Episode One of the CodeRoom. Does it make me a geek or a freak that I really got a kick out of that show. I watched it yesterday, at the end of a workday filled with unnecessary panic (other people's, not mine). I watched, I enjoyed, I am a g33k.
Rory is involved with CodeRoom now and assures us that future eps will be even better. In fact, I just remembered, there's an ep2 already available for download.
So excuse me, I need to download CodeRoom 2.0: Bluetooth Kiost Edition, and get my geek on. Hm, well I haven't found a downloadable one yet, but I can view it here, on the tiny screen.