I’m in Las Vegas to catch Microsoft’s MIX10 conference, where a lot of big announcements are being made. The combination of having just come from the Confoo conference in Montreal, flying to Vegas by way of Vancouver, and “springing forward” to daylight saving time has left me feeling like the bear pictured above.
More posts from Vegas and MIX10 to follow!
Today is all about virtual meetings; I’m spending most of it sitting at the home office with a headset microphone clamped to my head, bouncing from one online meeting to another, magically transporting my presence over great distances. My co-worker John Bristowe is in the same boat and quipped on Twitter: “I feel like I’m playing Live Meeting Portal”.
With that remark, and since it’s a Friday, I can’t help but post this amusing cat photo featuring Portal:
![[ani] portal kitty](http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/aniportalkitty.gif "[ani] portal kitty")
This article’s a bit more technical than the sort that usually appears here on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. However, since it’s about a technology that you, as readers of this blog, probably use every day, I thought it would be worth posting here. Enjoy!
Over at the design-oriented Smashing Magazine site, you’ll find Brad Colbow’s comic, The Life and Times of Internet Explorer 6. It’s the browser we all love to hate, even for those of us who collect a nice fortnightly deposit from Microsoft into our bank accounts. I got a great laugh at DemoCamp Toronto 21 when I said “If you got a cat when IE6 came out, it’s dead now.”
It wasn’t always this way, as the first section of the comic shows (you can click it to read the whole thing):
Once again, you can read the whole comic over at Smashing Magazine.
There’s a fair bit of history covered in the middle section of the comic, but I feel that the most important sections are the first (shown above), and the end, shown below:
That is the real question: “Can we stop supporting IE6 yet?”, followed by a real answer: You have to look at your audience. If you can drop IE6 support without ruining the experience for the majority your audience (you have to make the call on what constitutes a majority), then by all means, go for it.
Expecting people outside our industry to have as much interest in browser technology is about as fair as my insurance agent expecting me to have as much interest in the ins and outs of insurance as he does. I only care about the amount of coverage, the deductible, the slip of paper that goes into my glove compartment, and how much I have to pay a year. Everything else is just yappity-yap from some suit who’s interrupting my work day, trying to show me pages of boring legalese. That’s how we look to most end users.
For those of you who are fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there are some lovely “behind the scenes” shots of the cast and crew on the TrekCore site. I’ve posted a couple of my favourites here.
Photo by Tom Purves.
I’m boarding a Porter flight bound for Montreal, where I’ll be attending CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference). I’ll be there from today through Saturday afternoon, watching technical presentation, flying the Microsoft banner, hosting DemoCamp and having a beer (or twelve) with my fellow conference-goers. I’ll be posting notes and photos from the presentations and other goings-on, so watch this space!
Microsoft was a sponsor of CUSEC last year – that’s Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, the premier conference on building software aimed specifically at students. One of the perks of sponsorship was a “corporate speaker” slot, and it was decided that the presentation should be given it to the then-new guy…namely, me.
At the time I got slotted in as the speaker, I’d barely been a Microsoft employee for two months and was still feeling my way around both the company and its technology. By the time I would stand on the podium, I would have just passed my three-month probationary period. If I was going give a talk for forty-five minutes, it would have to be something other than “what it’s like to work at The Empire”.
Luckily, I did have something to talk about: a not-quite-normal career in tech, and the lessons I picked up along the way. The end result was a presentation titled Squeezeboxes, Start-Ups and Selling Out: A Tech Evangelist’s Story (yes, it’s a bombastic title, but it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a guy whose personal blog’s name is The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.)
The presentation was scheduled for the end of Day 2 (it’s a three-day conference), which is a challenge. The audience would be tired and being students, they were likely to be more focused on the big drinkfest that would take place that evening. I decided to go for “offbeat” and built my presentation around the abstract I gave to them, which was:
You’ll spend anywhere from a third to half (or more) of your waking life at work, so why not enjoy it? That’s the philosophy of Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joey deVilla, who’s had fun while paying the rent. He’ll talk about his career path, which includes coding in cafes, getting hired through your blog, learning Python at Burning Man, messy office romances, go-go dancing, leading an office coup against his manager, interviewing at a porn company and using his accordion to make a Microsoft Vice President run away in fear. There will be stories, career advice and yes, a rock and roll accordion number or two.
They recorded my session and unleashed it on the world yesterday. I share it with you below:
If you watched the video, you’ll note that I skipped a couple of stories, namely “learning Python at Burning Man”, “messy office romances”, “go-go dancing” and making a Microsoft Vice President run away in fear. I’ll save those for another presentation. (By the bye, the guy I made run away is a President now.)
I had a blast doing this presentation, and the general consensus of the attendees was that it was one of the highlights of the conference. I’m honoured that I was invited back to host DemoCamp, and look forward to chatting with everyone. See you in Montreal!
I love this “Drew”-style poster featuring the cast of Mythbusters:
If you’ve been to the movies sometime within the past 30 years, you’ve probably seen a poster by Drew. You can see a catalogue of his posters that were released here; there’s also a page of his “posters that never were”.