October 28, 2003
PDC 2003: Day 2
So first off, last night I had dinner with Eric and Tim. Tim brought along 3 other guys from his Microsoft team. After we do introductions, the one guy with Tim goes…”Latitude, I interviewed with them some time ago. I talked with some guy named…Brandon”. I see Eric pointing at me. Oops. The bad news was that we didn’t hire this guy. The good news is that the job went away so it wasn’t anything against this guy specifically. Small world.
This morning they had one demo in the keynote that was very cool. They took a smartphone with embedded camera and in about 15 lines of VB, they wrote a little application that snapped a picture, used location info to title the picture with the address it was taken at, and e-mailed it out. Um, that is exactly what I need for my blog. I want that — now.
At lunch today, I noticed that they had a special foods line in which you could get a “Low-Carb/Atkins” meal. Very cool. But then afterwards, you go into the breaks and there are piles and piles of candy. Oh well. They are getting it slowly.
One thing that sort of bumbs me out at this conference is the fact that pretty much 95% of the sessions cover stuff that you cannot put into production for 12+ months. Microsoft uses this conference to get feedback on their future direction but that doesn’t help me at work on Monday for products we are shipping in the next 12 months. I find myself going “I need that now!” a lot.
