Over on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, I’ve got a long (but entertaining) review of the hotel I stayed at while attending the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference titled A Dump with a Future.
On Tuesday night, attendees of the PDC were treated to a night at the Universal Studios Hollywood amusement park, which was closed off to everyone but us. Everything was free: rides, food and drinks, and the park was dressed up for Hallowe’en, complete with horror movie characters including Freddy Krueger, skeletons and chainsaw-wielding zombies.
I’ll post more photos on the Accordion Guy blog later, but in the meantime, enjoy these photos featuring the new “Simpsons Ride”, which was very amusing. It’s one of those “ridefilms” or “simulator rides”, in which you’re placed in a ride car that seats 8 that gets jolted around in sync to an IMAX film. The basic plot:you’re trying out the new ride in “Krustyland” when suddenly, Sideshow Bob takes over the controls as an act of revenge, and hilarity ensues.
One of the best things about the ride is that they try to keep you entertained in line with…you guess it, Simpsons cartoons. These new cartoons were made specifically for the ride, feature a number of Simpsons characters and best of all, feature writing that’s a lot funnier and sharper than the show has been lately.
I’m meeting up with a lot of interesting new people and catching up with old friends and collegaues here at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Among the people I ran into was John Lam of the IronRuby project. This was the prefect opportunity for me to conduct my first podcast interview as a Microsoft Developer Evangelist. I asked John to explain IronRuby to people who’d never heard of it and to give us a quick summary of the current state of the project.
My thanks to John Bristowe for suggesting that I conduct the interview and for doing the camera and post-production work!
This morning at the PDC keynote, one of the announcements made was about the online, web-based versions of the Office Apps we know and love: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. They look better than their Google Apps equivalents — so good that it’s quite hard to tell the web version from the desktop version. Take a look…
Word
Take a look at these two photos that I took at the keynote. Which one is the desktop Word and which one is the web Word?
Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.
Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.
The answer: The top one is the web version; the bottom one is the desktop version.
OneNote
Try the same thing again, this time as OneNote:
Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.
Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.
The answer: The top one is the desktop version; the bottom one is the web version.
Excel
One more time, with Excel:
Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.
Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.
The answer: The top one is the desktop version; the bottom one is the web version.
Live Collaboration
One more thing: in the demo, they were running the web, desktop and phone versions simultaneously on the same document, with each user’s edits updating the other two’s versions. There are some great collaborative possibilities here.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
One nice thing about PDC: there are plenty of free snacks, some of which are healthy, some of which, well, not so much…
Choose wisely, my geeky friends.
…but I have a very good excuse. I was still in mid-flight from Toronto to L.A. because I attended Cory Doctorow’s wedding last night. It was a little bit magic show, a little bit Alice in Wonderland, a little bit steampunk and a lot of fun. Here’s a photo from last night:
I’ll post more on the wedding sometime this week at my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.