Here’s the blogging setup I’m using from within the Ford Flex as we drive to Montreal: my laptop with a Rogers stick and carte blanche to use as much bandwidth as I need to continually post from the road. Damir’s at the wheel, I’ve got my seat moved all the way back, my own set of climate controls and Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio. It’s a surprisingly decent work setup; I could get a fair bit done this way.
Damir at the wheel, looking for an opening on the Don Valley Parkway.
I’m blogging and tweeting from the road today! My coworker Damir Bersinic (IT Pro Evangelist) and I have been loaned a Ford Flex equipped with Microsoft’s Sync and I’ve got my laptop hooked up to a Rogers internet stick. The photo above was taken just before noon, when we were on the Don Valley Parkway, right around Richmond Street.
I’ll be posting quite regularly from the road, so watch this space!
TechDays Canada, Microsoft’s cross-country conference covering how developers and IT pros can best make use of current Microsoft tools and technologies, hits Montreal next week. As with TechDays Halifax, which took place earlier this month, Techdays Montreal is completely sold out – there aren’t any tickets left to be had for love or money.
TechDays Montreal will feature some interesting Quebec twists, one of which is that all the presentations in the developer tracks – that’s Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform and Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices – will be done in French. If you’re an Anglophone, worry not: there will be a translation service to help you out. We’re happy to be able to do our presentations in our freres’ and souers’ mother tongue.
On the evening of the first day of TechDays Montreal, we’ll be loaning out our conference space to the fine folks at PHP Quebec and ConFoo so they can hold Career Demo Camp Montreal, a gathering that combines a career advice workshop with a DemoCamp-style event (I’ll be doing a presentation about boosting your career through blogging). Admission to this event is free-as-in-beer, and no, you don;t have to be a TechDays attendee to get in. For more details about Career DemoCamp Montreal, see their sign-up page.
And finally, there’s the matter of how we’ll get there. My coworker Damir Bersinic and I will be hopping in his van and drive from Toronto to Montreal. The usual sort of hilarity is likely to ensue, and we’ll take pictures and shoot some video and post tweets (he’s @DamirB on Twitter, I’m @AccordionGuy) along the way.
I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:
I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!
As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:
There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:
The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:
…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:
Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:
Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:
Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:
The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:
Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:
And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:
Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:
“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”
And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:
Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:
And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:
Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
The next stop on the TechDays Canada cross-country conference tour is Calgary! We’ll be there for most of the week, and the conference itself takes place on Tuesday, November 17th and Wednesday, November 18th at the Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre.
After that, we’ve got the following dates in December:
TechDays, Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities, starting in Halifax!
I, along with the rest of the TechDays team will be in Halifax and places nearby starting this weekend and for most of next week:
And don’t forget that TechDays Canada is also visiting these cities:
Tickets are a still available for these cities.
In case you’ve forgotten the TechDays formula, here it is again:
See you in Halifax!
One of the features at the TechDays cross-country conference is the “Ask the Experts” booth, which is staffed all day by speakers (when they aren’t speaking, naturally) and other local tech experts. They’re there to answer attendee questions about Microsoft tools and technologies, tech trends, the industry in general, the local job scene and so on.
While riffling through the photos I shot over the past couple of weeks, I found these ones I took when I passed the “Ask the Experts” booth at TechDays Toronto and saw the trio of Sean Kearney, Steve Syfuhs and Mitch Garvis. I took one look at them, said “Uh-oh, Trouble Incorporated!”, and snapped these pics. I thought you might enjoy them:
