Vaughan in Las Vegas

Posted by Vaughan on Mar 15, 2009 in Random | 2 comments

My flight arrives on the dot of the scheduled arrival time, and I’m through customs within 10 minutes.  Things have started well.  I’m at LAX with a trusty WIRED magazine read cover to cover.  The iPod is flat, the laptop is charging, and I just came to the realisation my phone doesn’t have roaming turned on.  Everything is going according to plan.  I can’t wait to head to Vegas.  With 15 hours head space I’ve psyched myself up for an awesome week of fun  work.

MIX09 looks to be an awesome conference this year, and I’m really looking forward to the sessions, and spending a week with some great minds.  Although my heart lies with the Silverlight 3 render pipeline session, I see the broader opportunities and scope lying with Live and Azure.  Where Microsoft plan to head with these platforms will be great to hear.  From a digital market perspective.

I look around the lounge and can spot the MIX09ites.  They size each other up with that ‘I know what you are’ look, a sixth sense at detecting your own breed.  Not that it’s hard to pick us out.  All on laptops, with their minor signature traits…  a MacBook with the logo turned into a biohazard symbol, a t-shirt with ‘rtfm’ in hex (because in English it’s not geeky enough), the Microsoft blooded individuals (clothing or backpacks branded with TechEd, PDC, Azure, Live et al), and me, with my trusty Dr Cube’s Posse t-shirt (more better fighto!).

But it’s the geek crew that add the real value to the trip to Vegas.  It will be the conversations and learning from industry peers (clients and vendors alike) that will be most value.  These are the like minded people that bend technology into the shape of something beautiful.  They embrace and drive technology, and influence the directions of platforms.  The personal and business value of being connected to that giant talent should never be underestimated.

And lastly, I’m trying out BlogJet for my offline WordPress blogging needs.  So let’s see how that goes… [edit] In summary, BlogJet created MS Word HTML shit, which meant it didn’t render consistently, if at all, so thumbs down.