Kids

On my way into work yesterday - the 8.20am commuter rush from Reading Station to Thames Valley Business Park - I was a bit amused to see two small children boarding the bus, each carrying what looked suspiciously like a laptop bag.

Now, I'm aware the government is diverting nearly half of its educational advertising budget to convince people not to continue on to unnecessary higher education (the other half advises people to do so). But still, this does seem a bit over the top.

Nevertheless, I was happy to write it off as some weird coincidence, except that as the bus stopped at Oracle - I noticed a couple more younger children walking around the campus. The original two got off at BG Group's offices. Then, today, there was a lovely 11 year old chap who was on work experience in the Microsoft offices.

I looked after him for an hour, but as other interns had stolen my thunder by showing him Silverlight and Photosynth already, I was left with the other cool DPE stuff to show him - SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Seriously, if you haven't seen Photosynth yet - you *have* to check it out. It's based on the equally cool Seadragon (which I saw the hottest internal demo of today...will share as soon as it's public).

Rather than have the youngest suicide on record in Reading, I decided to stick to what I knew instead and helped him to whip up a WPF project in Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008. I know I've been talking up how productive and easy these two tools are a lot recently, but I can now legitimately say that even an 11 year old can use them - maybe that'll help with the Java compete stuff.

On a vaguely related topic (it's a stretch, but I've had no excuse to blog this for weeks), I was in a very nice restaurant not too long ago when I saw a hilarious message at the bottom of the menu. Unfortunately I didn't get a decent photo, but:

Well behaved children will be tolerated in the dining room before 7pm

Classic. Though, not quite as good as this sign:



And, on the subject of kids, I couldn't resist sharing the photo I found sitting right next to that one above over inside a Facebook group: