On the road again

Sporadic blogging on my part is generally due to one of two reasons - either I'm doing very little of interest, or I'm doing a whole lot of fun stuff.

This week, I'm happy to say, has been the latter. I've been filling in for someone on the Inspiration Tour - a set of three hour presentations to students, with the aim of getting them enthused about technology in general, and showing off a heap of cool Microsoft stuff along the way. I was around to present on all the cool stuff in Silverlight - though I also gave a hand with XNA, and then with general questions on .NET and anything else which came up.

Yesterday I had the fun of presenting to a couple of hundred folks at my own University (Aston) which was great. I resisted drawing the New Aston Logo during a demo where I happen to say the line "obviously, you can see I'm not an artist in any way", as I was wearing my Microsoft hat, but it was very tempting. They've got the logo up outside the main building now too, and it looks simply horrible. I cried inside.

Things went pretty well there, people seemed to enjoy themselves and feedback scores were pretty high - with some nice comments left about me (apparently I 'captivate the audience', don't you know). However, they could have gone a lot better - because although I, and the other guy filling in, really knew our stuff, we hadn't presented it to students before - and I'd not really spent much time with the slide deck and demos I was using.


_{Some might question the merits of my 'standing in the centre of the audience' presenting style. But it gets results.}

Today, on the other hand, over at Brunel University, went superbly - everything was smooth and slick and polished and feedback scores were through the roof. The half hour for Q&A at the end over-ran and we managed to handle all the tricky and technical questions superbly, if I do say so myself. And if I don't say so myself, the feedback forms certainly do.

Newport tomorrow, for the same gig, and then I'm done with that forever - which is a bit dissapointing, but given that I'm writing this from the office, having just finished a 'day's work - I won't be sad to see the back of this and have enough time to keep up with my day job.

Oh and Friday? Off to Seattle for 10 days with work. Things might be a bit quiet around here whilst I'm out there, but I'm sure I'll spam you once I get back.

Xx