*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

 Saturday AtomicInternet (Brad Lloyd) hosted a PC LAN party in his basement in Farmington Hills, MI.  Since I was in Livonia after attending the CodeMash conference I was able to make the four mile trip from the hotel to his home.

Saturday morning I caught up on work email and then about 2:00 headed over.  When I got there, Chris Lacross, a good friend from Ann Arbor who used to play with us when I lived in Ann Arbor, had gotten the computers we were going to play setup.  It just so happened I got there just in time :)  Ron was already setup along with Risner.  Later The Kelley's blessed up with their presence along with Duane and Dan Davidson.   Keith Weinbaum showed up amazingly early along with Scott Huggins.  Needless to say we had a packed basement. 

I was personally looking forward to playing Battlefield 2142, but due to technical difficulties we couldn't play.  What little I did play, I can see why everyone gets hooked on it.  We did play Far Cray, Unreal Tournament 2004, some Quake 3, Fear, and at the end some of them were playing Starcraft.

It is funny how most of the games we play have a lot of the same themes.  Most of them are built around team play where you play different characters like an engineer, sniper, soldier and then your goal as a team is to either protect your base or capture the other team's base.  Either way most all of these are based on what we knew as team fortress years ago.  If I have to choose, I like to play the engineer role or the sniper role. 

You can view pictures that I posted up on Flickr here:  Saturday LAN Party Pictures

If you attended my sessions and are looking for the demos along with the powerpoint slides you'll find them here:

http://keithelder.net/Presentations/DevelopingSmartClientAppsForEnterprise/default.aspx

If you are one of the attendees that is new to .Net then download Visual Studio Express which is a free download that will allow you to open the solutions to run the demos.  Everything else you need to get up and running is listed in the presentations page.

I travel a lot and have to make sure I get up on time or otherwise I miss flights, speaking engagements and more, work.  Josh posted he was looking for a new travel alarm clock so I thought I would throw my $.02 in the ring. 

All of us have different likes and dislikes.  Our sleeping habits are as varied as the number of alarm clocks out there.  Some of us can get up with a simple beep beep beep and others need a little more jarring.  Others need a nuclear weapon to go off to get up. 

I grew up on what I like to call a small farm house.  I say small farm house because we didn't have 2000 acres but we did have large gardens, plant corn for animals, raise chickens, pigs, cows and other critters.  How I managed to get involved with technology is a mystery to this day.  Most people have no idea what it is like to wake up to a rooster crowing on your window seal.  This is probably the best alarm clock of them all!  The only problem with the rooster is you can't set him to a certain time :)  The rooster is going to crow before the crack of dawn no matter what, and then continue to crow during the day at random intervals. 

 So what do I use to make sure I don't miss anything and get up?  I happen to carry my alarm clock with me wherever I go.  I use my Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC phone.  Here is a screen shot of the built-in alarm screen in the pocket PC.  You have three separate times you can set and label.  One for morning, one for the afternoon nap and another for something else.  The days you want it to go off can be customized as well.  So for example you can set it to wake up on Thursday / Friday at this time, and then turn off the alarm for Saturday or Sunday.

I have my phone set to vibrate and also play one of the most annoying built-in sounds on the device, the dog bark.   I always place the phone on a hard wood surface to take advantage of the vibrating to increase the annoyance.  These two combinations of vibration on the hard wood surface and the loud dog bark does the trick every time. 

If I have something to do, like a plane flight where I have to get up at 4:00 AM, I will set all three alarms at 5 minutes apart.  It is easy to do and the phone essentially never stops vibrating and or barking.  For me, 99.9% of the time I am awaken by the vibrating on the table. 

I wanted to post a few interesting thoughts real quick on what I noticed about the CodeMash conference that made it different for me.  When you go to a conference a lot of the time you know who is going to be there.  If it is a PHP conference, for the most part those that are heavily into PHP are going to be there.  The same can be said for Java conferences, Microsoft conferences and so on.  

People From Different Walks Of Life

When I was putting together my Who's Who post for CodeMash it hit me why it was so different.  I suddenly realized there was no other conference where you would see so many people from so many different backgrounds and technologies in one area.  If I would have explored more I could have gotten lots more pictures of names from different areas that would have surprised you.  As I was putting together my post on who was there this really became apparent.  Even though the attendees were from different backgrounds, everyone was extremely open to learn.  If there was anything to take away from several of the keynotes it was learning how the other half lives is a good thing.

No Buses and No Shuttles

The other thing that made the CodeMash so different was where it was held.  For larger conferences you are going to stay in a hotel.  The hotel may be 5 minutes away or 25 minutes away, or as it was in Boston at Tech Ed, an hour away.  At very large events where you stay in a hotel you really have to plan your day.  Going back to the hotel could cost you several hours.  Sometimes you really want to go back to the hotel to either clean up or drop off swag or your laptop before a social event in the evening starts.  CodeMash made this so easy I took it for granted over and over and over.  The organizers booked the speakers as close to the conference as they could and it honestly took 30 seconds to walk from my room to the conference.  Wow, that was awesome.  For others that were in other areas of the resort, they were only a minute or two away.

I Never Left The Building

Once we arrived at the Kalahari Resort we never left.  Not even once.  There was plenty of things to do, places to eat, and more.  If you don't believe me, check out this video posted by Alexey Govorin where the attendees are trying to surf in the water park.  And for those wondering, this is the video I was showing at the end of the conference on the screen.  It was great to just stay in one place and not have to travel around in taxi rides, buses, subways, etc.