Borcon Day 1 - Sunday
(Catching up with actually posting my blog notes)
Arrived Sat night, it was a nice quiet flight down from Seattle, I was able to get a row to myself and an empty row in front of me so I was able to work on my slides all the way down, although it was pretty bumpy. Might have gotten a little carried away on the flight as I have 65 slides for a 1:15 session which has a ton of demos, oops.
One of my demos is for the Microsoft Keynote on Monday, I'm doing this with Borland's Danny Thorpe I managed to track him down this morning to chat through the demo(and get some help debugging the delphi code for the demo), Danny's a pretty chilled guy so we discussed some ideas for the demo and decided we will make it up partially as we go along.
I must be getting old, I went to check out the MS booth in the show hall and instead of looking to see if we have any cool demos or giveaways on the stand, I looked to see if we had paid for the same “super padded” carpet as last year :-), luckily we do so my back and knees might actually survive doing booth duty for the next 3 days. However if you are at San Jose airport on Wed night I'll be the one limping as I am bound to be in pain by then.
I bumped into Lino, Brian and others from Falafel, they have sporting theme going on their stand this year, they also have yet another venture, CodeFez. I'd swear that Lino has more subsidiaries than MS!
Seems like Nick has been having more luck with wireless than me and has been live blogging the pre-conference sessions.
After a short spell on the booth(come and get your free SQL Server 2005, B2 T-Shirt while they last!), we headed off to the Borland Keynote. This is very unlike an MS keynote, it involves the VP for Developer Relations and the CEO getting up to some antics on stage, generally involves a T-Shirt cannon and some awards for customers and partners. This year they showed a video of the next version of their Windows and .Net IDE, even with my glasses on, sitting in the 3rd row it was fuzzy so it might be time for the annual eye test! The new CTO also showed off some long term thinking they have been doing on Software Development Optimisation(SDO) it was cool to see a bunch of BI being used, including some very soothing visualisation hardware. After the session we all headed off for the welcome reception.
I headed off for the rehearsal for Rick La Plantes keynote. We ended up doing it in his hotel room, which was bigger than the meeting we had booked. This was the biggest hotel room I have ever seen in my life, it must have had more square footage than my entire house, good job Rick was only there for 20 hrs :-)
Danny and I walked through our demo for Rick, plus the Borland and MS marketing folks, everyone seemed happy so we headed out, however we came up with an idea to add to the demo so looks like a late night ahead, it will be very cool if we can do it though.
List of bloggers from borcon with far more detail than I have:
Craig Stuntz - http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz
Dave Nottage - http://blogs.teamb.com/davenottage/category/138.aspx
Jim McKeeth - http://www.bsdg.org/
Joe White - http://excastle.com/blog/
Marco Cantu - http://www.marcocantu.com/Development/borcon2004/
Nick Hodges - http://www.lemanix.com/nick/
Paul Gustavson - http://www.simventions.com/gustavson/
Robert Love - http://peakxml.com/
Serge Dosyukov - http://borcon2004.blogspot.com/
Plus the annual tradition of Dr Bobs conference report