Microsoft Student partners meeting in Dublin on 25th January 2008. It was a great day albeit a bit long round the conference table but truly great to hear updates form all the students. There is a lot of great work being done out there.

Here we are ” the mini UN”,

We presented Liam with a beautiful piece of Waterford crystal on the day as a mark of our appreciation for all the hard work he has done on our behalf and for all the support he provides us throughout the year. I think this caught him totally by surprise, he seemed bowled over and was not expecting anything like this at all. Careful Liam, that piece of Waterford Crystal fell off the back of a lorry

Liam was presented with a beautiful Waterford Crystal decanter as a token of our appreciation for all his support and hard work.

Now that I am back at school (boy have I some serious catching up to do), I have spoken to one or two lecturers and we agree that it would be most beneficial to do a quick presentation to some students and some of the lecturers on the whole TechEd experience. I plan to put together a quick slide or two about TechEd, Microsoft, where they are going in terms of future technologies and policies, and perhaps talk about some of the cool (wow factor) experiences and demos I saw last week. I’ll keep you posted as to who this goes, may try and get a snap or two also.

and so for me TechEd is all over. It’s saturday afternoon and time to reflect and catch up on some normality. Was a great week and I’m grateful for it. So what now, lets see . . . .tap tap tap; laundry, vacuuming, feed the dog, get the fire lit. aah its good to be home.
I gotta get back into study mode now also. We have an essay to write on organizational culture. I had done a bit of research in the library the week before Barcelona so I’d better get started on that.

The MSPP is an award-recognised program for students who are passionate about technology and who are active in student communities. Jennifer Perret, Caroline Phillips & Pascal Kuyten, MSPP, discuss the program and what MSPs are doing at TechEd Developers 2007. See here

Last night we all went downtown to Danzarama for the Irish party. It was great to meet a few fellow countrymen and indeed international friends who are now living/working in Ireland. The night was great fun and we had some serious conversations where we put the world to rights. I did feel a little vulnerable about having to travel home with losing Rangers fans though (and on that note, I gotta say, the Metro here in Barcelona is fantastic).

During the course of the evening, we had course to run into Vincent Vergonjeane. Vincent was the overall winner of the Imagine Cup in 2004 and was on the judging panel for last years competition in Korea. So I can tell you it was a pleasure to meet this fella. We chatted extensively about IC, what it means, what it’s like etc. I told him that I am entering the IC this year in two separate teams / events. He was delighted to hear this and gave me some great advice. Turns out he’s a fellow musician who happens to be gigging soon in Dublin. Might go to that.

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Neil, Kieran, Vincent and Mike at Danzarama, Barcelona. (where’s Alan man ???? – he’s taking the photo)

I saw a talk on the schedules that grabbed my attention titled “Women in IT”. It was scheduled for yesterday (7th Nov) lunchtime. I was amazed to se it because its a topic I have an interest in. Let me qualify that with the following . . .

I am starting to gain more and more interest in computing with regard to sociology, politics, culture etc. For example I am looking at things more and more like eLearning, computing in the developing world, problems that exist on a large human scale that have the potential to be fixed by computing (you get the picture).

I am interested in the divisions that we are crating in modern day computing. Those of rich v’s poor, the connected v’s the disconnected, and of course male v’s female. (v’s is probably the wrong phrase to use).

I have been a student for four years in Ireland, In my entire class there were only ever a tiny hand full of women. Prior to being a (mature) student, I worked in ICT and was self employed in ICT and noticed this same trend.
Are we disenfranchising women? are women reluctant to look at IT as a career? is this a problem of culture or stereotyping? what’s going on ??? The talk yesterday was interesting and indeed I got a chance to raise the above questions together with one idea I have had for a while towards addressing the issue.

The main speaker was Ani Babaian. Ani introduced a panel of guests each of whom have an interest in the issue. I was interested to see Irene Pathy on the panel. Irene has headed up the EHR (Electronic Health record) which is a programme rolled out in Zambia to record data on patients. Interestingly – we actually covered this as a case study in HCI this year at school.

The talk was brief and then Ani opened up the discussion to the room, from here it was healthy debate where people were given the opportunity to discuss andair their views and some interesting beliefs. We had opinions and opposing views and lots of interesting people, comments and ideas.

As well as posing the question “why?”, I also spoke about the potential for me as an MSP to perhaps do some ground work on this issue. Maybe things like going out into the community, speaking to second level students with a view towards getting the girls interested in IT, who knows? I spoke to some of the panel afterwards and was delighted to meet Irene especially as I have an interest in ICT in developing countries.

Simon Brown (The token male on the panel) being interviewed about the discussion here
Read more on this here : http://www.virtualteched.com/WIT

The panel at the Women in Technology talk

The boffin’s at BT have been continuing to work on their telephony API’s. Yesterday morning after meeting and chatting to the BT fellas at ‘ask the experts’, I decided to attend a demo given by Tim Stevens from BT on the technology.

It’s a very cool piece of software especially if you have any concept of how complex modern telephony is. This API harnesses all the capabilities of telephony and presents this to the user as a resource while removing all that complexity.

So, we started yesterday by having some fun, Tim mashed up a very quick app in C# and then had members of the audience text him messages which instantly arrived into his app on screen. The code for this was literally a couple of lines.

Then he went on to create a conference call app in just a few lines of code which he coded to phone some of us in the room and place us in conference. Apart from the dam roaming charges, we were all connected to each other there and then for a very quick “hello” before hanging up as fast as one can. (I actually ran out of credit during the demo and had to topup).

He went on to code other demos such as PABX menu systems, interactive pre-recorded quizzes etc all using real telephony and the API.

Usages

• Appointment management
• Incoming call handling and response personalization
• Dialogs
• Application oriented (‘outbound’) and phone orientated (‘inbound’) calls
• Dynamic callflows
• User defined realtime notifications to applications
• Provisioning of audio and callflow scripts

This service is currently fully up and running and they are adding new features all the time. Plus – you can sign up and get a sandbox version which allows upto 10 calls/txt’s per day absolutely free. Might be something worth considering for our Imagine Cup project.

Visit the SDK site here Web21c

See Nigel and Steve from BT talk about the SDK, Imagine Cup / Accelerator here

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Tim Stevens

You know what the problem with this week is ?

There is so little time and so so much to do/see/experience. It occurs to me that this is the case with most of our lives now also. I guess being a mature student, I am considerably more aware of my temporal existence than I ever was before. Time is so dam precious and it’s only recently in my life that I came to realize this.

Now I want to squeeze every last drop out of time, I want to milk it of every last fibre less I loose it. This entire week is like a concentrated model of what I am talking about. I am looking at the schedules, I want to go to that talk, but wait – there’s two more on at the same time, not to mention that cool demo or that hands on class somewhere else in the centre. I can’t be at them all, plus I need to eat and sleep and I need to blog. I actually feel the need to blog! so blogging is not a chore but a privilege. The problem is time.

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But you know what, If I spend too much time worrying about the future, or the past and panic about what might be, or what might have been, I’ll miss out on now!

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. . . and now is the important bit.

It’s wednesday (7th Nov) and I am walking around this massive (truly massive) conference centre. I think I should try and take a few snaps of life in the halls here, life through the rails, through the glass etc. No matter how hard I try, photos will never convey the sheer size and scale but lets do our best anyways.

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Ask the Experts area (or should I say, a tiny portion of it.

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Scenes from a hall, this hall could be used to launch 747’s and its one of many

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Hands on labs, here there are hundreds of PC’s all set up with interactive do it yourself tutorials for all the new technologies being showcased at TechEd 2007.This place is cool, I have spent a few hours in here playing around with Silverlight, Blend, Design, VS2008, Sql Server . . . .

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Another hallway lined with laptops and laptop users, sorry about the flash darkening effect

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Don’t know who these dudes are, if you can’t get into a presentation, no problem they are streamed live outside.

So its the evening of MSP day, we are all off to bowl in the biggest mall I have ever seen here on diagonal mar. We are all placed randomly into fictitious teams representing various countries (I am the German number 3 tonight) and this means that we all get to mix really well.

I am meeting people and shaking hands all over the place. Some people look at me a little confused because I seem just a little too old to be a student so I have to explain my “mature” status (god I hate that, where’s me walkin frame, and me teeth).

So the beers flow, the water flows in my case, the food is fantastic, the bowling league gets underway to loud music and an ultraviolet lit bowling alley – this is fun. We got some of the bods form MS here too, Caroline, Jennifer, Holly, Andreas et al. Great to meet these folks and chin wag a little.

We were semi-finalists, beaten by Mexico would you believe. Still Alan received a T-Shirt for being top scorer in our team. On to the pool hall for a few 8 balls. Its so strange here ‘cos there is no smoking ban. Ah the memories of that smell – I used to be a smoker up til 2004. Tonight I’m glad I’m no longer.

I’m home for 11pm, really tired, I have not slept really at all since arriving in Barcelona. Still, I am hyper and cannot sleep so a good opportunity to blog is taken full advantage of.

Sorry to say people that I left my camera at home for the night out but the guys (Alan, Mike and Neil) have some great pics and they will be posting at some stage.