Meeting the Girl Geek - Steve Clayton - Site Home

I had the pleasure of meeting Sarah Blow of Girl Geek dinner fame yesterday for a chat about life, technology and blog names. Sarah gave me the idea for the new name of my blog – Geek in Disguise - as much as I tried to hide it she coaxed the geek out of me with discussions on Windows Mobile, Vista & Outlook 2007.

I need to get out more though - that’s what I learnt. Simple stuff like we assume everyone has access to IM and the ability to download and install Vista. Sarah has neither at work as her company (for good reason) manages the desktop environment and routes HTTP traffic through a port other than 80 which means both Live Messenger and even Web Messenger don’t work for her. One of the things we sometimes forget at Microsoft is that we’re far from a typical organisation when it comes to IT. Last week I moved wholesale to Vista and Office 2007 and will not look back. I also live on IM and couldn’t imagine not having it (though I suspect my friends could imagine me not having it). We sometimes forget that other organisations don’t have or indeed want this luxury and I guess that can make us some out of touch or even arrogant. We need to get out more.

Anyway, back to Sarah who thankfully wore her Google t-shirt on the previous day though despite saying she doesn’t like pink, she does have a pink CAT5 cable connected to her PC. I spent some time trying to convince her that she does need a Windows Mobile phone rather than a Symbian unit though a failed attempt to get my Vista Acer laptop to connect to it via Bluetooth didn’t help the cause. Fortunately she dropped said phone in a puddle today so my voodoo hex worked and Paul from MoDaCo is helping wih the move to Windows Mobile.

We also talked about the RSS Integration in Outlook 2007 which I’m making good use of at the moment. There are some kinks to it that could be beter (like adding a feed when offline) but overall Sarah seemed to like it – which was a small victory. Scott Hanselman has a great post on this topic. For me the real beauty of RSS in Outlook is when you add you get the benefits of Outlook’s instant search across feeds which is great for sorting through stuff quickly.

After taking a look at some of Sarah’s work to program CE devices with C and C# it was time to hit the road but next time we meet I’m taking the PTS-TV camera. With no girls in the PTS team maybe we can give Sarah a cameo spot talking about Girl Geeks? Check out the London Girl Geek site for details of the next dinner and the how it all started MP3

Wow! An entire post on me... that's a bit scary! I'm glad you liked "Geek in Disguise". I didn't even mean to pass that one onto you but hey... it's funny what people pick up on.

It's good to see that you found out what the real world is like, outside of the "ivory tower". I think more of the MS devs need to escape for a couple of hours and just visit ordinary offices of ordinary people... get back to finding out who their real users are like and not just catering for other devs.

On the note of messenger... most companies don't allow it as they see it being abused and used for non business use, which reduces productivity and increases company costs. On the other hand it does have benefits for co locational teams :)

And yes I do have a google t-shirt... :) Much to Steve's amusement. Unfortunately I have 3 Microsoft ones, all XL mens! Typical MS stereotype issue of them assuming everyone would be male attending... it's the little things that make all the difference... feedback for any and all future events, assume that at least one female will come along, so cater for them as well! I know MS must have female MS t shirts... so where's mine ;)

I have to say I quite like the RSS feed stuff in outlook but what I don't like is having to set those feeds up in IE... Why can't I import my rss feed list into Outlook directly expecially if that is where I actually want to view them from... So small victory for MS but still a little work to be done to keep me happy! ;) As I say on my blog... I am probably MS's worst user... I am highly critical and like everything just so... as well as simple and easy to use... and following my workflow. :)

Steve may want me on PTS-TV but so far I have managed to avoid it... I have a feeling I would be far too cheeky for it! Either that or I would break the camera... or someone may find the blonde side of me...

As for pink cross over Cat 5 cables... I do protest! It was given to me on my first project and I have really tried very hard to get rid of it... but no matter where I try to leave it, it always comes back to haunt me... At least I know it is a X over though. :)

Smartphones... hmmm... well I was out Karting and our team beat Nokia :) But they did have some cool devices out there with them... All on Series 60 OS... You guys have some competition at the moment with some of that stuff. All they need is to ensure that the latest dev tools are good and they could be onto a winner... with a device with gps, wifi and phone capabilities... I mean... come on... and simple ui as well... (and the opera browser...) I say no more ;)