Potpourri
How I enjoy those "P" words! But this post will be potpourri- something of a random collection of good stuff [at least, I think it's good stuff, and I'm the chatty one with the keyboard].
How Soon I Forget
In my previous post, I talk about some of the presentations coming up at the Device Driver Developer's conference. I made a shameful omission- our own Neslihan Bulut [one of my muses for the post I titled Potential] will be presenting a technical session on new requirements that will be applied to get a logo for your driver package if you are using KMDF or UMDF. That testing involves the WdfTester tool [one of the underutilized tools in our current WDK arsenal, I suspect] for KMDF, but I believe our overall approach is reasonable. At any rate, go and find out.
Been with us only a few months, and both she and Wei will be presenting at key conferences. Potential, indeed...
Practice Makes [some other word that starts with P]
Yesterday, it was speaker coaching- my coach was excellent. I've done a lot of speaking, scripted and extemporaneous, and presenting [but not recently], and beyond that I've had plenty of exposure to stage fright- playing in bar bands and participating in choral groups, etc. For that matter, I ran for elected office once, and going door-to-door discussing issues and asking for votes is a lot more wearing than any of the rest, although I must admit that standing for several hours with a Les Paul hanging from your neck is pretty tiring in its own way.
Which reminds me, I've kept both of mine from the mid-80's- a solid walnut model they called "The Paul", for which, as a promotional offer, the Gibson Co. obligingly made a custom [headpiece?? tailpiece??] [terrible I'd forget the correct word- it's the piece that covers the rod you can adjust for the neck tension], and my real pride and joy- a Les Paul Custom with the silverburst finish. I remember when I first saw it in the store- a place called Music Workshop in Endicott, New York- love and lust at first sight- it was not a cheap guitar [if I remember correctly at that time the only more expensive model in the Gibson catalog was the left-handed version of the silverburst], but it was just awesomely beautiful, and I knew I would buy it as soon as I scraped the cash together- and then I dragged it into places I shudder to think of, because it was my working instrument of choice ever after [to be fair, I usually played both in rotation- it was nice to have a second guitar handy if I broke a string].
Anyway, back to speaking. My coach said I had way too much text on my slides [and she was right], so I zealously hacked and trimmed. Then another review today and it seems the slides are also printed and distributed, and in some cases, they may be all someone sees. Many of mine now had too little to be of such value. So I spent the latter part of today undoing some of that hacking and slashing...
Side Effects
As a part of all this preparation, there are some changes coming to my blog. I'm not going to say anything more until they are done, but I do believe they will be useful to the community, given what I see myself popping up for on keyword searches and the like.
Beyond that, this has made me realize that there actually are a few technical topics I can discuss in this format, so once things settle down, I can get to those, as well.
My Full House beats whatever you're holding
Boastful of me... His name is Niraj Majmudar, and he just blew in from Texas. We now have as many SDETs on the WDF QA team as there are SDEs on the development side- I really like to see that. We also should have blogger parity- well he says he blogs- just have to see if we can get him to take a bite of the MSDN apple. Maybe beyond parity, as Doron, Peter, and Ilias have all been rather quiet of late [all in a good cause, no doubt].
Better yet, he's a fellow gamer. H'mm, myself, Niraj, Patrick, and Shyamal- that'd make for a good 4-player Halo 3 co-op [or a team for one of the Big Team Battle matches]! Or if they want people who are actually halfway competent, they can substitute Brandon for me [even though he's on the dev side of the fence]. I am personally in awe of Brandon because he has Cody Miller on his friends list (Cody is in Guinness World Records for completing Halo 2 on the hardest difficulty level in the shortest time- without his character dying even once)! They were in the same dorm at college, 'twould seem...
Talked to him a bit today [with all this conference prep, not been much time for chat at work]- we both worked in the defense industry before coming to Microsoft, and both had clearances [and both worked for companies in the vicinity of Dallas]...
Which reminds me
I bet this doesn't happen terribly often. When I was undergoing the investigations related to my obtaining a security clearance [Secret, if you must know, and "it's a secret", if you don't], the investigators visited my mother, and after a bit of chit-chat, asked her if she happened to know a Robert Kjelgaard who worked at IBM. She said, "Yes, but he's dead".
In part because of the investigator's apparent age, she was thinking of my grandfather, who had recently passed away [and yes, I was a third generation IBMer at one time].
She also rather quickly realized who they were asking about, and corrected things, and I did get cleared- but for a minute there, I can just imagine what they must have thought was going on...
To any who've read this far- thanks for listening to this babble! I promise to be somewhat more substantive soon.
