Mark Johnston's Blog : Personal

My festive geek gift list

markjo — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:12:29 GMT

Everyone else does one of these, so I couldn’t resist throwing my gadget and geek desires onto HTML/RSS.

Flip Mino HD
This little beauty is an HD video recording device. It would be cool to start capturing more and more video moments both personally (family stuff to share with the folks back in NI) and professionally (events, demos) and upload them online.

Flip Mino HD

Gorilla Tripod
I’m going to Africa in 2009 and want to capture top notch snaps and need something to balance my SLR camera on. The gorilla pod provides that flexibility and won’t take up much of the15KG luggage weight limit for luggage on internal flights like a normal tripod.

Gorilla Tripod

Zune dock
The Zune software for me whips iTunes butt. When I work from home I have it running on my home PC in the study. What I really want is to have a Zune dock in the kitchen/bedroom hooked up to speakers and wirelessly sync content.

Zune Dock

HP MediaSmart Homeserver
My media collection is blossoming and with the NXE being my main channel for consuming digital content, I’m not so fussed on using MCE as my media interface. Having everything on a WHS gives me a scalable storage solution that can be stuck in a cupboard and serve the living room, study and personal machines. The BIG thing I’m excited about is having Live Mesh integration as discussed at PDC in October

HP MediaSmart Server

Sony Vaio TT with all the trimmings (SSD, WiMax, Bluray)
My next laptop has a couple of key requirements – smaller and lighter than my already small/light X61 Lenovo tablet, killer battery life and look good! I saw the new TT Vaio when I was going through Heathrow recently and it looks like it fits the bill.

Sony Vaio TT

I'm 5 today...5 years at Microsoft

markjo — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:16:53 GMT

(Image courtesy of HouseofSims)

I've been at Microsoft for exactly 5 years today. Doesn't time fly!

What have I done since I started? Some highlights/history:

Joined as an i- contractor to deliver technical events to students
Built Project Hurricane - a social network/community thing before social networks were in fashion.
Ran the Imagine Cup and coached teams to go to Japan and India worldwide finals. 5 out of the 6 students are now MSFT employees in product groups and MCS
Became a Developer Evangelist looking at Silverlight and WPF technologies, part of the launch team for Windows Vista and Office to developers. (Presented in an old plane in winter...cold!)
Moved over to Marketing as an Audience Marketing Manager with my old team. Done some cool stuff with Dreamspark, Imagine Cup, Student events, Channel 8 and more
Been to 1 PDC, 2 Tech.Eds, 1 IT Forum, 2 MGXs, 2 TechReadys, 3 IC Worldwide finals, 3 role summits, 1 BillG PR event, other random Redmond visits and done hundreds of events, written a tonne of blog posts, travelled to every city in the mainland UK (I think).
Made some really close friends
Met my g/f and wife to be

Who knows where I'll go next?!?! ;-)

My lack of blogging....

markjo — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:41:08 GMT

I've been mad busy planning the UK Imagine Cup finals on the 5th June and haven't had a chance to stop....until we got a shipment of Popfly ducks for each of the attendees to the event!

Thought it was worth a post :-)

My love for Silverlight...

markjo — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:32:12 GMT

...is so strong that I had umbrellas made for a recent event:

(The pantone matches the nebula logo as well!)

:-)

Last.fm Comes to Vista Media Centre

markjo — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:20:07 GMT

I'm a big fan of Last.fm and will be giving this a go on my home machine for listening to music.

Last.fm Comes to Vista Media Centre (Sarah Perez)

Herding cats at Microsoft

markjo — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:49:52 GMT

I work for the United Nations apparently. I work in the Developer & Platform Evangelism group at Microsoft, or DPE (or D&PE if you are in the US) and people have a uniform response internally and externally - "Eh?".

This article on C|net news explains what the organistion does:

"The evangelism organization was conceived to get people to adopt technology when it doesn't necessarily seem rational, when there are no tools or documentation. Evangelism can help envision the possibilities. My role is to look at up and coming technology in the product groups and piece together an end-to-end story for developers and create a call to action,"

Herding cats at Microsoft

It reminded of a great talk given by a friend of mine who works for Ubuntu as their Community manager, Jono Bacon:

It's a very entertaining set of talks but also quite nice to see the parallels between the two types of organisation.

Off to Seattle

markjo — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:16:51 GMT

It's been a manic few weeks recently trying to get the Imagine Cup Workshops going for the finalists in the UK Software Design category. They are up here on the UK Academic Team blog - we're looking forward to hosting these guys and seeing what they can learn over a short sharp 2 day training event. Now, I'm sitting in Starbucks in T4 of Heathrow waiting to board my flight to Seattle for a week of marketing and evangelism content around students and academics.

I'm seeing some friends, doing outdoor-sy stuff while I'm here and staying in the low-light but very trendy W hotel - which inevitably means one thing during the social side of being out here... Mojitos.

All good fun! And I hope to catch up some technology stuff as well - I'm experimenting with Twitter and will be using it to tweet during my trip. I'm using Office Communicator to stay in touch with my girlfriend who works at MS and using video calls to chat back home (also saves on the old mobile bill for work). Will also try and call in to the Apple Store in Bellevue and check out the Macbook Air, although I hear Lenovo are coming out with something similar soon anyways.

(Credit of photo to Devos on Flickr)

Synergy - great for multi-PC setups like mine

markjo — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:27:22 GMT

I've got a spiffing Dell XPS 420 as my main home machine and I've been spending a lot of time on it working on personal projects and being an ADD-type of person tend to do work stuff at the same time on my Lenovo laptop. I always struggled with having to flip between machines but didn't want the expense and mess of a KVM switch.

Then I spotted Clint Rutkas' post about Synergy, a neat utility that allows me to share my keyboard/mouse across two machines seamlessly. It's a little unfriendly in the UX department getting it set up but once you have got that mastered it's a breeze to use!

(Image Source: Me and it is normally messier than this!)

Clint Rutkas: Synergy in action

A little blog redirection

markjo — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:41:07 GMT

I've been umming and ahhing about what to do with this now that I have changed roles and no longer getting to spend all my time with the fun world of Silverlight and WPF. I've had some great experiences and decent traffic through my blog, especially around Silvelright (6 Silverlight screen casts has been popular :-))

But now my job is so much more varied and a lot less technical (but trust me I'm never losing my passion for it) I need to move this blog in a different direction. I've always had an eclectic interest in technology and hopefully this will give me plenty to talk about.

There are so many good things going on right now in the MS/tech/student space and that's where this blog is going:

Imagine Cup: expect lots of technology stories about this year's competition, theme (the environment) and previous competitors stories
Windows Live
Windows Vista and consumer stuff:
Silverlight and general web dev
Facebook: from a marketers and end-user point of view

Thanks to Mr Clayton for the nudge in the right direction for this post!

(I don't blame any of my 3 readers for hitting the unsubscribe button, point your add browser to either of Mike T's or Mike O's or some of the many Silverlight.net blogs and you'll get your Silverlight fix)

Last.fm sells for 140m of her majesty's pounds

markjo — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:49:32 GMT

One of my favourite music sites, Last.fm, has been bought by a US media company, CBS, for £140m ($280m). This is fantastic news for a number of reasons: they are a UK start-up and have great personality to boot; and they have some really cool software+services running in the backend.

I can run last.fm using Flash through the browser, install a Windows client that will run in my system tray not taking up space and now I can even embed last.fm on other web properties that I run as Widgets.

Now, with Microsoft hat on, this would be a perfect opportunity for us to engage them about the virtues of Silverlight as a rich web technology alongside the rich desktop experience which is WPF. It will be great to see how they bring the "social music revolution" to video and the HDTV generation.

Congrats to the last.fm team on the acquisition.

Technorati tags: last.fm, cbs, silverlight, widgets

Me = Evangelism -> Marketing

markjo — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:07:56 GMT

It's finally public knowledge, that I am moving away from pure evangelism (yeap, that's my job title!) and over to marketing! I currently spend a lot of time deep in technology (primarily Silverlight and WPF) coding, learning it and talking about it and I've enjoyed the immense opportunities this has given me (from being part of Windows Vista launch through to travelling the country with my team in a branded 4x4). But, about a month ago an opportunity presented itself which was too good to turn down and enabled me to move my career in a direction towards marketing (which I enjoy a lot!).

So, in the next few weeks I'll be transitioning from Developer Evangelist to Academic Marketing Manager. My responsibility will be quite simple (this is a personal view):

Connect with as many students as possible and help them get better skills on Microsoft technology and have the best start to their career! And hopefully improve their view of Microsoft as an organisation along the way

What does that mean in reality? I'll be working on the marketing for all the academic programs from the Imagine Cup through to curriculum in teaching and software access. I've done this type of thing before but as an evangelist working at the coal face, now I get to help reach thousands more students from a marketing angle. Maybe I'll even get the chance to bring that big Blue Monster I hear so much into my work:

This blog will be staying the same though as I'm ultimately a technologist in disguise and want to keep that passion in my life fulfilled. Hopefully I'll get to diversify a bit into the fun worlds of robotics, XNA, Windows Home Server and other gumf that students love to play with :)

Random presenting experience

markjo — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:49:43 GMT

I thought it was too weird/funny not to post about. I was presenting yesterday on Silverlight to a group of about 100 developers attending under the MSDN umbrella. Unfortunately, I had come down with a pretty dodgy virus which meant I wasn't really on top form. Now, if I had time and there was someone available to deliver my session I would have sensibly backed out and recovered at home but that wasn't to be and I had to push on.

When you present you get a good grasp of the audience by seeing people's faces and their emotion and level of engagement in the content. Now, I was doing this as normal, maybe not 100% but I swear that the bloke of The Apprentice who is Sir Alan's aide (on the left) was in my session watching. Not only that! But a guy I used to go to Queens with was there as well - now that is possible I guess but he lives in Northern Ireland and he would've told me he was coming. Very random and alarming when you are just about getting through the content you had planned!

Kids, the lesson to learn from all this is - *Don't present while ill* :-)

I've been blogging for ages

markjo — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:40:43 GMT

Well, I'm nicely ticking along with blogging (over the 100 post mark) and I was doing some research into a program I used to run in the academic team called Project Hurricane which has all but disappeared off t'internet. So, I fired up the Wayback Machine and fired in the URL and sure enough a load of the pages have been cached. But it got me thinking about back to when I first started at Microsoft and how I was one of only a 100 max bloggers in the company (before Scoble too). And thought it'd be interesting for those that know me to see what I was like back when I had just left uni and moved to England.

Marks mark on the www (December 2003) and Marks mark on the www (Sep 2003)

It didn't last too long to be fair but I remember getting good hits in terms of views and people saying they read my blog (even in LA which was cool).

And then it died. But came back again in 2004-5 for a bit on theSpoke (a student technology site) - MarkJ on theSpoke

A bit random but I thought it was cool to look back and see that I was a little ahead of the game (well, compared to MS UK blogger greats like Steve and Eileen) but just a pity I didn't stick at it during my early years at MS (I was crazy busy in year 1 at MS spending 6 months on the road) or everyone would be reading my blog :-). I'm very happy blogging now and plan to keep it up for the foreseeable future.

It's me..at the MSDN roadshow

markjo — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:11:22 GMT

I get the Parry photography experience... (I'm the dot at the front looking at the camera, everyone else is looking at me...or asleep :-))

MSDN Roadshow 2007 Comes Home

Technorati tags: martin parry, mark johnston, msdn roadshow

OT: Put a Linux Guru through pain (for charity...mate)

markjo — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:18:33 GMT

Jono Bacon, Mr Ubuntu Community dude/Herder of Cats/all-round-good-chap, is attempting to perform, record, mix and master an entire album by himself in 24 hours! And he's doing it for Comic Relief, a very noble charity and UK TV event.

In good banter, don't do it for charity, do it to put one of those open source/linux 'losers' through their paces. :-) Good luck mate! (In case any fanboys on either side read this, don't take this seriously please!)

Now, with my teammate and Jono getting into the spirit of charity, I'm starting to feel that I should be doing something more than donating old clothes, uni books and old VHS tapes to the charity shop. What about, a sponsored how many times you can say "Wow" in a presentation? I wonder if Mr Rob Miles is doing his lecture in rhyme for charity anytime soon?

GO AND DONATE!!!