That was TechEd Europe - some random thoughts...
TechEd Europe was a hoot – The TechEd conference team do an excellent job of looking after speakers and attendees – the TechEd team are like swans, looking graceful on the surface, but I bet they are flapping like mad under the surface – it was really nice to catch up with some of the OLD crew, Myra, Paddy, and Sam from the events team, and John (marketing boy) Wyer, David (slide shuffler) Gristwood (who was presenting a session titled The Zen of Web Services [nice title Dave!], and also making some new friends with some of the speakers and attendees. It’s a pity I only got to fly in, do the keynote, and fly back out again – I would like to have had more time to soak up sessions, and perhaps even give a few sessions on embedded operating system technology – let me know whether you would be interested in having some embedded sessions at TechEd US or Europe and I will see if we can slip some sessions in there.
Last night at the hotel I was browsing a few of my favorite blogs in Omea Reader and noticed a link from The FurryGoat Experience (nice blog title Steve!) which jumped out to a blog/website called Creating Passionate Users which talks about how T-Shirts are one way that people get hooked on a product or service – you just need to look at all the baseball shirts/hats or football shirts (and yes, I mean the sport where you use your foot to kick the ball, not the sport where you wear padding and run up and down with the ball under your arm 
) – is it the same with Technology? – if you had a “Windows CE Rocks!”, “I Love Windows XP Embedded”, “I POS using WEPOS” T-Shirt or whatever would you wear it ? (and I mean, would you wear it out in public) ? – what about a car window sticker, like the Apple Logo, would you put a Windows CE logo sticker on the rear window of your car ?
This morning I was in Amsterdam, this afternoon I’m in Minneapolis, but only just… <rant>it took over two hours to clear customs and immigration in Minneapolis</rant> – the good news is there’s a Starbucks in the Hilton hotel, so I’ve had my afternoon fix and am ready for an evening full of rehersals… – and then back on stage again tomorrow for the World Wide Partner Conference keynote.
– Mike
