Getting ready for Tech Days.
I've arrived in Paris/France last night (not Paris/Texas) I have rehearsals for Tech Days today, Sunday, my Embedded demo-palooza session is tomorrow just after lunch - this session is not going to a typical death-by-powerpoint session that sends the audience to sleep, I only have a few slides that will be used to introduce the heroes of the session, these are the .NET MicroFramework, Windows CE, Windows XP Embedded, and Windows Embedded for Point of Service - this is a demo-filled session that will show how embedded developers can focus on the most important aspects of their device - the device experience.
If I'm traveling into Europe I typically take British Airways from Seattle to London (direct flight!), and then use London as the hub to get to my destination - I couldn't book BA on this trip due to the possible industrial action, so I booked flights on SAS through Copenhagen instead - the flights were uneventful, surprisingly good food on the Seattle/Copenhagen flight!
The one downside to the flight was the laptop I have with me for Tech Days and Embedded World - my (usually trusty) HP 8240 "Mobile Workstation" laptops system board died early last week and wasn't going to be back from repair in time for me to bring on this trip - so I ended up with a loan device from our lab, the Dell M1710 - this is a monster laptop, featuring a 17 inch display (vista with Aero glass looks amazing!), dual-core processor, 4GB Ram, and a power supply that dims the lighting of an average house when plugged in - this laptop is so crazy it also has red LEDs around in the casing to make it look hot when running, oh, and don't forget the Red glowing "XPS" logos on the laptop lid... crazy laptop! - the point being that I'd not finished writing my demos for Tech Days, so wanted to get some work done on the flight - the SAS Airbus 340-300 supplies 110v to each seat, when I plugged the laptop (without battery) into the power adapter my seat power shutdown - so I didn't get any work done on the flight :O(
The hotel I'm staying at is right across the street from the Palais des Congrès convention center, which is where the event is running - this should make it easy to carry my collection of reference boards and networking to the rehearsal today.
A short walk from the hotel is the the Arc De Triomphe (shown below)
Interestingly, the Eiffel tower can be seen in the distance - I'm guessing the tower is probably about an hours walk from the hotel (might have to walk to the tower on Saturday - I wonder if there's a Starbucks at the top...)
Right, back to coding - the XPE demo is working quite well, I can't test the CE demo until I get to the convention center - the WEPOS demo is done, so that just leaves the MicroFramework demo to finish...
- Mike
