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