September 2005 Entries
The drive from Death Valley over to Zion was quite a long one - we made it as far as Nevada, and the northern edge of Las Vegas by around lunchtime, and managed to get lost for the first time in this part of the trip due to a complete lack of signage, and a map that's a few years out of date. James's navigation skills managed to get us back on the right road eventually, and we headed eastwards, out of Nevada, through a corner of Arizona and into Utah. The stretch of the I15 through that corner of...
Next stop - Death Valley. The weather forecast wasn't great, and sure enough, as soon as we hit the eastern edge of Yosemite, the heavens opened. We figured that the rain would stop before we got to Death Valley, so as we carried on driving over the soaking wet roads, we kept looking for the gap in the clouds, only it didn't appear.
We stopped a few times on our way to take pictures of the stunning scenery, but in order to do so, we had to get out the waterproof jackets and protect both ourselves and the cameras from the...
Post PDC, the first item on the agenda was to pick up the hire car and then head up to Sequoia National Park - no more than 200 miles up the road from LA. Wanting to avoid the hire car fiasco of last time (driving on an Interstate in a car with zero accelleration was not entirely pleasant), I'd phoned up Hertz, and eventually negotiated for an upgrade to the next size up car for a not unreasonable amount of extra cash. The car arrived - and lo, it was huge. A Kia Amanti - a Merc-wannabe, with _everything_ I...
Stage one of the holiday was to fly over to San Francisco, spend some time in San Francisco, then head down the coast road, stopping off at various places along the way. We've seen some great things, and it was a pretty varied trip, so here's what happened...
It was a short stage - we arrived late on Friday (having been fed several times during the journey), and collapsed in the hotel room. And what a room! Fabulous hotel - Expedia did us proud with this one. Huge bed, LCD TV, and a Bose stereo... plus there was a television in...
Carrying on from my previous post, which really concentrated on functionality and new stuff, I figured it made sense to blog a bit about the PDC experience in general. It's quite an amazing event, and each one has its own individual flavour. The last PDC I went to was the BIG one in 2000 in Florida. That time round, it was the .NET launch, and the hype was amazing, so how has this one compared?
Well, for starters, the phrase of 2000 was "so basically" - this time around, the phrases are more along the line of "So, let's actually go...
So, we've been in LA now for about four days, and during that time we've learnt a heck of a lot about the new stuff coming out from Microsoft in the next year or three. Fun to note that, although it's not even on the shelves yet, Visual Studio 2005 is already being considered current technology that everyone is familiar with, so the assumption is always that the VS2005 environment, the new stuff in C# (like Generics), and the advances in ASP.NET are considered almost old hat, and you have to be familiar with it to gain the most from...
James and I will be heading off to sunny California in just a couple of days from now, where we'll combine a bit of a holiday with attending Microsoft's PDC (Professional Developer Conference). Packing, as always, will be a last minute thing, but it's ok - we have made a list of things we need to remember, so hopefully we won't forget anything.
Still not sure which sessions I'll head to when I'm there, but there is one that caught my eye - Women and Technology: Dream, Code, Run, which seemed quite appropriate. I'm hoping it won't end up being a...