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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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2005-02-04Blackbelt this!You can find out about the Digital Blackbelt webcast series and download the presentation materials for the first session at Joe Stagner's Digital Blackbelt forum site. I would like to tell you whether I found it to be worthwhile, but I can't. You can watch a rerun of this morning's Bill Gates webcast (one where all the demos worked just great, even Bill's code) once it is put up on the recent-webcast list here. I can tell you this one is worth watching, because there is a lot about connectivity and easy construction of connected applications for the enterprise as seen from a Microsoft-centric worldview. I will have to look at those myself, and I am very grumpy about that fact: Two wasted hours grumpy.Bill Gates did a presentation and Q&A at the Windows Office Developers conference, scheduled from 10:00 am to 11:15 today. There was a live webcast of it. I was mildly irked that it overlapped with the first Digital Blackbelt webcast, running from 11:00 until noon today. I was already uncertain about attending a session that featured "Selling your Boss ..." in its title, but I figured I could suspend judgment for a bit. So I drop in on the "MSDN Webcast: Connected Systems and the Microsoft Office System (Level 300)" webcast and it all goes great. I had pre-tested my system and downloaded all of the audio and video components that are apparently required. It all works the first time. The demo displays of Visual Studio are pretty blurry in the webcast, and going to full screen is not that helpful. But I follow along well enough, busily typing my gleanings into an open Outlook Note. The Q&A starts at 10:45 and is scheduled to go for 30 minutes. I tear myself away from the Q&A just past 11:00, preparing to open the Digital Blackboard webcast and maybe even keep the Connected System webcast around. That didn't work, because my browser moved away when I started into the second conference. OK, no problem. But when the WebCast Console or whatever it is launches, my computer freezes. The cursor is stuck, Ctrl-Alt-Del is ineffective, and I am hosed. So I lean on the power button until the laptop shuts down, then I power up again. Powering up into Windows XP after a crash takes longer (I figure NTFS has work to do), and starting up my account takes what seems like forever. Then Outlook takes even longer to start up after a crash too (but it has the note with the link to the webcast, perhaps). I look in my Drafts folder to see if there is any surviving remnant of my hour's worth of notes from the first session. Nothing, all gone. I know better, and every time I am lulled into complacency by an Internet-based application, I get slammed for it. Why do I insist on not learning that lesson? I head back into the Digital Blackbelt webcast and notice that I have to give lots of firewall permissions to have everything running. This time I get into the middle of the webcast. Oh, we're sharing an application. I wonder what it is. I maximize my browser screen to see if I can get all of the application visible at once, No, I have to scroll around if I want to see more. Beneath the application, there is this little text box where questions and answers are appearing. And to the left there is a big nearly-empty sidebar that prevents the application getting fully into my browser window. There is no sound. There's a "click here for audio" button in that nearly-empty sidebar, so I do. The window says it is initializing or something and it takes freeking forever. After a good 3 minutes, I close the silly thing. Still no sound and I have no idea what the application we're looking at is and why it is interesting. Eventually, I give up and follow the link on how to test sound. This gets me to a version of the soundcheck that says it succeeded in initializing. I go back into the application and "click here for audio" again. This time, I get a failure and the help page about what the cause should be is very geeky with lots of technical possibilities and no clues on how to tell which it might be. My guess is that some remnant application is hogging my sound interface and the webcast can't get to it. I do a restart, figuring there is something in my local audio that is messed up. When I am logged-in again (it is now after 11:45), I do a quick check with MediaPlayer to see if my audio is working at all. I find a working Internet radio broadcast and then close MediaPlayer. Then I go to the webcast site, tell my firewall that all of those scripts and ActiveX components are fine for one more time. I get back to the webcast page at 11:55. The page I'm presented says the conference has ended. Bottom line: I was on-line for two hours. I lost my notes on the first hour when I attempted to get into the second hour. I never got into the second hour successfully, and didn't even learn whether I would have heard audio if they were still there. So my one impression of the first digital blackbelt session is that there was some sort of dive down into nuts and bolts that I wouldn't want to show my boss even if I had one of those. I have no idea what kind of overview was provided to establish the context of it all. I had a lot more to take away from the Bill Gates presentation, the demos, and the Q&A. Those notes are gone. And I won't be making any effort to reconstruct them. Times up. Crap. 2005-02-02Little Things Mean a LotScobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger: Thinking Smaller Brings Lots of Interesting Ideas. [from 2005-02-02] Scoble was challenged about his notion of small ideas, and he responded to "will the little things make enough of a difference?" with a great list of example of small things that have done that. The conversation moves on to the next small things (a nice shift). Scoble primes the pump with a list of items that have crossed his radar, and his link blog carries more. |
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