Recently I found myself listening to a presentation in a lecture style room and the speaker was giving out some fabulous information (articles to look at, books to reference and blogs of subject matter experts to check out).  I was sitting in the front row of the room and did not want to break out my laptop to take notes.  I think it can be very distracting to the person giving the presentation, and I have a twitter addiction that I have to feed if I have an open laptop in front of me.  I wanted to jot down some of these gems that the speaker was sharing, so I started to send myself e-mails on my mobile phone with the subject containing the item I wanted to check out. 

My thought was that I would later transcribe it into tasks in outlook or just look up the book online to see if it was worthwhile.  I don't know if you have ever done this, but you think for a second that it is terribly clever but after 2 or 3 e-mails to yourself it become tedious.  Also you loose the context in which the "note to self" was written if you don't translate it quickly after sending yourself the e-mail.  I found myself thinking:

If only we had an easy way to take notes during a presentation or a meeting without breaking out your laptop

Then bam - it hit me.  This problem was solved in several thousand years ago: paper.  I promptly went out and bought myself a moleskin notebook and have been carrying it ever since.  Now I can quickly breakout my notebook (opening it is much faster than booting up a laptop) during a meeting and take notes that are all in context. If I need to transcribe it into an Action Item for later I put an asterisk (*) next to the line and create an outlook task next time I have the laptop open.  I also have this great record of the event to look back on.

But don't take my word on it.  Take a look at the sketchnotes that Mike Rhode put together from his recent trip to the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX.  He captures the emotional awakening that paper can give you in his recent blog post about his sketchnotes:

For many SXSW attendees the sketchnotes seem to awaken positive memories, even several days later. This is one of the reasons I keep a travelogues when I go on trips. Notes and sketches of my activities help me recall clear memories — even years after the trip. Hopefully this will be true of my SXSW sketchnotes in the future.

I grew up in the Trapper Keeper generation, so I was used to paper.  I was a sophomore in high school before I was in the same classroom with a computer, and that was this mammoth Tandy computer that we used in economics class to simulate a shoe company for economics class, certainly not something to take notes on (after all floppy disks were "kind of expensive", you know).  Somewhere in the last few years I shunned the use of paper as "not cool".  I have taken a complete 180 degree turn on that decision.

So I have avoided putting upcoming events on my blog, but recently a couple people have commented that they wished they had heard about some events.  So I am putting this post out here to announce some really cool upcoming events, but I would also like to know if you as a reader of this blog like these / hate these / don't care either way.  All of these events are in Wisconsin, but other parts of my "territory" (Indiana and Illinois) have some upcoming events soon as well.

March 14th - MilwaukeeDevhouse1 - Part hacking, part coworking and part party, this is Milwaukee's version of the SuperHappyDevhouse.  Bring your project, bring your idea or just show up and have some fun hanging out with the tech crowd.  The guys and gals over at Web414 are putting on this event and Pete Prodoehl has a slideshow about what to expect. 

I am currently trying to get clearance from the family to attend the event and if I do, I will be working on a Flickr-based project.  Yes, the one that I came up with over a year ago and have not done anything with - hence the reason to attend the Devhouse so I can work on it.

Who: All are welcome, please register
When: Friday, March 14th, 7:00 PM - ?
Where:  Bucketworks, 1340 North 6th Street, Milwaukee, WI

March 15th - Fox Valley Day of .NET - The Fox Valley has a great .NET user group and they are putting on their first all day event.  They have some neat sessions lined up.  I am actually presenting the session right after lunch on web technologies.

Who: All are welcome, please register
When: Saturday, March 15th, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM (registration at 7:30 AM)
Where:  Fox Valley Technical College (Cafeteria), 1825 N. Bluemound, Appleton, WI

April 5th - Deeper in .NET - The Wisconsin .NET User Group is bringing back their popular Deeper in .NET program after taking a year (or so) off.  They have some great speakers and sessions lined up.  I will be the Emcee for a panel discussion.

Who: All are welcome, please register (must login first)
When: Saturday, April 5th, 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM (registration at 7:00 AM)
Where:   Milwaukee Marriott West, W231 N1600 Corporate Court, Pewaukee, Wisconsin

April 17th  - Heros Happen {Here} launch event in Madison, WI and May 9th - Heros Happen {Here} launch event in Milwaukee, WI - These are the marketing launch events for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.  Windows and Visual Studio have already shipped and SQL Server will ship after the launch events.  I will be presenting a session at each of the launch events and I have no idea why they added semicolons to the title.

Milwaukee Registration and Madison Registration are both open, and I would recommend registering soon as these events are "selling out".

I was at the Milwaukee Auto Show a couple of weeks ago looking at the latest that the automakers have to show.  My wife and I have gone every year for the past several and we enjoy the event.  This year means a little more to us, as Jodie is in the market for a new car.  So we had to get serious about the cars that we are looking at and more important the features that we want in the car.  For example, I am really interested in getting XM Satellite radio, because they carry the Major League Baseball games.  Jodie is really interested in the Ford Sync product.

Checking out the Sync

Ford (and Mercury) had a couple cars at the show that were wired up to demo the Sync and they had demo people in the cars waiting to show you the features of the platform.  You may find this hard to believe, but I have never seen the Ford Sync in action, despite the fact that I work for the company that helped them build the platform (it is co-branded as "powered by Microsoft").  Fact is that Sync is just not in the part of Microsoft that I work in and we make a lot of products, so it is hard to keep up with all of them.  So I climbed into the Mercury and started talking to the demo guy.  He found it humorous that I worked for Microsoft and had never seen the product in action, but proceeded to give me the demo.   He walked through the various voice commands and then said "I can show you the music off the flash drive or the iPod". 

Where is the Zune?

I said, "Dude, the iPod and not the Zune?".  He said, "Yeah I thought it was weird that the demo kit came with an iPod and not a Zune, I have a Zune and I thought it was weird that our kit came with an iPod".  I was a bit taken aback by this, and I thought about what marketing company screwed this up (we outsource a lot of our marketing with weird results).  I was pumped up enough to even send Steve Ballmer an e-mail (but I did not as you will see in a minute), and I even tweeted it:

at the auto show where I just learned the Ford Sync press kit comes with an iPod, where is the Zune?

Once I calmed down about it (which did not take long), I thought how brilliant it was that they were showing the iPod and not the Zune.  I like my Zune a lot, but I will be the first one to admit that the iPod has out sold the Zune by a 100 to 1 ratio (or so I don't have any official numbers and Wikipedia has somewhat old numbers that are tough to compare).  Regardless of the actual numbers, 100 to 1 is good enough to postulate that for every 100 people with a music player that climb into the demo car, probably only one of them has a Zune, the rest have an iPod.  If they showed the Sync only with a Zune, the response might be:

• This looks cool, but I have an iPod
• What is a Zune?
• Maybe I should buy a car with an iPod connector
• Microsoft is at it again only creating technology that works with their stuff

The last hypothetical response is the one that concerns me the most.  By demoing the product from your competitor, you are showing that you have an open platform and that is a very good thing.

Interoperability as a Strategy

I think one of the strengths that Microsoft has now is a real focus on Interoperability of our products and an emerging story around true cross platform products (chief example being the Silverlight runtime and its sister product Moonlight).  This focus it not a "quick fix" and it is a journey rather than a destination.  We also have our past record of being less than interoperable to overcome.

So what can I do?

As an evangelist for Microsoft, I am on the "front line" with customers and the community on showing our platforms.  I am going to go out of my way to talk about our great stories around Interoperability.  Stories are nice, but I am going to take it a step further and try and always demonstrate Interoperability when doing a presentation.  If you see me showing a web application, make sure I pull it up in Firefox to show you that Microsoft has made sure that ASP.NET AJAX will work on the top 4 browsers (Safari, IE, Firefox and Opera) as an example.  If I show you Astroia, It would be great to show you the services consumed by .NET and then by Adobe AIR.  Next time I show Silverlight, make sure I open the application on Linux in Moonlight as well.  Now clearly there are limits to what I can show, I can not show a WPF application running on OSX, but I can show you WPF as a front end for a rails application running on OSX.  Look for this new focus at a demo near you soon.

Note:  This blog post was updating after publishing to fix a typo.  Hitting publish at midnight will do that to you!