My First Microsoft Product Launch

So being an IT guy, and my company going the Windows Way whole hog; I decided it was about time I went to one of these fabled Microsoft product launches where you get heaps of swag from booth babes and free beer and steak, and ... and...

Well that is just a load of crap, but I had a decent time anyway :)

While Microsoft and their partners still practice the "meat-grinder" sales technique (keep shoving the product down your throat until the money flows out the other end), the IT Pro track presenters had a sense of humor about it, and were able to laugh at themselves when things didn't go as expected onstage. One guy furiously typing on 4 different demo machines, the other "stretching" the talk so we wouldn't get bored and rowdy.

The keynote was the same drab "rah-rah" cheerleading I've come to expect from almost every keynote presentation. KEY MESSAGE: "This will be good for your bottom line, folks. Trust us, we're sure..."

The actual demo sessions were informative and even slightly eye-opening, the whole Vista/Office2007/Exchange2007 package looks pretty impressive overall. I was most impressed with the Business Desktop Deployment Workbench demo. Building a single operating system image to be deployed in a number of different manners including DVD, from an SMS server, directly from the workbench server, and others. The language options are pretty impressive too; Vista is no longer base-language dependent, but can be deployed with as many or as few "language packs" as you wish which can be applied very simply after the fact. That will make a lot of Quebec IT people happy. Most IT folks I know despise working in a "translated" environment like the French Canadian WindowsXP, but prefer the language of origin, US English. The users they support, however, have their own preferences of course :)

Lunch was a decent box including sandwich, chips, salad, cheese and crackers, a tiramisu cake, and an apple. Not steak and beer, but pretty decent for free :)

No "booth babes" although there were some attractive ladies in evidence.

And I got a T-shirt.

All in all, a pretty good day.

Ben's goes bye-bye?

Workers at this Montreal landmark have been without a contract since February 2006. The first photo was taken coincidentally in February as I was walking to the train station after work. Ben's is one of the few places I remember coming to when I came on field trips to the city with my grandparents when I was little.

This is how it looks now, in November. The chairs and tables are all stacked at one end of the floor, the fondly-remembered lemon-yellow formica walls still covered by the autographed photos of celebrities who have come to this shrine to Montreal-style "Smoked Meat".




A sad day for our local culture when this family-run business goes away. I caught a hint of a headline about a new 28-storey building going up on this site when searching the Web, but couldn't actually find the article. I had noticed these signs going up, though.






These are the workers' demands, which seem pretty reasonable to me as a once (and hopefully future) customer.

• a Chef (cook)
• a meat cutting person
• new silverware, glassware, and toaster
• Repairs to the HVAC
• Reasonable seniority rights and wage increases

Let's hope they can open these doors again!

Ben's Wikipedia entry

Hey this is cool... You can use Writely to post to your Blogger account!

and it's a nice little editor too... Hmm... I may end up using this instead of emailing posts in from my Blackberry... or both; we'll see.

Ok, now for some real work!

Listening to TWIT#77

http://www.twit.tv/TWiT
Oh no! Here we go again.... Microsoft has apparently scared Novell into coughing up money for intellectual property used in SUSE Linux. Bollocks!! What is this "deal" really about? Is it the whole FAT disk format thing again? Or is it just one more way for MS to undermine linux as a viable desktop?

Links :

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-20Statement.mspx
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/community_open_letter.html
http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/54088.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/03/microsoft_novell_suse_linux/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000121
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/

Ooooh, just found a good one:
http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/

Just as an aside:
Digital Rights Management doesn't protect anybody. In order to get your money's worth for the media you buy, you have to turn into a "thief" and rip movies and music illegally.

Ok, gotta go earn some bucks.

FIRST POST!!!

I've always wanted to do that, ever since I started reading SlashDot years ago...