So Deb and I were in Vegas at the Venetian this week. Just for shits and giggles we tried to recreate our photo of real Venice... How did we do for authenticity?

The Grand Canal in ‘Real Venice’

The Grand Canal in Fake Venice (Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas)

Trust Deb to ruin it by not wearing the same top!!! Me, ever reliable in my yellow cool-dry.

Frankly I’m torn. The chlorinated canals in Fake Venice smell much nicer than those in real Venice…

So… I genuinely object to paying US$20/day to use the hotel gym. But, needs must sometimes and so it was that I found myself at the Mandalay Bay Spa  $20 the poorer this morning. Been working reasonably hard in the build up to the K1 road race in a couple of weeks so needed to get some time in on the stationary trainer.

Well, what an utterly useless experience that was. I got inside the Gym to find that;

1. They had two consumer grade exercycles and that was it as far as bikes went.
2. None of the cardio equipment was available anyway

So even if I had been able to get on the equipment it wouldn’t have been much good for the Interval workout I had planned- I ripped the crank off a consumer grade exercycle in Bangalore this year so it’s just downright dangerous.

In the end I threw my toys out of the cot, got myself a refund of my fees and went for a run up the strip.

Think I’ll try and find someone friendly at the Luxor for the Gym tomorrow and will not be staying at the Mandalay Bay for MIX10 next year that’s for sure.

So I had a great time at TechEd Africa this year. Will definitely be trying to get an invite to come back next year.

As always you can contact me about my sessions chris.auld@intergen.co.nz.

Here are the follow up notes from my sessions. I’m not going to provide the PowerPoint decks until I’ve done the other TechEd events around the globe. I’ve provided them to the event organizers who will stick them up on the password protected attendee site.

1. DYN201 – xRM, Dynamics CRM as a Developer Platform
   Good session in a smaller room. I had this one back to back with my other CRM session so this proved to be a good warm up with many people attending both. I used the demos and decks from the half day Business Action World Tour event that happened everywhere in the world *except* Africa so I thought it was appropriate to show the folks over here the content. I also talked about the fact that I eat my own dogfood- we’ve built a company that I’m  major shareholder in called MedRecruit. Go and take a look at the site, it all back ends onto Dynamics CRM 4.0 and runs on Windows Server 2k8 on Hyper-V. If you like it… give us some Google-Juice from your blog and tell all your doctor friends. I’ll be eternally grateful!
   If you want to take another look at the content from this session then check out the Business Action Virtual Tour.
2. DYN303 – Souping up Dynamics CRM with Silverlight
   This session is the one that Jian Sun is going to be delivering at Tech Ed Australia. He was responsibile for putting together the demos and I built the deck. This was probably the best session of the week for me. I felt the attendees got some great practical skills to go home with tomorrow and start building cool stuff. I promised a drop of the final demo solution that we built during the session. So here it is:
3. AZP201 – A Lap Around the Azure Services Platform
   I love doing this session because I know the content really well and as a 200 level architecture+business value session I get to put my own spin on things quite a bit. First time I’ve really had the chance to cut loose and talk about competitive cloud technologies at a Microsoft gig though- discussed AWS, AppEngine and Force.com all of which (along with Azure) take quite different approaches to the cloud. Will be interesting to see how things shake out.
4. AZP302 – Programming .NET Services
   Today was a deep dive on .NET Services. I thought this session went really well too, but, it’s always harder to really nail ‘ew stuff’ sessions because it’s not like you got a whole bunch of experiential wisdom that you can impart as best practice guidance. We covered the whole .NET Services platform with demos in 60 minutes. I also tried a new ‘demo’' to explain the Service Bus relay and Direct Connect upgrade via NAT Probing through having three volunteers throw foam balls. I thought it went pretty well- we’ll see what the evals say!

So. All in all a fantastic event. I’m looking forward to getting out to Australia and New Zealand Tech-Ed early next month now.

So it’s 1830hr in Durban South Africa and today was the last day for TechEd Africa for 2009. This was my first TechEd for this year and the second time I’ve spoken at TechEd South Africa.

Before I give you links to the demo code I’m going to bore you with some photos of my trip down the Zambezi last week. There’s actually quite a story behind it that you can read all about over at the Intergen Blog.

All hotels these days will give you an Internet connection of some sort. ironically the most expensive hotels will charge you an arm and a leg for it and the cheapest with often throw it in for free.

For uber-tech-geek travellers there is a bit of a problem though- it’s often hard to use the hotel internet when you’ve got multiple devices. Often they’ll lock your ‘purchase’ to a single MAC address and this means one machine and one machine only. Not ideal and the workar9unds such as MAC address spoofing are equally shitty- you can’t have more than one machine connected at a time.

My solution is to take a Wireless Travel router.

I have a Linksys WRT54GC.

Really useful and well worth doing. I can now run multiple laptops either wired or wireless and my iPhone all off the one hotel internet purchase.

That’s Singapore and Sydney for those of you who don’t live in airport codes :-)

I’ll be running a 2 day training course in Singapore and Sydney in a couple of weeks time. These are focused on showing you how to build out Line of Business applications using Dynamics CRM and a range of other Microsoft Platform Technologies. We’ll cover things like Silverlight, WPF, Unified Communications and Azure.

Intergen has put together all the content for this course and it’s a mix of presentations and deep dive hands on labs. It’s a 2 Day event and ideally you should have some previous CRM experience, or, have run through the CRM Developer Ramp Up Kit. You don’t need any prior experience in the other technologies but best you know your way around Visual Studio and you’ll need to be able to understand C# enough to work with it in the labs.

Metro Participants can register via www.discovermetro.net or can register directly on the Partner Learning Center. 

The link for Singapore for May 10th - 11th is
https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=265620

The link for the Sydney event for May 14 – 15th is
https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=265700

I’ll be running the same event in other APAC region cities in the future so keep tuned.

From www.tripit.com

7 Trips
73,600km traveled
18 Cities visited
9 Countries visited and it’s only March…

I should add a couple of extra cities this month (LA and Vegas) and should hit 100,000km by month end pretty easily.

w00t!

So back online afterthe Blackout.. and whaddayaknow… they delayed it

Internet copyright law delayed

So I’m finally on the homeward stretch of a tour around Asia presenting on Microsoft CRM technology- currently sitting at the airport at Singapore waiting to get on my flight to Sydney. Will be my first flight on an A380 so I pretty buzzed!

I just posted a comment over on Cactus’ site where she’s having a whinge about Air New Zealand.
I’m sorry but I’ve tried a bunch of the *A carriers and while NZ is not perfect it’s the best of the bunch I think. As for calling out Singapore Airlines as a shining light- I’m sorry but until they fix the following that aren’t playing the game in my book

• Checking in *A Gold card holders at their business counters @ Changi T2 and T3- instead of having a special area to hide them away in.
  

  In your place from the moment you step through those big glass doors.

  The ‘Special’ Gold Card Holder check in area. Note the tape fences to keep the Economy Class flying ‘swine’ in check!

  Reserved for Proper Premium Service passengers only. No cattle here.

• 
   
  
• Allowing *A gold card holders to use their business class lounge at Changi T2 and T3 the same way that every other bloody Star Alliance airline does for their frequent flyers. Instead *A Gold members get a ‘special’ lounge without showers and the other niceties one might expect. Back in the days before T3 they used to claim it was due to ‘space requirements’ but with the move to T3 this ‘excuse’ is categorically a complete load of bollocks- It’s peak time in the lounge right now with all the long haul flights leaving over the next couple of hours and the place is empty.
  
• Updating their priority boarding policy and priority boarding signs to make it clear that they actually give a shit about being part of a global alliance rather than just paying it lip service.
  
  Star Alliance?!? What’s that?

For my next post, you’ll get my feelings on the behaviour of another behemoth of the Alliance, the perpetually bankrupt, United Airlines.

Deep down I really just want to fly on Spice Jet!

I hope the inflight service is as Spicy as it sounds! Though without the naked Cacti as I’m sure they’re sans a J cabin that would be up to standard.

So I’ m doing a world tour (well a tour of Asia) running some ‘training’ events around Microsoft CRM. I call them ‘training’ events because it’s not really possible to train people to do much in a half day event- what they’re really about is exciting people about the potential of building line of business applications on top of Microsoft CRM.

I did a bunch of Intergen Twilights on this very topic last year but the BAWT events are a full half day looking at everything from WPF to Silverlight to UC/OCS and even Windows Azure. We’ll be following these up with a cool two day training course in April and May so if you’re not already involved in the Metro  program for CRM you best be signing up!

I’m currently in Bangalore, flying out to Hong Kong tonight where we are running the event Friday morning, then Singapore on Monday, Sydney on Wednesday and Auckland on Friday.

If you’re based in Shanghai or Beijing then Jian Sun, one of my colleagues at Intergen, will be presenting the course in Mandarin Chinese in these cities in early March.

Looking at my tripit stats I’ve done 13 cities in 7 countries so far this year.

So I’ve done about 43,000km of travel so far this year….. YIKES! probably another 30,000 this month too.

I’ve decided to use Tripit to track my travel stats this year.

So the first 23 days of my 365 Days of Crocs Charity Challenge have been pretty exciting.

The Crocs have been to a bunch of new places that I’ve never taken them before…. and indeed a few places I’ve never been before. They’ve survived the sweltering heat of Mumbai, the cold conditions of Beijing, a day around the Microsoft Campus in Redmond and I just arrived in Calgary where there were icicles inside the air-bridge! In summary… Crocs are the perfect choice for International travel across a variety of in-temperate climates- if you take just one pair of shoes, make it a pair of Crocs*.

*I do have my ski boots with me also, and a pair of trail runners…. but they’re really just for the gym.

So Vittorio and I went out for a traditional Beijing Dinner last night. Was really good. We tried some adventurous things. We didn’t quite get to eating the Silk Worms, but, we did eat Donkey meat.

Donkey meat in the centre, behind the pickled cucumber circle. I felt a little queasy this morning… but no idea if that was food or just general exhaustion. I’m planning a quiet night with room service in the hotel this evening. Of course my hotel meal will usually cost the same for one as dinner last night cost for four!

So it’s Saturday night and I’ve just arrived in LAX- I had my sisters engagement party so caught NZ2, the late Air NZ flight.

It’s chaos here. The sky is blood red, freeways are closed, hundreds of homes have been lost.

It’s a truly ominous view out of my hotel room, the air over LAX is thick with smoke. They’re flying massive DC10 air tankers to drop water on the fires.

See

http://www.changingthewayyoufly.co.nz

AirNZ have announced a bunch of new things.

Highlights from where I sit.

1. All domestic flights including smartsavers now acrue status credits. THis is something I have advocated for sometime. I've never been super fussed on whether I get points for smartsaver fares but missing 0out on status credits really isn't great for encouraging brand loyalty. Very pleased to see this.

2. New Space+ seating on domestic flights. Forward rows on the NZ733, NZ766 and NZ320 aircraft will have new seating and more room. Againa bit bonus for those of us who *need* to spend timwe on the laptop doing emails on the plane. This was always a sore point for me becuase QF has heaps of room in those seats. A +ve change.

All in all very +ve.