OK... so I'm trying to install Office 2k3 SP1 so I can test some Infopath stuff we've been working on. Thus far I have probably blown about 2 hours on it.... and I'm getting extremely PISSED OFF!

The install blows up at the end of the process claiming that it can't find SKU111.cab. It doesn't give me an option to help it find SKU111.cab... it just dies.

I am currently uninstalling office and then will reinstall it again to see if that helps. If none of that works I'm going to ring up PSS and yell at them.

OK, so I'm a day late... But monday was a snow day here in Dunedin. Nick thought I'd be cold... but not me! Office Dog and I were out by 8am in shorts and T Shirt (well he was in his birthday suit) going for a run. Herewith some photos... off my Smartphone I'm afraid...

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericgu/archive/2004/08/12/213778.aspx

Eric: Well, the news is that Ive decided to leave the C# team to join the Windows Movie Maker team as a developer.

Imagine you work for a New Zealand company with an entrenched monopoly. You think your website is pretty good, and you do a lot of business that way. But maybe you want to know what people really think. Perhaps you worry that your customers don't like you as much as they should.

...

So you take action. You decide to post a comment defending your company, but pretending to be from one of your happy customers. No-one will ever know, and it will help even up the balance a bit. Perhaps you even feign illiteracy in your "happy customer". You think your customers are a herd of illiterate sheep after all.

But you forget two important things.

1. You are not completely anonymous when you surf from work.
   
2. You are a complete idiot.

The whole 9 yards here and here.

Just seen this on the news....

I hope that the ALP also does 'the right thing' by donating the political donations they have received from thuggish Western Australian trade unions to the various construction companies who were the victims of such thuggery....

One can but hope....

Iliciting suggestions for content/functionality for your theoretical internal developer portal

Oh yes please......

But seriously... developers work in all sorts of different ways- IMHO the last thing they want is some company wide uber portal to constrain their lives. Give me blogs and Google- that's a pretty good toolset to be completely honest. Google is my most important productivity tool- I'd just love some metrics on how many searches I do a day.

Update: Office Dog is in the Dog Box for chewing the power plug off our office Air Hockey table....

BAD DOG!

I'm pleased Mr Dee didn't come to my session on smart clients, Val and Gabe gt a bit of a roasting...  *

I'll have to write up my review sometime over the next few days... just REALLY busy..... and got to do GST today!

I agree on poor old Nic's session... the drilling was crazy... I left and stormed down to the speakers room and told some people to start rolling shit down hill!

[OK.... Quick Brainfart Below]

To be completely honest I'm not as keen on Sky City as a venue. I really liked the Aotea center because it was spread out, had lots of room and has some character. The rooms are not as good as Sky City maybe, but, they've just done a major refit.

I didn't actually get to many sessions at Tech Ed this year- was busy reworking my slide deck to remove all the content I presented @ Security Summit. In the end I only had two people who had been to the security summit presentations in my session so I could have represented some of that exciting content.

My session went pretty well. Got through a couple of Demos. My Smart Client deployment demo went well apart from the fact that I couldn't get my initial MSI deployment to work so I had to XCopy deploy. Deployment really is the best feature of smart clients. We have one of our applications deployed from invercargil to Kaitaia and updated automagically over the internet.... Really is useful.

I think that I spoke fairly well but that I could probably do with refining my slide deck a little- had a bit too much detail on some of the slides. I really wanted to make it an interactive session... but everyone was pretty tired Daryl Burling and Brent Clarke helped kick things off though.

Will be interesting to see my feedback. Anyway... gotta go do some work. More on Tech Ed from me (including jumping off the Sky Tower) later!

*[UPDATE] Mr Dee did come to my first session (the DNUG Meeting) and said it was a 'must not miss'

We've now got an 'office' dog around Kognition.

Toby is a wee terror who has just today learnt to climb the stairs to the office. Provided he is good and stays relaxed on the bean bags I'll let him stay... otherwise he's going out the back!

Michael Kleef is talking about how he tried to make his session more interactive for Tech Ed this year...

I really want to start getting my sessions more interactive too- tried to get this years Tech Ed one more interactive. The fact that it was 2nd to last session made it a bit tough...

Looks like Michael was using bribes... must remember to take some bribes next time

Will have to wait and see how my evals turn out....

Hard News has good post on Maxim today.

Including Maxim being caught telling porkies... which is WELL WORTH READING

...and more good stuff from the Rationalists and Humanists on the Maxim Spambomber

Now you all know that I'm by no means a religious nutcase. But this is really funny...

Our Father, who 0wnz h34V3n, j00 r0ck!
May all 0ur base someday be belong to you!
May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn h34V3n.
Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe.
And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just as we teach n00bz
when they act lame on us.
Please don't give us root access on some poor d00d'z box when we're too
pissed off to think about what's right and wrong, and if you could keep the
fbi off our backs, we'd appreciate it.
For j00 0wn r00t on all our b0x3s 4ever and ever.

4m3n

Got to a few sessions on Day one... in between sorting my deck and in particular my demos.

The 100 level Map Point session was prettty good- getting our hands on the map data for NZ (about 6mo out) will mean that we can start to do some really neat stuff with our utilities job dispatch application. Pity there is no support for writing your own plugins to the MLS- kinda precludes doing funky stuff like location over packet trunk radio.

Next session I hit was the stuff on Team System. I'm not completely convinced that the demarcaton of roles in Team system is going to work in an NZ context- we tend to be jack of all trades down here... but we'll see. The workflow looks good but I'm going to delegate all that hard stuff down to Nick

Went to the Metropolis architecture talk, if only becuase it was The Metropolis talk. Harry did a good job, knew his stuff well.

Also went to the Data in SOA discussion that Harry gave. Again, a useful session if maybe a little assumptuous of the idea that we are all from big IT shops.

Finished the day with an early Dinner @ The Mexican Cafe with Nick. Saw the guys from Provoke and there were plenty of other Wellywood types- seemed they were all out for dinner with PAndrew.

Blogging from the keynote this morning.... The room is filling quickly and as per usual people are STUPID and don't shift to the middle of the rows..... is it some innate fear of a sudden need to ablute that causes this phenomena?

The MS team have been a bit more adventurous with the keynote this year and chose a 'Professional Speaker' rather than an MS exec for the keynote. I think this should be cool- we never get one of the really BIG execs down here anyway.