stuart test blog

The second day at TechEd was pretty good. The best sessions I attended were the Exchange 2007 ones. Charlie Chung gave a flawless demo of Exchange 2007 and its integration with PowerShell.

The worst demo of the day came from Softricity whose session I was really looking forward to. Their presentation was all marketing based and none of their demos worked and they couldn’t fix them! Sometimes you can forgive a presenter whose demo fails, but they had three, unrelated failures so we didn’t get to see any of the product.

Also, I found a video of the (annoying) Jaquie Brown interviewing us the meet-and-greet function that was after the first day of TechEd. Its’ quite funny to watch as you can see that nobody wanted to talk to her. Here’s the link – http://www.techedlive.co.nz/Video.aspx?v=4, fast forward to the 4 minute mark to see us.

Here’s a photo from the TechEd Live site showing Nathan from Microsoft demloshing a hard drive!

Tags: microsoft, teched, tech-ed, teched+nz, exchange, exchange+2007, softricity

Well the first day of TechEd 2006 is over. The keynote speech from TradeMe’s Rowan Simpson was the most interesting. The most painful was the dreadful MC,  Jaquie Brown – if you’ve ever been to a comedian that wasn’t funny, you’ll know the feeling. That horrible, painful feeling you get when the presenter on stage is cracking the worst jokes ever and getting no laughs in return. It felt like I was having my teeth pulled out – sorry Jaquie, that was terrible.

If I had known the keynote was going to be so bad I would have stayed in bed. I could have done with the extra sleep too – after stumbling home from Minus 5 at about 2am in the morning!!

On a more positivie note, I attended some great sessions today. My highlight was David Roundtree’s presentation on ISA 2006. Other good sessions were on Vista, Longhorn and PowerShell.

I’m up in Auckland for the next few days to attend the number one geek-fest that is known as TechEd! I flew up early this morning to catch up with Damian and Shelley, and got to meet the new edition to their family – 2 month old, Lola.

The next three days are going to be full-on, with sessions running all day. I’m most looking forward to the active directory presentations as well as the content on Exchange 2007. Not to mention all the new Longhorn and Vista stuff, plus the latest MOM and SMS packages… You can follow the action live here: http://techedlive.co.nz/

I’m staying at the Carlton Hotel in Auckland, and I must say that it is rather nice (it’s not often I stay in 5 star hotels!) Not sure how much I will blog over the next few days, but I’ll hopefully post some teasers on the beta @ amanzi site if I encounter any cool news worth blogging about.

If you’re also going to be at TechEd, look out for me – I’ll be the geek with the backpack!!!

A couple of interesting articles to read if you’re looking to lose weight and increase fitness:

• http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Six-Pack-Abs
• http://www.carbohydrate-guide.com/archives/2005/09/16/thermogenic-foods.html

Also, read this article too: http://positivesharing.com/2006/08/low-rent-living/. It’s not anything to do with diet or fitness, but I like it…

Interesting reading for any current or wannabe bloggers, the blogosphere is not quite what you expected!

A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant’s little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal’s hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

• http://www.techmeme.com/060816/p8#a060816p8
• http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/the_great_unrea.php
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=343

I discovered the Traineo site which is the latest Web 2.0 offering aiming to fill a need in the online market place. I’m not sure whether I’ll file this with the other sites I sign up with but then lose interest in, but we’ll see.

Anyway, the aim is to track your weight, diet and fitness so that you can reach your goal weight. I’ve been trying to lose some weight recently and the Body for Life programme definitely helped a lot, but my biggest problem has been my own lack of commitment (and love of food too!)

So perhaps the site will help me reach my goal – I’ve set a reasonably sensible target which is just 8kgs away. You can track my progress here: http://stuart.traineo.com (I though the photo was quite fitting, here it is again.)

Tags: fitness, traineo, weight, body-for-life

By the way, this post and the previous post were both written with the awesome new blogging tool released by the Windows Live team. It’s called (imaginatively) Windows Live Writer, and you can read more details and download it for free from here: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!…

I haven’t been able to fault it yet – it seems perfect. This is the most interesting product released by the Live team so far IMO. I’ll be using this for all my blogging for the forseeable future – it will also probably encourage me to blog more too.

I’m back from my trip to London and Amsterdam. I had planned to blog more while on holiday but I actually enjoyed the break from the computers too much. The holiday was awesome and it was great to see my Mum, Gran and brother, as well as all the friends still living it large in London!

I’ve uploaded most of the photos from the trip to Flickr but I’ve still got some more to go and not all of them have been named properly yet. You can check out my London and Amsterdam sets here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amanzi/sets/

I met up with Chris today for lunch down at Canary Wharf. I had my first Pret a Manger sandwhich since getting here and loved it!

I then headed to the Tate Modern gallery which I hadn’t been to before. This is an amazing gallery with some famous paintings along with some odd sculptures. The highlight for me was Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002) – a 13-minute, four-channel video / music collage comprised of nearly 600 found film clips, projected onto a 40-foot-long screen.

The rest of the day was spent walking around the sights of London and taking lots of tourist photos. You can see them all on my Flickr site here.

Sydney Airport – Wagamamas

Originally uploaded by amanzi.

I’m doing the wireless thing from Sydney airport at the moment. Had a great flight from Wellington – got to see Mt Ruapehu as we were still climbing out of Wellies.

Also had some of the best service I’ve had from a Qantas flight, even watched a great film “Match Point” on my own personal DVD player.

One of the things I’m looking forward to in London is Wagamamas so it’s nice to see that Sydney already has one. The duty free airport is like a huge shopping mall. I’ve bought an adapter so I can use my Etymotic Isolator earphones on the plane. They are great at blocking out the surrounding noise.

Next stop… Hong Kong.