Cakes? Popcorn? or PopFly?

Mr Ellery invited me to present PopFly in the three cities MIX on Campus Tour 07

Pop over to http://mixoncampus.spaces.live.com and sign up.

And more importantly, make sure you say hello.

Articles mention: Jeff Sandquist in the April 2007 Wired.

“The heat internal being 70x” is a littler hyperbolic — more like 70% of the heat is internal when blogger steps outside our blogging guidelines. Some notes on our Policy has been discussed here already.

“Microsoft Popfly is for making Web Bling” lulz. my favourite quote.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace signup.

I use Editgrid for collobrative financial management in our house.

Microsoft in Australia links, because I could not recall on the fly.

Microsoft on HD DVD

Rundown of a week in Seattle, and sadly a week too soon.

Halo 3 ships this week world-wide, and I missed it. However did buy some Halo 3 T-Shirts for the family.

Meeting up with my fellow Enthusiast Evangelists, prodding VP’s and seeing all sorts of cool things almost made up for the lack of Halo 3. Almost.

Full flight to LAX, and I think I slept most of the way. Two Arrigo-nauts collected me at SEATAC and dropped me off at the hotel in one of the new Arrigo-mobiles. Cost: two jars of Vegemite. Goes well on bagels, evidently.

Sunday: a quick shop and eat with Paul Foster. I can has iCat! Lego store Bellevue!

Monday morning on-campus. Nic Fillingham and I jumped on those shuttle buses, building to building and generally found ourselves lost on campus. Microsoft is big.

On the Monday afternoon before the internal meeting, Nic, Paul and I visited Best Buy, Circuit City and Fry’s (Renton). Retail therapy works on men, too. As long as it is a quick visit, quick browsing and immediate purchasing. All hunting, no gathering. Fry’s had a collection of WiFi antennas that will augment the home network through 100 year old walls. Halo 3 advertising everywhere.

Second only to Halo3 in Seattle are Starbucks. I lost count of how many I saw during the week. Starbucks is so ubiquitous, it is tough to find/get real strength coffee.

This week, it’s OJ on CNN and FOX News early in the week, drifting to Jena and Ahmadinejad in latter part of the week. It seems that these channels have hyper-competed themselves into a corner. At least CNBC and Bloomberg seem to have cool stuff on. Even a Microsoftie in Japan talking Halo 3. I knew I went to the wrong country! Oh, and the History Channel is just like Australia.

Internal meetings are usually “not my thing”. I either go postal/have a brain fart (this time I reserved this for a VP) or start thumping the table. This 3 day meeting, I managed to get that out all on the first day. And seem to be keeping my job.

I have not watched Iron Chef, but did see a cook-off show in Japan. There is a restaurant in Seattle where it is a battle of the bands. Our team of EE’s lost due to the use of a former professional chef (Miel) on the other team. I must admit, the steak was almost as perfect as my mashed potatoes.

Thankfully, the PopFly, Visual Studio Express, Photosynth and Windows Home Server guys all had chats with us on Days 2 and 3. The volume of cool looking and working things at Microsoft is increasing.

I have note worked out the story as Benjamin is being cagey: frogz.fr?

News: Australia is one of the largest markets for Windows Home Server. Time to Pimp My Server, too.

Highlight of the week: Microsoft’s Home of the Future.  Flora escorted and presented many concepts that will appear in future homes. Having been setup for some time, does the Home of the Future really foretell the future? Well, originally the Home contained a microwave oven that could scan barcodes. That product now exists on the market in the US$170. My feeling is that technology will slide into the home’s we live in today. Less Jetsons and more Smiths/Jones.

The next 6 months is going to be a little of a consolidation of my first 6 months of work. More hints/tips/howto and a fewer interview style videos.

Interestingly, I could get my phone data-synching in LAX ok via T-Mobile but AT&T in Seattle sucked. The connection kept timing out, so I was relegated to SMS/TXT. How 1997. Due to roaming costs, Windows Mobile 6.0 smartly does not automatically synch and prompts you prior to connecting. The last thing I need is an angry cost centre owner asking why my bill is thousands.

Cashed in all my QFF points and upgraded myself home. Probably not the best use of points, but I needed the sleep.

Next trip to the US: MIX08 in Las Vegas.

Other stuff I missed out on:

Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Keyboard 8000 ships this week in the US. iPod Touch not in stock at the Apple Store, Bellevue. Yes, I believe I am going to buy one as the WiFi and form-factor for browsing is intruiging.

Rock on Halo3. I’m sorry I missed you!

… oh, and I missed my cats, cars, TV and family too.

And now to lose these 2kgs I’ve seem to put on. Even eating 50% of normal volume.

Just in time for me, as I return to business-as-usual.

Stephen let me use the following cartoon in my Popfly session:

Cut to midday Monday. I draw his name out of a hat as a winner of a WACOM Bamboo tablet. Steve was over the moon: although he wasn’t quite sure if it would help or hinder his cartooning. http://littlevoices.com/photos/scribbles/images/42/original.aspx:

Later on Monday night, as I left WebJam, Stephen was still going shooting aliens in some game at Galactic Circus. 

1. Add more microformats to this blog (John Allsopp)
2. Silverlight myself up. Maybe not to this extent, however.
3. Become Mr Popfly Australia, and do more demos
4. Thanks to 2m20s Philip Beadle, dotNetNuke is on the list, too

The Microsoft PopFly alpha can make you lose three days. In a good way. I haven’t had so much fun since, well, Photoshop maybe.

I’ve created a public PopFly “Block” called NeilFinnLyrics (now shared) this is bare, bare bones. It simply uses the new REST interface to the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server.  The Lyric Server supports SOAP/WSDL, and normal image insertion.

PopFly is social programming: drag and drop blocks onto the page, and create your own mashups of data. Adding Neil Finn’s Lyrics to the data that can be mashed up is just another step in getting the words out there. My love for Neil Finn knows almost no bounds.

Writing a Block with the current Alpha requires knowledge of JavaScript and XML. And a little bit of patience.

Come have a chat at ReMIX to discuss where you may also profit from PopFly. The first thing that should be created is a branded PopFly Superannuation Block. Thoughts?