www.nickhodge.com

Acquis­i­tions today. I hope Avril isn’t read­ing this:

1. Win­dows Home Server from Tran­quil PC

After much pro­cras­tin­a­tion, I’ve decided to buy some­thing that’s already built. And isn’t going to require lots of coal to be burnt to keep the thing going.

2. Meraki Stand­ard Mesh

All the cool kids were doing it, hon­est! Attempt­ing to wire up Liam whilst he is at school. The antenna pur­chased in Fry’s has helped out within the house, but doesn’t beam far enough.

3. A sur­prise that should be arriv­ing tomorrow.

Ima­gine: you are out hav­ing a pleas­ant din­ner with your parents-in-law. One thing leads to another, and you start play­ing with your new toy: Win­dows Mobile 6.0 and my new Palm Treo 750.

Minutes before leav­ing the house, I had down­loaded and installed the Win­dows Live cli­ent for Win­dows Mobile into my Treo, and had yet to log in to the service.

Over din­ner, when the con­ver­sa­tion turned to some­thing where I could merely “nod”, I un-pocketed by Treo 750 and signed in.

Appear­ing on my “Today” screen was my Win­dows Live login details:
Ooh, Mes­sen­ger sign in. Tap here to sign in, let’s sign in and see who is online.
I nod politely
At 6:10pm on a Fri­day, Sydney time only my European friends tend to be online. In this instance, Paul Foster fel­low enthu­si­ast from the UK is online, so I start up a quick chat. The Con­tacts are exactly the same as your desktop and web list. No mat­ter where I am, with my trusty Treo I can chat with them.
Yes, in our chat we refer to each other as “dude” as it sounds cool. Notice the little “Voice clip” option at the bot­tom left? By click­ing on this, I was able to send a quick “G’day” to Paul.
A voice clip? Yes, just like the desktop ver­sion of Win­dows Live Mes­sen­ger on your PC.

I demon­strated this to my parents-in-law to show them I was a worthy hus­band for their daugh­ter. Thank­fully, they were impressed.

Oh, and thanks to Paul Foster for his assistance.

As Simon Hig­gins came down with the ‘flu over the week­end, and I had not been any­where need a TAB or horses, I volun­teered to present. ASCCA here we come!

Hmmm, 45 minutes on Vista. I think I am going to show some inter­est­ing things in Win­dows Vista plus do some vox-pop on Seni­ors. See if a few memes actu­ally apply. Also spruik for speak­ing and video exper­i­ences around Aus­tralia. Large WA con­ti­gent here. Future WebJammers?

Whilst I am not sponsored by Tel­stra NextG, I am start­ing to find out how excel­lent it is to present with an inter­net con­nec­tion — no mat­ter where you find yourself.

Nan Bosler, OAM: Stat­istic: Seni­ors spend 42 hours per month on the inter­net.  Generation-Y, 37 hours. Use: Email, lookup product inform­a­tion, exchange pho­tos. Secur­ity is import­ant as threats from vir­uses. Con­cerned about con­sumer pro­tec­tion, and threats to grand­chil­dren.  The Hon Kristina Keneally MP is steal­ing my stor­ies and jokes!

Ulti­mately, it was great to speak with 120 people, all tak­ing a day to hear and learn about technology.

Links from my talk:

Talk to your kids, in the next room with Live Messenger.

Family.Show (gene­a­logy)

Live Spaces (make your own blog)

Win­dows Live Writer (easy to use tool to cre­ate blog entries, and post photos)

NEW!! Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor (To check your PCs to see which ver­sion of Vista will work on them)

Whilst driv­ing from Perth air­port to the Hotel on Sunday, I determ­ined that I haven’t been in Perth since late 2005. Nearly 2 years. Perth is greener now.

My first visit to Perth was in 1993. I think I’ve been here at least 27 times through my last 4 employers.

The Dux­ton Hotel’s high-speed inter­net access is wire­less only, and keeps drop­ping VPN con­nec­tions to work. As a video-blogger, I am con­stantly mov­ing around multiple-hundred of Mb files around the world, and the lack of net­work sta­bil­ity is frustrating.

This danah boyd video is killing me. Note to self: choose a dif­fer­ent hotel. And one that doesn’t think I am a Ms.

I’ve already cap­tured two videos: one with Gary Barber and one with Stephen Price.

Stephen is the car­toon­ist who cre­ated my new avatar, and Gary is the geek-father of Perth.

My dis­cus­sions with Gary revolved around “why Perth?”. Is it the tyranny of dis­tance that forces Perth people together; which is like Aus­tralia. Why then do humans seek like minded people out and see a need to get together in meat­space? There is no doubt that Perth people have this innate drive to help each other in a way that you do not see in other cit­ies. Maybe Mel­bourne at little. Adelaide should learn from Perth.

By strange coin­cid­ence, I ran into Nick Ran­dolph and Brian H Mad­sen (and a bunch of .Net dudes) at the centre of Perth Sil­icon area, Tiger Tiger. Thank­fully, they didn’t ask me some obscure .Net tech­nical ques­tion. If they had, I’d prob­ably called Joel Pobar.

On the return walk to the hotel, Stephen lead me astray into the Hay Street Border’s Book­store. Yes, my book col­lec­tion +1. And friendly staff. The geek-girl behind the counter loved my “geek” t-shirt. rscpt.

Tomor­row is more than another Wed­nes­day for Perth: its Web­Jam day. Lach­lan Hardy and Lisa Her­rod land to get the Perth exper­i­ence. I hope that Web­Jam is a two-way exper­i­ence for all con­fer­ence people in Aus­tralia, espe­cially in the online space.

AIMIA: “Dis­rupt­ive tech­no­logy — your life mashed up. Decod­ing the consumer. ”

Thanks to Mr Pod­cast, Leslie Nas­sar, there is a per­man­ent record of the panel. More “rep­res­ent” than “present”. I hope I assisted people in thinking.

http://tinyurl.com/2dfc3d

In ScottGu’s com­ments to his excel­lent post, he men­tions that Microsoft licensed some of the QuT Ruby.NET work! w00t! Aus­sie code lives inside Iron­Ruby. Well done, Dr Wayne Kelly and team.

New Microsoft hire (start­ing in Septem­ber), Scott Hansel­man, is also get­ting into the Ruby-way.

Also, Miguel de Icaza gives a big tick to the project.

Aliv­etec (That’s the Gold Coast health gad­get guys) go lar­ger than The Geek Stor­ies: ABC’s Good Morn­ing Amer­ica. MSR + Aus­tralian good­ness goes really large! A phone that tells you when you are not breath­ing. W00t!

John Lam gives an update on Iron­Ruby. The first drop is avail­able now. LOLCODE, Ruby, Python. A dif­fi­cult choice!

Want to step out with Sil­ver­light in Bris­bane? Pop me an email and I’ll con­nect you up.

AMD Dual Core (2007) vs. Mac Plus (1986). Inter­est­ing com­ments on “large soft­ware” — as I actu­ally remem­ber using Mac Plus’s for hard work (word pro­cessing, spread­sheets) and System6.0.8; I should write up what the Mac could not do in 1986. Meh.  The Mac was only throw­ing around 22K of graph­ics (512 x 384 pixels / 8 bits as the Mac was only B&W) ; Word didn’t even repa­gin­ate in the back­ground. This Mac could not have TCP/IP’d as there wasn’t enough memory on the logic board (1Mb hard­wired, no upgrades) or speed in the SCC (serial con­trol­ler for the RS423 on the Macs).  An inter­est­ing read to see how far we’ve come.

Photo: delic8genius

Just before I depart for a hol­i­day, I’ve pumped out three videos

1. Inter­view­ing ReMIX attendees on Web­Jam
2. My Microsoft Pop­fly present­a­tion
3. The Geek Stor­ies, ReMIX

What is an Geek? Is Geek a pejor­at­ive term?

In the UK, being a train­spot­ter or anorak is def­in­itely pejor­at­ive for those out­side the craze.  Duncan Riley uses the mar­ket­ing term Prosumer (pro­fes­sional consumer).

If any­one comes up to me and calls me a Geek, I am proud. Hav­ing spent the last year break­ing off the shackles of “sales and mar­ket­ing droid”, being a geek is refresh­ing. And hav­ing suc­cess­fully passed on my geek genes to Liam — I am even prouder.

Self-proclaiming myself as a geek with the title Pro­fes­sional Geek still gets side­ways glances — even at Microsoft — which has spent the last many years suc­cess­fully becom­ing the enter­prise soft­ware com­pany. Thank­fully, Microsoft’s heart still beats with a geek tune.

So what is the size of the geek vir­tual nation? This is a nation not divided by 19thC lim­its of Empire; nor sep­ar­ated by age, gender, lan­guage. A geek has a under­stand­ing over the last 250 years, tech­no­logy has pro­pelled humans at a rapid rate. The inform­a­tion age we live in may be seen as a dif­fer­ent time to the indus­trial age — who can pre­dict future historian’s categorizations?

There are two recent meas­ure­ments of the size of the geek vir­tual nation as it exists today:

• Apple PR: Down­loads of Apple’s Safari 3 beta for Win­dows 2000, XP and Vista: 1,000,000
  Who else apart from geeks, inde­pend­ent of plat­form reli­gion, would down­load a beta of yet another browser?
• Piper Jaf­fray estim­ates 500,000 iPhones sold on the week­end.
  Most estim­ates put the US at 50% of the world’s IT eco­nomy. 2 x 500,000 = 1,000,000

Whilst both num­bers are Apple-centric, it is still an inter­est­ing num­ber to pon­der. How many bor­der­less, hyper-online geeks are there in the world?

Hey, Jeffa The Geek Stor­ies has the scoop, before The New Invent­ors: watch the inter­view with the Alive Tec CEO Bruce Satch­well — that blue device attached to the patient is made on the Gold Coast!

Email­ing Bruce last night, apart from com­ple­ment­ing me on my sharp eyes and good memory — he also broke the news that Alive’s Web Developer, Tim Hil­liard, is wear­ing the mon­itor for the run­ning of the bulls in Pamplona in a couple of weeks.

Alive  have made a very crude map of the bull run route using Win­dows Live maps.

Map view

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=42.81795~-1.642793&style=r&lvl=17&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=11721060&&cid=62DC070579519371!130&encType=1

Bird­seye view

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=r42pyngvwrkz&style=o&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=11721060&&cid=62DC070579519371!130&encType=1

You­tube video of the run in 2006

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTHHgxFOD_g

I hope this doesn’t end in tears.