I'm Back

I'm back! Well, nearly.  I couldn't resist a pre flight blog post (that's my plane above) to get me back in the swing of things when I touch down in the UK in about 10 hours.  My business trip/holiday has been great.  I've been staying with family out here just south of San Jose and have been getting a healthy does of Golf, Sun, Sand and the rest of it. 

I also had the opportunity to visit the Microsoft offices at both Mountain View - in the heart of Silicon Valley and also San Francisco - very nice they were too.  Both had their charm - in Mountain View I particularly like the basketball court and sand volley ball court, whilst San Fran was right in the heart of the city and an elevator took you to the food court of a shopping center where you had a load of choice for lunch. 

Mix was fantastic and seeing the likes of Ozzie and Ballmer speak was a great experience - make sure you catch their keynotes on the replay at www.visitmix.com (click on Keynotes to filter quickly) - Ballmer is at his best, far better than I've seen at internal Microsoft conferences.

I bought myself a new digital camera whilst I was out here and I've been taking loads of panoramic photos which I can create easily in Live Photo Gallery.  There's a video here on how to create your own (hat tip to Steve). Steve's been posting his own - but I get the feeling my new ones from San Fran today trump him.  I might speak to the Live guys to see if we can't run a competition for the best Panoramic photos done in Live Photo Gallery - get some cool prizes on offer or something like that.

One of the other things I just came across was Channel 9 are rubbing shoulders with some pretty cool people these days too, check out what Ice Cube has to say about when music meets technology - namely Silverlight and Zune.

March holds forth lots of events and travelling round the country to talk to partners about Windows Server 2008, Vista etc with me going off to Exeter when I hit the tarmac - let's see how I do with jetlag!!!

See you back in the UK!

JS