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Letter from America 2

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I've had a really hard time with my iPaq today.  First thing this morning I couldn't get it to connect to anything.  For ages I poked about - everything looked fine.  Then eventually I found, in the asset viewer, that I had no IP address.  I Poke about some more but to no avail, then decided to reset the machine; well that did the trick

Then I set about creating a blog post, again from my iPaq, while sitting inside a session room here at the conference.  After what must have been a total of around two hours of tapping time, on and off, at the little on-screen keyboard, I decided to post my blog.  I turned the wireles back on and pushed post - nothing appeared to happen.  After what I now think was probably a simple case of  impatience, I started tapping around to see if I could somehow coax the thing to work and, to keep this story short, I managed to loose all my work!

So now I have resorted to a terminal to publish this post.  I'm really annoyed as I had carefully typed some usefull stuff and now I'm in something of a hurry I don't have the time to retrieve all the contents from my own memory; I have to get into town to join my team for an evening meal.  However I do have time to leave you with the one, bizzare and most notable event, that's occured since my last post.

The last session I attended yesterday was on SQL Server Integration Services.  For some reason I decided to sit on the front row, something I never normally do and something I don't intend ever doing again.  The speaker was the lead developer for Integration Services, Ashivini ?????, I can't remember his second name right now.  After about 10 minutes into his presentation he looked across at me and then just stopped speaking.  Feeling jet lagged and conference fatigued, a sense of strange unease came over me.  I hadn't been following his words closely over the last couple of minutes and so now I tried to rewind his words in an attempt to find a clue to the pause and his examining stare. Then he suddenly said something along the lines of, "Are you John Mac Enroe... well you look just like him, I really thought you were John Mac Enroe."  Naturally the audience erupted into raptuous laughter.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2005
    That'll be Ashvini Sharma (http://blogs.msdn.com/ashvinis/archive/2005/07/28/444703.aspx)

    I'm sure he'd be amused to read this :)

    -Jamie
  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2005
    I think Ashvini Sharma is the guy you're talking about. His blog is at: http://www.sqljunkies.com/WebLog/ashvinis/default.aspx
  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2005
    Yes, it was me. Sorry, Mat!

    Didn't mean to put you on the spot, but, man! I've never had that experience before, first time for everything!
  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2005
    No problems Ashvini. If I had been quick enough, I should have said something along the lines of "You can't be serious!".

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Mat, does this mean that you are available for tennis / anger management lessons?
  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    No - but I will consider opening shopping centres etc, for a fee of course