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One Down, Two to Go!

  • Artigo

Greetings from Beijing! The first set of presentations in the Asia tour are done, and they're saying here that the event in Taipei as a whole was a HUGE success! We had more than 1000 attendees - way too many people for the small convention space at the bottom of the Westin, and I personally delivered a speech on Windows XP Embedded to more than a hundred people.

This is my first-ever business trip - I have never done anything like this before. First time presenting to a large group of people in a professional setting, too. I was pretty nervous right at first, but I actually managed to keep moving along throughout the presentation, and I think it actually came off quite well. I stumbled in a few places, of course, but for my first presentation, it went better than I expected it to.

I delivered three presentations, each with a brief demo that I basically ad-libbed on the spot. My first one, which immediately followed the keynote, was "Introduction to Windows XP Embedded", where I introduced the attendees to the product, explained the differences between it and Windows Mobile/CE, and then introduced them to the end-to-end process, the tools and the EEFs. It felt good to be able to say things like "And this is my favorite feature, Enhanced Write Filter". :)

The second presentation was on CMI Explorer - demonstrating how it can be used to automate your build scenarios and such. That one actually didn't go as well as I'd hoped, because during the demonstrations, I kept tripping over my variable names. (I picked a name like "MyConfig" and "MyInst" to distinguish between individual variables and the object types they were created from.) Still, I did manage to convey the material pretty well, and I had three different people come up after the presentation and ask me where they could download the updated version. (It hasn't been released yet, but it will be soon.)

The third presentation was on booting from CD - the ever-infamous El Torito component. This one went pretty short, and apparently down here in Asia, it's a major faux pas to have your presentations go short. I had 75 minutes to fill, and I only managed to fill about 35 minutes or so of that time. The El Torito presentation given in Las Vegas was done by one of our MVPs, and he'd spent some time introducing his company as well as the topic, so that would account for some of the difference in time. But it's just generally a short topic anyway - hard to add extra content to it, really. Thankfully, that was the only time on this trip that I'd have to present that topic.

Another noteworthy thing that happened here was that we were all invited to an executive lunch. Most of us got to stay through it - myself included, and I got to meet with the president of Chander Electronics and a VP from Advantech - both are major customers of Windows Embedded and suppliers for embedded devices in Taiwan, so it was very interesting meeting these fine gentlemen. I was the only American at my particular table, so I spent most of my time eating, listening to everyone else speak in Mandarin, and occasionally nodding and laughing along with the group. They were very nice, though, and they all spoke English when they talked to me. And Mr. Chen from Chander even gave me a brief lesson on how to hold my chopsticks - apparently I've been doing it wrong most of my life. :)

We flew out to Beijing yesterday morning and arrived at around 3pm local time - we had a connection in Seoul, South Korea. That was an interesting experience - as we were approaching Seoul, we flew right through a hail storm. It was very bumpy, and you could actually hear hail hitting the top of the plane. Weird...

We're staying at the Great Wall Sheraton in Beijing, and MEDC is already underway here. It's a two-day event in this place, and my single presentation (Intro to XPe) is tomorrow at 9am. So today, I spent my time catching up on some work, taking care of a few personal matters, and then I went to visit our Beijing Tester Team, whom we've been working with for quite some time now on testing features and bug fixes. They're a really cool bunch of people. I even wrote down an address in Mandarin today, and apparently my Chinese handwriting is good enough that the cabbies understood it perfectly. Awesome! :)

After tomorrow's event, we fly out to Kuala Lumpur for the final portion of the tour, which happens early next week. See ya then!

- Matt

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