Etienne's VSTS World

11:41 (Cairo Time) Day 47 -- …

Good night ;-)

ET

17:30 (Cairo Time) Day 47 – So Aaron started blogging here on GWB and just show you what we went to see last night here. you can go here to view more. There is only one word to describe the pyramids... Grandiose!

I wish you were here…

Egypt is …. Special!... and hot, did I mention that before ;-) 

Here is a glimpse..

Cheers,

ET

12:30 am (Cairo Time) Day 46 – Cairo is big, hot, alive, crazy, foreign and friendly… Our first real day in Cairo was all that, we started off going to our offices in Cairo to meet the folks we are going to talk to for the next three days, thank god we have a driver provided to us by the company, I would not drive in Cairo! The is no such thing as a line in the street here, no traffic light (not that they would stop…;-)) and cars, cars, cars, well did I say cars, I meant to say lots of cars! And buses, an people, that’s right people crossing the street in the middle of traffic, and no one is stopping, they just have to weave through it (back to this a little later), people get out of buses in the middle of the road and then proceed to the curb, people start from the curb and jump on a moving bus in the middle of the road! Crazy I tell you. I would not drive here period. Cairo is big, 453 sq km (more than 175 sq mi), 16 million people (I think even more now that is the 1998 census value), very alive lots of people everywhere and the fact that most of them don’t talk anything but Arab it’s pretty foreign to us. So after a stop at the office we decided to go the Egyptian museum, let me tell you, this is an impressive place, lots of antiquities there, sarcophagus, mummies, papyri, King Tut’s tomb content as well as Ramses II sarcophagus. It’s an impressive collection and the biggest one in the world. The museum is too big to see all in one day so we will probably go another day to finish it. We hired a guide to explain the thing in the Museum she was very nice and was a Doctor in ancient Egypt so she knew a lot and gave us a lot of very good explanation on the various things in the museum. We then when to a papyri vendor across from the museum, so in order to get there guess what, we had to cross the street, you remember Frogger, well let me tell you I thing the frog had it easy compared to crossing the street in Cairo ;-) you need skill to cross that road, if you think Sandman was out of his comfort zone when we were driving in the British country side, well here he was outright not in it at all!! Even Aaron was not feeling good about crossing, living in Montreal, you learn to cross the street when it’s convenient so I was feeling ok about this task but still a little concerned, since I am writing to you now, you can surmise that we made there and back in one piece and we got some really cool papyri. One of the last judgment, one of Cleopatra and one Osiris for me I’ll take pictures and add to the blog entry when I get home to show you. They are authentic (as far as we can tell) and change color when held in different light and angle (very cool) because of the paint that is used to create them. As we were making our way to the front of the museum to catch our ride back to the hotel we were attacked by a prong of fake papyri peddlers. I have rarely felt myself pressured in my life but let me tell you, those guys tried for at least 10 min even after we were in our car to sell us papyri. 5 for 20 EGP, 6 no 7 for 10 EGP, 10 no 12 for 15 EGP… you see the picture well let me tell you we were glad the driver shoood then off and we got back to the hotel. Tomorrow (well this morning) is our Day 1 and will go from there. I will post picture when we have some (most of them are from moving cars since we have gone from hotel of destination and back for the last 48h). We are planning to go see a sound and light show later in the week and maybe go see the great library of Alexandria (2h away) on Saturday I’ll keep you posted.

Signing out for now… good night

Cheers,

ET

23:55 (Cairo time) Day 49 – We have left the relative cold of Wales (18C) to the scorching heat of Cairo (35C) man what a shock to start with. But let’s back up a few days, after our last talk in Swansea, I got to install a local TFS instance and found an interesting but I will talk about in the next post, after that was done, we got out and started our Wales sightseeing experience by going to Worms Head to have a pint and a sunset ;-). It’s quite a nice place and we watched the Brazilians win 4-1 against the Japanese. Got a few shots of the place too, I have a gallery of Wales here. Friday we had our only day off and went to visit two Castles, Kidwelly and Caerphilly. So how do 3 guys in a car go to these locations, well you whip out the GPS obviously, ahh ain’t technology great… when it work ;-). So Aaron’s device worked to get us the Kidwelly and we got to visit the castle. I was their (Aaron and Wayne’s) first castle so it was fun seeing them enjoy the sight for the first time. I have visited numerous castle both in England and in France and I truly like seeing them because the feeling you get when you’re inside is well hard to describe… the history, the fact people used the be living in there 1000 years ago… it’s hard to describe. So back to technology, as we are about to leave Kidwelly to go to Dinefwr (another castle we were supposed to go to) the GPS device buggered off, it wouldn’t work, So I said no problem I got my laptop in the back and started Vista… doh! I hadn’t install the GPS device, which we did and at least I had Mappoint Europe so we plotted to that castle, and off we went, while we are going, Aaron got the device to work again so we flipped back to that one, well he had plotted the wrong location and GPS Lady (the voice in the GPS) brought us right there, using the fastest possible way, literally… see here, let me tell you sandman was not in his comfort zone… ;-). I have done a similar trek with my good mate Steve last year and let me tell you, you hope no one else is coming the other way because there is no real place to move to the side. So after the off road trek, we ended up in a village way off of our intended destination. Instead of going back to see Dinefwr, we proceeded to Caerphilly and spent around 1.5h wandering the castle. The two castle were very similar and we had a great time. We then drove back to Swansea to relax a bit since our plane was at 6:20am the next day and we had a 3h drive back to Heathrow to take the plane and we need to be 3h in advance because of the international flight (isn’t everything out of Heathrow and international flight ;-)). Off we went at midnight to leave for Cairo… Next part Egypt.

All and all a great sojourn into the United Kingdom!

Cheers,

ET

23:00 GMT – Day 45, We have been in Swansea Wales (in the UK) for the last 3 days, The training as gone well again most people are excited about VSTS and can’t wait to be using it. We find interesting deployment opportunities at every locations which makes those trips important for us.

Swansea is by the sea, it’s a small but lovely town. We really haven’t much time to wander around being in meetings all days long. We will have a few day Friday and Saturday morning so we’ll make the best of those days before leaving for Cairo. I actually have no pictures yet (eek!) but I’ll make up for it in the next post. The Brits are great and they are very excited that their team made second round at the World Cup (well the English are anyway). We ate Indian tonight and that was very good. The cost of living here in the UK is very high, but for some things it’s just weird for example, we bought a GSM pay as you go cell phone sim for 5 Bps (British Pound) which is about 10$ vs 25$ in the US, but we pay 1 Bps for a can a coke (2$) go figure…

The cell phone network here in the UK is great but the internet infrastructure sucks it’s the worst I’ve seen yet… well NZ and Argentina a close second ;-). I’m glad I live in North America for that.

I’ll be back soon with pictures and some site seeing comments.

Back to the future… I didn’t post anything about tech-ed since the blogosphere was filled with comments that week, but let me just state a few things, the Keynote was not very exiting except for the few odd moments and the “24” spoof called “4”. I went to Data dude sessions and some WinFX (woops .NET 3.0) sessions. Boy we have a lot of stuff to cram in our little brain in the next few months it’s going to be a interesting ride. The parties were nice the best one being the VSTS influencer one where I got to meet, chat and catch up with a lot of the product group guys. One of the best session was Joel Semeniuk’s BOF on managing project with VSTS (I think there was about 50 people in the small room) but we had a great discussion on the subject.

I was gripping a lot about the Embraer regional jet being small when I go the US from Montreal but I got the try a Bombardier Regional Jet to go to Boston and well it’s a very smalllllll plane I have new respect for the Embraer now ;-).

Well I’ll be back soon

Cheers,

ET

13:30 EST – Day 26, on the plane back home from Kokomo, it was a short trip, I left Monday and I’m already going back home.  There a was a welcome change of plan that happened yesterday, instead of going to Winnipeg next Monday we are pushing the date to July a week after we come back from India.  This will let me spend next week in Montreal, I have been away for the last 3 weeks and this will be great to spend time with my family before the going for another 4 weeks.  I should be able to attend the user group night to see Jerome talk so that will be fun.

So how was Kokomo, well it’s a small town (nobody knew the population ;-) cause none of them live in Kokomo, they all live around Indianapolis).  So you ask me what is there to see in Kokomo, well, hum.., err,… The stump and the steer.  So the stump is a big tree stump in a glass gazebo (where we can only see it from outside) that is a 200 year tree that supposedly represents the size of trees in Indiana at that time (or before).  It’s pretty big but a stump… anyway, the steer on the other hand is well, err, a big bull (without equipment), and it’s well big.  The steer, name appropriately Big Ben was said to be the biggest bull of its time weighing in at 4,500 pounds, I guess that’s big I would know I don’t know anything about bulls ;-).  So we also went to the Strawberry festival on Thursday and ate a large (notice how everything is big, large, etc in the US) bowl of strawberry shortcake (little cake, one pound of ice cream and a big scoop of strawberry) that was fun.  Oh and did I mention that it rained all week with some electrical storms to boot!

The sessions went well as usual our little trio is getting better and better at delivering the material.  Everyone again is can’t wait to use the tools. 

Interspersed between sessions on Tuesday I also delivered my first webcast, I just got the reviews now and I’m happy with them.  I didn’t think I did so well.  I may listen to myself again but in a few months now right now.

So there you have it, I have a week at home then off to Boston for Tech-ED (this will be great to meet the other MVP that will be present and chat with folks) to actually attend sessions instead of giving them.  This will be fun.  I’ll try to give my taught on that also in two weeks.  Then the amigos are off to the UK, Egypt, India and finally Winnipeg.

Stay tuned.

Cheers,

The Frenchman

Ps I don’t have any pictures to share of Kokomo… I know it’s a shame Camera Man didn’t rear its head in Kokomo.