Geeks on a plane

The first thing I noticed about the gentleman seated next to me on a recent flight from Charlotte to Atlanta was his music player. Not only was it not the usual "eye-pahd", it was actually the same type as mine - an iRiver. Smiling to myself that not everyone in the world is brainwashed by Apple, I sat back to enjoy the flight.

A little later I glanced over and noticed him reading a magazine. I thought to myself "hmm, that full page ad for developer tools looks familiar. Why, that's a copy of MSDN Magazine! My rowmate is reading MSDN Magazine! How cool. He's probably a developer. Here's my chance to recruit another attendee to MSDN Events."

Imagine my surprise when he responded that he actually wrote one of the articles in the issue! I told him I'd check it out and promote it if I thought it was good, so here you go: Check out David Banister's cool article on using regular expressions in SQL server. Some really good tips in there.

How serendipitous that we were seated together. We spent the rest of the flight talking about his project he's working on with help from Microsoft Premiere support in the Charlotte office, and I talked about the dev community and life as a Developer Evangelist.

So, David, thanks for the great conversation during our flight, and here's hoping I see you at the Atlanta launch event, or elsewhere around the dev community in Atlanta!

By the way, as I write this post I am again on an airplane, and grateful for having found a lot more about the ins and outs of selecting a primo seat courtesy of www.seatguru.com. Not only do I have enough room to open my laptop comfortably in this exit row seat, but the seat in front of me does not recline sparing me from the constant fear of my screen being crushed at any moment during the flight. I get a little grin every time I see the person in front of press that button and wiggle around trying to lean back into "my" space. Not today, lady! :)