MEDC 2007, the trip to NZ, if it can go wrong, it will...

Today (May 17th) we (that's Don Kerr, Rob Tiffany, Derek Snyder, and I) had an 8:30am flight from Sydney to Christchurch/NZ for the mini-MEDC event - since this is an international flight we arranged to be at the airport by 7:00am - It was a little foggy in Sydney this morning, which meant massive disruption to the inbound and outbound flights. Our 8:30am flight was pushed out multiple times and finally didn't leave until 12:30pm, a full four hours later than expected - it's a three hour flight to Christchurch and a two hour time difference, which gets us into ChCh at 5:30pm - interestingly, the mini-MEDC kicked off at 4:30pm, so the speakers for the event were going to be a little late!

So, how do you pass the time at the airport while waiting for your delayed flight ? - simple, discuss (at length) the difference in UK/Australian and American English, for example the difference in "Zee" verses "Zed" - look, it's a "zeebra", in the "Zoo".

We had a good turnout for the mini-MEDC having a room full of attendees at the Christchurch convention center (thanks for waiting folks!).

We decided that the presenters should dress in something appropriate for the local audience, so decided to wear something to cheer on the local soccer team, the All Blacks. Here's the presentation team (left to right), Rob Tiffany, Derek Snyder, and me! - do you notice that Rob's shirt says "All Black" and Derek's and my shirt says "All Blacks", I wonder what the difference is... 

The evening was split into two sections, one covering Windows Embedded (.NET Micro Framework, CE 6.0, Windows XP Embedded, and Robotics Studio), and the second session covering Windows Mobile (Derek and Rob). If you attended the meeting and have questions then do let me know!

Tomorrow we have a number of customer meetings, then on Saturday morning we're heading back to Seattle - this has been an amazing week, we've been slammed solid with events and meetings, quite tiring, but interesting at the same time.

One of the areas of feedback from Sydney and from NZ is that developers want to hear more about our products, and that regular webcasts on a range of technology topics would be useful - let me know what you would like to find out about and I will see if we can get some webcasts kicked off.

- Mike