Conference Season Begins!!
It was hard. I had to change 6 values in a SQL table to turn off the blogging feature of the Pwop Publishing System (PPS)… (tm). The feeds put up a valiant fight, however, and it looked like they would never retreat, but as I lifted my rifle to my eye and watched the carnage as the last bit field was set to zero I thought to myself… “I’m takin’ this blog back, beyOTCH!!”
Now that the smoke has cleared a bit I am free to post. Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first, my recent trip to Europe for round one of conference season. SDN in Amsterdam, the Krakow .NET User Group in Poland, and DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Amsterdam
I arrived at SDN on Monday Morning, October 6th with not really anything to do except to get some interviews and have fun. By the way, what is the average interval of time that a traveler to a foreign country will wait with his or her hands under an automatic sink faucet before he or she realizes that it’s not working? The guy in the men’s room at SDN that day skewed the curve by waiting an epic 20 seconds with a pissed-off look on his face. WTF, dude, 20 seconds???
So after some obligatory how-do-you-dos I got right to my work and went to sleep. Jet-Lag. That’s the big story of my 4 days in Amsterdam. It took me until the last day to adjust. I blame the 2 year old sitting right behind me on the plane. You know, the minute I walked into Logan Airport in Boston I heard that little bastard crying. I said to myself, “just my luck that kid will be on my flight.” Not ONLY was he on my flight, he sat right behind me, wailing the entire time. Suck it up, kid! Life is hard!… I’m kidding, of course. I love children. All children. Except for that little crying bastard. I HATE him!
So after I woke up it was dinner time, and after that we adjourned to the bar, where I met up with most of the usual suspects. Miguel Castro, Beth Massi, Tim Huckaby, Stephen Forte, Remi Caron, Julie Lerman, Shawn Wildermuth, and a few others. Out came the microphones, and Miguel was my first victim. He told a story about his escapades in a bar in Amsterdam that I can’t repeat here, but it will come out on .NET Rocks! soon. Perhaps we’ll make the 400th show a compilation of all these otherwise unpublishable stories. Here’s a picture of me listening to Stephen Forte (who was with Miguel) tell the rest of this horrible story:
Tim Huckaby didn’t want to be interviewed directly, but instead asked if he could do a few interviews himself. Here he is interviewing Shawn Wildermuth about Silverlight 2 and WPF.
SDN, a non-profit developer user group in The Netherlands, is run by Remi Caron (see below).
He’s eating one of my home-made burgers. Well, it wasn’t just me. Steve Forte, Remi, and I spent all day Wednesday preparing the meal for the rest of the speakers and VIPs who went on a day-tour of Rotterdam. We started out in the kitchen at a restaurant that Remi “rented.” He ordered up a bunch of ribs and hamburger and we were able to chisel off some counter space and do our thing without bothering the chefs.
Remi made a marinade for the ribs and boiled them in a pot that was at least a meter tall and 2/3 of a meter wide. Forte and I chopped up some onions, and I carmelized them in butter and an absolute PILE of herbs, salt, and cracked pepper. Then we added the translucent onions to the beef, made up about 40 patties, and put them in the fridge.
We left the ribs boiling and went out for a long lunch in Amsterdam. Forte was complaining about the lameness of Dutch sandwiches, so Remi took us to a specialty sandwich shop where I got something like carpaccio, cheese, and sliced grapes pressed as a panini and drizzled with a fig reduction. The other sandwiches were equally awesome, and Steve was forced to take back his comments. I think he just hates the Dutch.
We went back to the restaurant and finished the prep work. We put the ribs in travel containers, cleaned up the dishes, gathered up some garnish (tomatoes, cheese, mayo, ketchup, etc.) in a big box, and drove to the place where dinner was being served, Papa’s Beachhouse.
This place was on a pond, and decorated with Hemingway memorabilia. Pretty cool. They had a nice kitchen where I set to the task of slicing the tomatoes and laying out the garnish platter. Here’s the kitchen:
And here’s what the serving table looked like before we started cooking the ribs and burgers:
The manager was very helpful. Here she is firing up the grill. The indoor grill.
When Steve and Remi started cooking the ribs, that’s when we realized that perhaps an indoor grill wasn’t the best idea.
There was so much smoke in the room, everyone cleared out. We had to coax them back in when it was ready to eat.
Of course, it was awesome. I don’t think Miguel had a very good day though. From what I understand he had a horrible hangover and spent most of the day green. on the boat. He was a bit woozy by the time he arrived at Papa’s.
It was a long day, but lots of fun. And the next morning I was off to Poland.
Krakow, Poland
So, a week and a half before my flight to Amsterdam, Tim Huckaby asked a bunch of us RDs if anyone wanted to come to Poland with him to present at a User Group there. Of course, I said yes! So bright and early Thursday morning I got on a plane from Amsterdam to Krakow. I met Tim in Warsaw (the second leg of my flight) where he was speaking at a big Microsoft conference.
After checking in at the Holiday Inn Krakow…
… we asked the kind lady behind the counter “Where can we get the best traditional Polish food?” and she sent us down the street where we saw lots of stores with this strange sign:
I think they were sex shops or something. I’m not really sure.
After a few minutes walk we ended up at this place:
Folwark. Great place. Good beer. Check out these ribs (do you see a pattern here?)
At the user group meeting, Tim and I started off the presentation like this:
And the reaction was naturally enthusiastic…
OK, so that wasn’t the group. Here they are, after learning that my and Tim’s bottles were filled with iced tea and water, respectively.
They didn’t think it was as funny as we did, apparently.
Tim did some great demos on Surface development and I did a demo where I played my piano through the Internet.
I play a few notes on a keyboard, capture the MIDI data with a component I wrote in VB.NET, send it over a UDP connection to a daemon running at my studio in Connecticut, which takes the MIDI bytes and sends them out a MIDI port to my Yamaha baby grand piano, which has a MIDI interface, and physically plays the notes – keys going up and down. The whole thing is captured on a webcam and we get to watch it right there in Poland just seconds after I play the notes on the keyboard.
This is a picture of me with the network guys trying to get Internet access on my laptop.
Yep. You got it. Didn’t work.
Once we got Internet access we couldn’t punch a hole in the firewall for UDP, so I was basically screwed. It’s a cool demo, and it actually did work in Bulgaria. 
This is Barbara, from the local Microsoft Office, and Szymon (pronounced shi-MOAN) who works in Poland for Tim, watching me crash and burn.
Actually, I must have done something funny because they seem to be enjoying themselves. Maybe this is where I dropped trou? I can’t remember.
As Tim did his demos I gave him some background music:
I think every presenter ought to have a guitar player do a little soundtrack while they’re speaking. It adds so much drama!
Special thanks to Tadeusz Golonka (pronounced jshzshzsh), our fellow Regional Director. Here he is posing with Tim. Tad Rocks!
Afterwards we went out to a nice dinner where I fell asleep.
I actually fell asleep writing an email. Right after I dumped my beer in Barbara’s lap. Sorry, Barbara. Big man tired. Do clumsy things.
The next day Tim and I went out and mingled with the locals, who look very strange to me.
OK, so that’s not fair. This guy was French.
Tim is Catholic, and was drawn to the Bazylika Mariacka, or “Basilica of Mary”, where Pope John Paul II was said to have preached often. Tim said if he didn’t go in here and take some pictures “The Queen will kill me” and The Queen ain’t his daughter. 
Hey, is that Sam Gentile?? Naw, couldn’t be. He was in Bulgaria, though, I swear he was.
According to this blog post, “It is said that two brothers worked on the basilica, each designing a tower. When the first noticed the construction of his brother became much more high and beautiful, he killed his competitor. Yet after he felt sorry and therefor threw himself from the highest of both towers.”
This place was beautiful, no doubt about it. Even an atheist would be impressed.
The ceiling was amazing. I set the timer and put the camera down on the floor looking up through a chandelier.
Looks like a spaceship landing.
Next we wandered out to the square and bought some doo-dahs from this nice lady
You can’t see it, but Tim is grabbing her ass. She seemed not to mind.
We spent some considerable time at the Czartoryskis Museum, which houses this portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci
Interestingly, they also had a bust of a girl I once knew
Next, Tim and I got a walking tour of Krakow, ending up here on Wawel Hill (pronounced VAH-vehl), the central fort and basilica in historic Krakow.
It was getting to be Golden Hour and the photo opportunity was awesome.
Heading back to the hotel I saw this, and thought… yeah, we have those back home too.
This trip ends with Tim, Szymon, and myself in a bar watching a Polish Jazz Band and drinking some of the strangest Vodka I’ve ever had. Tim and I stumbled back to the hotel at 3AM, with the understanding that we’d leave for the airport at 6AM. Somehow I got up at 5:30 and got ready. At 6:05 I called and woke up Tim, who uncharacteristically slept through his alarm.
We met shortly afterword down in the lobby. As we’re checking out, Tim mentions to me that he called the front desk for a wake up call but nobody answered. The stocky German manager screams “Zat is impossible!! I vas here all night!! You are an idiot!!!
We just barely made it to the plane.
Sofia, Bulgaria
The best thing about speaking at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria, is that I get to experience the hospitality of the folks from Telerik. From the moment I arrived I was taken care of.
I don’t have any photos of the live .NET Rocks! discussion we did on ASP.NET topics, but I do have this from the speaker’s lounge:
As I mentioned, I also did the remote piano demo here, and it worked! The wireless in the room was a bit shaky, but I did get it to work and the crowd seemed to like it. There’s nothing like playing a piano remotely thousands of miles away.
I’ve said it before, but the women in this part of the world are beautiful. The guys are schlubs like us, but the women are something else. Actually, the men have a strange feature. When they get really really drunk their eyes turn bright orange.
See for yourself about the women:
I blurred out the man in this photo, just so we wouldn’t have to look at him.
Tim, of course, was a wild man.
At one point I caught him making out with Nadia and snapped this photo:
I’m just kidding. He wasn’t making out with her. But it makes you wonder where his right hand is, doesn’t it?
This was the speaker party at a piano bar. They convinced me to play “Piano Man”
On the last day they took us to the village of Melnik, near the border of Greece, and home to one of the oldest monastaries in Bulgaria. I wish I had a picture of this, but while we were walking through the village, a beautiful woman (big surprise) leaned out of her second story window with only a towel wrapped around her to say something to our tour guide. She had a watch on the had that was holding up the towel. Forte yells out “someone ask her what time it is!”
After a tour of the winery, which included a nice sample, we sat down to lunch. This is what I had:
They eat a lot of meat in Bulgaria, actually. That must explain why everyone is physically fit. Not a lot of bread, no carby snacks, no desserts to speak of, and lots of meat and veggies.
After lunch, as we were leaving the restaurant, I spied this magazine in the lobby.
Hmmm… should we tell them? Naaaahh!