MMS 2006

Been a busy week or so with the preparations for heading out to San Diego to attend MMS 2006 (Microsoft Management Summit). I will be blogging some of thoughts and experiences from my travel to this, however due to the full schedule and exploring the little bit of San Diego that I can, do not expect a lot.

Monday Morning MMS 2006 Day -0

MMS has not officially opened yet; many people are traveling in from all parts of the country and the world. My flight is on Delta. We board the plane get settled in for a 4:05 flight, then starts to get warm in the airplane while pre-fight preparations are underway. The pilot comes on and tells us the AC is not on because the co-pilot found a fluid leak on the pre-flight walk through and that the maintenance crews were looking into it.

20 minutes and a few degrees later, they state they need to deplane us and move us to another flight. This is an inbound flight from Orlando and the same type of plane so all the seat assignments stay the same. They relayed word along that it was a cracked shut off valve, which caused the leak on the other plan.

1:20 minutes later we are airborne and traveling backward in time (I gain three hours here – Yay!) We arrive in San Diego only an hour 1:10 off the mark, not too bad. A friend of mine was on the earlier delta flight to San Diego and he stated they also needed to switch planes due to maintenance issues and they were an hour delayed or so.

A couple of sessions were scheduled on this day, but the summit does not officially open until 6PM with the opening session of the expo. This is a nice change from some of the other sessions as it contained an open bar and a LOT of food.

We managed to catch up with Dave Jaffe and grab some passes to the MyItForum part that SMSExpert is hosting again this year for Wednesday, that mission accomplished we just hovered through the expo gathering swag and drinking.

Not much else happened this day.

Pickled Beer!?

I was searching online for the shelf life of sour kraut this evening and stumbled upon a small nugget of information. Sometime the side trails in the search for information can be interesting.

Flemish Sour
AleFlemish Sour Ale is a style of beer made in Flanders that, while a small niche today, probably represents the bulk of European brewing from 1500 to 1800. It is 5-8% alcohol, sour and sweet, with little to no bitterness and hop aroma and a very complex bouquet.

Pickled Beer: Tandem Fermentation of Flemish Sour Ale

Mad Davy Flint

My pirate name is:

Mad Davy Flint

Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Computing in the year 2020

I am finally getting off my duff and researching a bit more. I've been stagnated in the here and now or in gaming worlds such that I have not been looking ahead enough. So while I play catch-up on some of the possible future directions our technology and society will run I will drop a few links here over the next few days, weeks, or months.

We all know the Giant Microsoft for what it is today and the recent past, but what about tomorrow? Microsoft has a large amount of highly skilled and intelligent people on its payroll, what are they working on when looking beyond the next product releases (Vista, Office 12, etc.)

In the summer of 2005, an international expert group was brought together for a workshop to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years.
The resulting document, Towards 2020 Science, sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements necessary to accelerate scientific advances –particularly those driven by computational sciences and the 'new kinds' of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials, chemistry and physics.

Microsoft like Google labs and other R&D outfits at companies have some interesting stuff in the works; some of it immediately practical others very long running in viewpoint (Like Quantum Software, not to be confused with software by the current company named Quantum today). You can check out more of Microsoft's publicly released initatives here