[Note: This one's filed under "Personal" - I did this because it's a collection of some thoughts that I've had during my MS assimilation, and not necessarily something most people are going to find especially interesting. That said, I've still tried to make it somewhat entertaining - when I come back to read it in a few years, I don't want to bore myself.]

I was in Tacoma yesterday to do an MSDN event. Because the drive from Portland is about 2.5 hours, I opted to stay near the venue last night, renting a hotel room at a Shilo Inn.

One of the nicest things about Shilo Inn is that they guarantee that no more than 50% of your towels will have other people's blood on them. Sometimes people make mistakes, which is probably why three of my four hotel supplied towels were stained with the crimson essence of others, but I'd like to think that this was an isolated incident, and that somewhere else in the hotel a family was happy to find only one blood stained towel in their lot. These things happen, you know? Ha ha. 

Another thing to note when renting a room at a Shilo Inn is that "internet access" means "there's probably someplace within driving distance of the hotel where you can get net access, like somebody's house, or maybe a downed telephone line you could hook your computer up to." It does not mean "we provide internet access" as is usually the case when hotels advertise "internet access" as a room feature. Microsoft, for example, provides "free soft drinks" to its employees. This actually means free soft drinks (without quotes). This does not mean handing out small firearms with which to hold up nearby convenience stores in order to acquire beverages without paying for them. Always read the fine print.

Anyway, the result of the Shilo Inn's kick ass internet access was a night spent without spam, without slashdot, and without blogs. I didn't realize how long it had been since I'd gone without net access until I woke up at about 3:00 AM following a bizarre dream. I can't remember most of it, but I do remember that, at one point in the dream, I disconnected from the internet and was surprised to find that it was possible. I even remember saying, "You mean you can shut this thing off?" It's strange to think how much my life depends on being connected to other people's computers right now. Somebody really needs to come out with a patch that I can slap on my back for long flights, or the occasional stay at hotels run by liars.

It wasn't much of a loss, though. Being without the internet meant that I finally had some free time to sit around and get to know myself again - engage in some nice introspective thinking, and refamiliarize myself with me. You know - catch up on lost time, talk about the weather with me over a cup of coffee, and just generally see what I've been up to lately.

When that got scary, I stopped and popped open my laptop to study for the event. This quarter, we're covering InfoPath, building custom controls with ASP.NET, and some of the slick new goodness in ASP.NET 2.0. Surprisingly, the most interesting part of the talk for me is probably the InfoPath stuff - I didn't know much about it before. I knew it existed, but I hadn't ever tried to do anything with it. Turns out that Don's enthusiasm is not unfounded. I'm hardly an InfoPath expert, and really consider myself to be a bit of a n0ob, but I wish I had known more about it back when I was a consultant because it would have made some of my customers very happy (and, in turn, would have made me happy).

It also happened to be my first "solo" talk. I put solo in quotes because Bill Steele was there with me during part of the InfoPath talk. I didn't know about Bill until I worked with him in Kentucky and Ohio last week, and he's is seriously one impressive SOB. When he's not giving MSDN events in his own district, he's writing some of the coolest .NET software you'll ever see, and giving talks to NASA staff on some .NET software he's written for what we could quite appropriately call a vertical industry. I don't want to go into any detail about his work right now, but I'll tell you this much: The next time some .NET hating zealot comes along and says, "OK - you like .NET, but nobody's really using it," you can point up at some man made winged thing in the sky and say, "Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. SmaryPants, some people are currently trusting their lives to it..."

When Bill starts talking publicly about what he's been working on, you can rest assured I'll link to it here. I really want to talk about it, but it's Bill's project, and I don't want to scoop it. There isn't any NDA weirdness going here, and he even said I could write about it, but you'll understand the secrecy when he comes out and chats about it himself. It's that cool.

Also present at the talk were Jim Blizzard (my first MS homie (he's the one who convinced me that MS was in no way evil)), and my boss, Paul Murphy. After the talk, we went out and had a nice little chat about the things I did right, and, of course, the things I did wrong.

Turns out I did quite a few things wrong, but nothing that can't be repaired. The one great thing I took away from the talk is that, although the topics we're presenting on are mandatory, the slide decks and demo scripts we're given become "ours" once we've received them. What this means is that I can go through and totally gut a presentation, removing anything that I think is marketing fluff, and replacing it with what, as a developer, I think is really important to communicate. I wish I had known that last week, but better late than never.

Speaking of which, I have some slide decks to massacre right now. I'll be checking back in periodically, but I'm guessing that my first couple months at Microsoft are going to be a very busy time during which I won't have as much blogging bandwidth as I used to have.

Then again, of course, I could be wrong...