With MEDC 2007 about to kick off officially tomorrow, my feelings of excitement are definitely increasing. Completely focused on rehearsing my session and preparing for some other events, my inspiration to write this column is sort of lacking. So I have decided to show you a sneak peek into my life during a conference week like this one. Right now jet lag is still bothering me a bit after arriving in the USA last Friday, but coping with a 9 hour time difference takes its toll I guess. Today I will fly from Phoenix to Las Vegas, a nice one hour flight to get settled in the Venetian this afternoon. Like last year, the Venetian is the MEDC 2007 conference place. Tonight there is hopefully an opportunity to meet a couple of people I have not seen in like a year. Then tomorrow I need to attend a couple of breakout sessions, those sessions that I will present at MEDC Europe later this year. Of course it is always good to hear the original speaker so I can hopefully say something useful about these sessions in Europe. Tomorrow night I have a tech check for my MEDC 2007 on asynchronous programming techniques that is scheduled for Wednesday 3.45 PM. All my spare time between now and Wednesday afternoon will of course be occupied by more rehearsals for the sessions. If you recall last week’s column, where I told you that I have way to much content for 75 minutes, you will realize that practicing to stay in time is going to be my major thing this year. I have limited a few demos typing as little code live on stage as possible and still have some hopefully convincing results. I guess only time (and of course evaluation scores) will tell. Usually after being done presenting, I get this nice relaxing feeling for the remainder of the conference. Probably things will be different this year though. On Thursday I will attend a few more sessions, but I also need to think ahead about next week. On Friday I will fly back from Las Vegas to Phoenix for the weekend in preparation for next week, which is going to be very full as well. I have a webcast scheduled for Wednesday May 9^th, talking about Device Emulator 2.0. Since this is a level 200 session I won’t show too much code, but it still needs some good preparation. On Thursday next week things are getting serious. On that day I have to dry run my Tech Ed session that is scheduled for June in Orlando. That session is only about 60% ready today, meaning I will need to work all weekend long on that session next weekend. Hopefully the entire slide deck for that session is done by Monday May 7^th. On Tuesday I will fly from Phoenix to Seattle and start rehearsing for the Webcast. On Wednesday afternoon preparations will start for the Tech Ed dry run. On Thursday afternoon the Tech Ed dry run is scheduled, so Thursday morning will be filled with more preparations and last minute demo changes for sure. Before flying back from Seattle to Phoenix I am sure that Thursday evening finally that relaxing feeling will hit me. Having dinner with a good friend in Redmond, I will finish eleven hopefully interesting but completely filled days. I hope you will understand that the chance for a column next week is about 0%, but I will try to blog some things from MEDC over the week.

Maarten Struys