Absolutely incredible trip thus far! It's been great meeting and hanging out with people in the Heartland District and I wanted to share the slide decks from my talks. At the Minneapolis BizTalk 2006 R2 launch I talked about BizTalk 2006 R2 and EDI, and BizTalk 2006 R2 and RFID. The decks can be found here. At the Heartland Developer Conference I had a packed house of over 100 people to learn about Practical Test Driven Development, and those slides can be found here. I hope I'm invited back to HDC next year, the difference between it and the (also fun) Tulsa TechFest was absolutely stunning. Very tight, 4 tracks, but great attendance at talks. Love it. Kudos to Joe and Phil.
Since Monday, October 8th 2007 the record industry has lost : Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai, and now the "Queen of Pop" Madonna. The Music Revolution is officially started. The recording industry had more than enough time to get their act together and give bands what they wanted, their unwillingness to change with the times is what has brought us to where we are. Much like other revolutions, a people can only be pushed so far before their comfort with their current circumstances overcomes their natural human aversion to radical change. But we should take a moment to recognize what will be recognized as where this started by history, Radiohead. Much will be made about Radiohead's announcement last week that they were ditching the record labels to go independent, and correlations to the historic battle of Lexington and Concord are inevitable (at least in the U.S.). The comparison is fair, as long as you realize that even in the American Revolution many patriots fought the British well before Lexington and Concord. Likewise, many brave bands of lesser name have broken away, or just never started, with the recording industry. The key of the phrase "The shot heard 'round the world" is not shot, it's heard. The dominos are falling, and I predict you can expect the next steps to be more bands (obviously) followed by top Recording Industry executives beginning to parachute out to promotion firms like Live Media (who Madonna is using) and others.
Alright, so next week is shaping up a bunch of fun. I'm wrapping up a BizTalk 2006 R2/Visual Studio 2008 project this week and next week I'm headed to Minneapolis and Omaha for a couple of speaking engagements! Tuesday I'll be in Minneapolis, speaking at the BizTalk 2006 R2 launch event care of my employer Sogeti. I'll be speaking about RFID and EDI in two different sessions. By Thursday I have to make the run down to Omaha to speak at the Heartland Developer Conference where I'm stepping in to cover a Test Driven Development talk for a speaker who had to bow out at the last minute. I fly in to Minneapolis on Monday, out on Saturday, and so this a call out to anyone in that area to see if we want to get something together. Geek Dinner? Drinks at a pub? Pretty much anything. Of course, you can also touch base if you'd like to do something more productive. I'd be more than happy to do some visits to development shops, slip in an architectural or code review, talk to your team about BizTalk, C# 3.0, or pretty much anything. So let's hear it, Heartland District, shout out if you'd like to hook up.
