On Friday, we journeyed to Aberystwyth for the Inspiration Tour!  The lecture hall was quite impressive, and the lecturer Sandy Spence kindly guided us into our parking space so we were able to get set up very quickly.  It was a tiring day, as we were up at the crack of dawn to do the 4 hour drive to Wales, then followed it up by doing a 3 hour presentation to the students!

 

After a good meal and a long sleep, Ed and I went to the university again to do another talk, this time a 20 minute one to the prospective students on why Aberystwyth is a good place to study, and what kind of links the university has with Microsoft.

 

Both events went very smoothly, and we were home by Saturday afternoon so we got to spend some weekend time with our families!

 

   

  

Somehow during this week, Ed and I both found ourselves helping out at Game City in Nottingham!  The event was very well put-together, and we got the chance to meet some really interesting people.  The Free Play Lounge was a lot of fun, especially because I was the one handing out the tokens for the free drinks!

 

Ed and I both got to help Paul Foster video some cool stuff there - I'll post a link to that when it's been uploaded!

 

  

Finished Hull, and then off to Essex!  We stopped over night in Essex as we drove from Hull to Essex in the same day! (So much driving, this week we'll be covering more than 1000 miles!)  When we arrived at Essex, we struggled slightly to locate the lecture theatre that had been arranged due to the lecturer that we arranged it with being absent.  That said, the MSP for Essex (Gavin Carpenter) was on hand to help us find the theatre and carry the gear, so once we'd located him, everything went swimmingly!

 

People seemed quite interested in XNA, and there were a lot of questions regarding Xbox 360 deployment, as well as an interest in Embedded technologies, where I was asked to demo application deployment to the HTC Touch that we had on display.

 

Gavin also went the extra mile, and had organised pizza and beer for the attendees, who seemed very happy to discover this arrangement!

 

        

This week, the Inspiration Tour went to Hull! We met Rob Miles around lunch time, and he took us to the lecture theatre we'd be presenting in.  This theatre was very unusual, in that as well as being one of the larger venues, you also had to tilt your head right back to be able to see the people sitting on the back row - it was that steep!

 

The presentation went smoothly, although it was very cold in the theatre; I might even take a jumper next time I visit!

 

Rob snapped loads of good photos for us as well, which was difficult given the steepness of the theatre!  You can visit the Rob Miles website for his opinion of the Inspiration Tour.

 

     

This week, we took the Inspiration Tour to Bradford!  The University lecture theatre we were supplied with was the most amazing yet, a 400-people seater with three projectors and a stack load of AV equipment!

 

The staff were very helpful in setting up (this can often be difficult because we're not able to accomodate for all the different university set-ups!) and we managed to get presenting very quickly!  The crowd seemed pretty happy with the presentations and demos, and we got a few laughs at our XNA content!

 

A couple of people stopped by to ask more questions at the end of the show, which was cool as some of the questions were quite challenging to answer!

 

 

Just got back from the offsite (currently staying in Leicester as I'm off to Bradford University for the Inspiration Tour tomorrow) and I have to say, I really enjoyed it!  I met a load of people in DPE that I haven't come across before, and got to know others who I've seen around but not really spoken to!  We got to make fun videos about what we thought DPE was, and I was lucky enough to end up in a group with a bunch of like-minded people who all shared similar views.

 

Of course, a Microsoft Offsite wouldn't be a proper offsite without drinks and socialising, which is coincidentally what we ended up doing on Monday night!

 

The food was great, accomodation was good, and finding the place was a relatively painless experience (I know how difficult this can be, as the Inspiration Tour has proved!) so all in all, a great couple of days away from the office!

This week Staffordshire University got the Inspiration Tour treatment!  The turn-out was fantastic, and the event went pretty well!  Students there seemed interested in what we had to say, and we even managed to get a few laughs with my dreadful Xbox 360 game-playing!

 

It seemed that quite a number of the students present were Linux users, but something I will certainly take away from the event is that we managed to convert some people from Linux to Microsoft!  If you are one of those people and you want your name credited on this blog (you lucky people!!) then let me know, or if you'd like to find out more, then leave me a comment!

 

A few people came to chat to us at the end as well, anyone who did this (or even if you didn't!) feel free to post comments or questions on this blog and I will get back to you!

 

[dodgy IT picture 002 coming soon!]

Ed and I did the first Inspiration Tour visit to Manchester Metropolitan University yesterday!  Despite the University projector failing, we managed to pull together our resources and run a lab-session type presentation, where we split the group up and showed them the technologies we would have demoed on the big-screen!

 

The students had lots of good questions for us, and we did our best to answer them, but if any of those students are reading this (or any other students for that matter) and they still have un-answered questions, comment this blog entry and I will reply!