Its one of those days...

This friday was one of those days to remember...and forget..Having been invited to give a talk in a Microsoft seminar, I dared to buy myself a laptop (aka lappy) juz a day before. Ofcourse, finally I look like a proper IT professional (acc to Dinx) and I got myself a pretty high end one at that. 100GB HDD (well, only 93 GB is ther thanks to Dell), 1GB RAM, DVD R/W, 15.4" Widescreen n so on. Dont get shocked if I say this is the minimum config required to run a software (VS.Net 2005 and SQL Server 2005). I stayed up overnight and installed all these things feverishly, but when I finished I realised I was late and took a cab. Thats when everything started to go wrong....

My softwares juz dint wanna work! I begged, I pleaded, I banged it, I shouted at it, it just dint wanna work! I ran back to the office to install the old version of the softwares, but it said "No dude, once u r in 2005, dont think about 2003 :P". And then I decided to create a new partition to install the old one, but then Dell says "No pal, you dint pay us $10 more, so piss off! no control over your hard disk!" By now, I had lost all hope of enticing my audience to a treat of cool code and cool stuff. Its a joke that a lot of Microsoft guys think themselves as "cool", but then my demos really were, trust me ;) With a withered look, I did manage to scare off a few organisers by hinting about the problem. I wasnt feeling so pleased about it myself! Then finally the stage. The organizer herself was a cute lil babe, so I dare say that the way she was looking at me to do some magic on stage brought back a smile to my face.. (Disclaimer for J: The characters in this part of the episode are completely fictitious and does not bear resemblance to any person, dead or alive. Any such thoughts in your mind are purely coincidental). She was a pretty bad compere though, and I did think about how Princess might have done it.. I had a couple of my students and my friends hangin abt, so I had expectations to fulfill! Finally the d-time. I had to stand in front of 300+ professionals, ranging from 20 somethings to 60 somethings to people who were already zzzzzing after a nice lunch, so it was quite a challenge. With puls in my prayers and J in my heart, I began...

.nettttt isssss aaaaa veeery niceeeee plaaaaatforrrrrm...

Damn I never knew I could be so jittery. I tried to get my thoughts away from how I sucked (er...words in this case) but once in a while in the first half, I did realise I was having some trouble getting my words out properly. Then as it progressed I was getting better. It was quite a good experience. I even played with the people who were zzzzing, by raising my voice beyond the tolerant levels once in a while, at the excuse of emphasising a point, waking them up with the shock, only to see them slowly drift back. And a few guys were staring at me the whole time as if I was God (well, assumptions are nice once in a while :P). I really missed my "cool" demos, cos sometimes words are juz not enuf.

Thanks to an exhaustive presentation I had prepared, and to the screw ups by the guys before trying to demo some non-working code, I excused myself from having to demo much. So talk I did for majority of the next 1.5 hrs and I was pretty surprised by the applause I got at the end. Well, I couldnt help but think about the age old saying "When we clap, it means thanks for ending the crap!"

I did get some enthu guys n gals come to me at the end and talk to me about my topic (oh btw, it was .Net Security in Enterprise Web Applications). One guy was overly profusive in his admiration, which made me a bit uncomfy, but otherwise was quite good. Aah, at the end of it, the gleaming babe was jumpin about in her joy. I did get some compliments from some non-IT guys as well, so that means that I was not alone in having had no idea about what I was talking about!

So much for the saga, for which at the end, the Microsoft Regional Director presented me with ..guess what...two Microsoft .Net T-shirts :P Gosh, when will these guys really change? Anywayz, it had the words "Cool Developer." haha.

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