Tuesday, June 24, 2003

'as-salâmu alaykum   Just about to leave for the airport and fly to Rome, then backtrack to Tunis. Away from New York for 2 weeks (As much as I love it here, I could use a break from the constant rain anyway). I will be presenting at the North African Developers Conference in Tunis later this week from June 26-28. This is my third time to Africa in the last 28 months and the second time this year.  I am so unprepared from a travel standpoint: I have no local currency and don’t know if I have the correct power adapters. But it will all work out due to technology. Compare this to foreign travel 15 years ago without ATMs, GSM cell phones and high-speed internet at your hotel.   After the conference, I will also have a free day to go and see the historic Carthage (I plan on dragging Clemens and Malek with me), sure sure it was raped and pillaged by the Romans two thousand years ago and there is nothing there, but I am the History buff so there.  Then on Sunday I fly off to Barcelona and then judge the Imagine Cup and speak at TechED Europe (July 1-July 4).   The hotel in Tunisia looks nice, I just hope that I can find the time to ride my bike, but it looks like swimming in the Med won’t be a problem. Can’t wait to catch up with my fellow Microsoft Regional Directors that are speaking there, off the top of my head the other RDs that are speaking in Tunis are:   Clemens Vasters (Germany) Andrew Brust (USA) Goksin Bakir   (Turkey) Sylvain Duford (Canada) Yann Faure (France) Abdelmalek Kemmou (Morocco) Mathieu Plasse (France) Selcuk Uzun (Turkey)   In Tunis I will be presenting (with the help of an Arabic translator): June 26th from 11:00-12:00: Using SQL Server CE & SDE to build enterprise solutions June 26th from 4:00-5:00: Using Regular Expressions in Windows Forms & ASP.NET (Code and Slide Download) June 27th from 11:00-12:00: Asp .Net DataGrid Drill Down (Code and Slide Download) Ok, first of all, I talk fast and my French sucks (actually I think my Arabic may be better. 'ismî stephen, 'anâ sâ'ih. wa-mâ 'uhibbu 'akthar huwa 'ash-shacri l-'ashqar maca l-hawâjibi s-sawda'). That is gonna be bad for the translator. Second, the sessions are only 1 hour long and I have the standard 75 minutes of material. Stay tuned to see how it turned out! Either way, the sessions are going to be lots of fun and we will geek out at lot. See you all in Africa…. 6:07:23 AM

New York State Regents Exams   Every year in New York State, High School students take a state-wide exam called the Regents in various topics. My mom and dad were high school Social Studies teachers. I have an advanced degree in History and Political Science. Needless to say that we are into this stuff a little. (Much to the disdain of my older Sister.)   So each year we have a strange tradition, my dad brings home the Regents exam after it is given and we take it on the dining room table. It is a little competition each year. (Bonus year was 1994 when I taught Summer School at Prep and we got to take two exams that summer, I think even Jack took part in that year’s silliness.) We take the sophomore Global Studies and the Junior American Government, 50 questions each. Out of 100, the competition this year came down to:   Stephen 100 Dad 99 Mom 97   Not too shabby. Maybe if this computer thing doesn’t work out, I can teach High School Social Studies! 6:01:39 AM

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