The American

7.5 / 10

George Clooney as an ageing hit man hiding out in a small Italian town.  A dreamy storyline, not as much action as one might expect based on the marketing.  Beautiful cinematography.

Sebastian Vettel wins historic Formula 1 World Championship

@AussieGrit Mark Webber finishes in third place for the year.

I had to go on media blackout yesterday afternoon, having foolishly booked my Berlin to London flight in the middle of the Formula 1 finale in Abu Dhabi.

BBC iPlayer to the rescue.  The entire 3hr 15min BBC broadcast was available as a stream when I got home.  The BBC coverage of the Formula 1 World Championship has been absolutely awesome this year.  Big congrats to the team that put it together.

I was fortunate enough to be at Silverstone in July when Mark Webber won the British grand prix.  He raced very well this year, taking home 4 wins, and he led the championship for a fair portion of the year.  All the leading drivers made a few errors and had some technical troubles this year.  As a result, there wasn't a single stand out driver.  Going into the final race - there were still four drivers mathematically in with a chance of winning the championship, so different to the early 2000s when Michael Schumacher absolutely dominated the sport.

Mark Webber was in second place in the championship leading up to Abu Dhabi, but didn't have the pace on the final weekend.  To win the championship Fernando Alonso had to keep the pace with Mark Webber, and finish in at least fourth place if pole-sitter Sebastian Vettel came through with the win on the day.  Sebastian Vettel drove a perfect race in Abu Dhabi, Mark Webber made a pit-stop at the wrong time which cost him several places, Fernando Alonso followed Mark Webber's pit-stop strategy and they both ended up way back in the field, effectively handing the championship to Vettel!  At 23 y.o. Vettel is now the youngest world champion in Formula 1 history.

Disappointing for Aussie Mark Webber, but a fantastic season nonetheless.  Bring on 2011 !!

A few thoughts and observations from Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010

I've just taken a week out of my current contract with an investment bank for a bit of a technology refresh at the Microsoft TechEd Europe conference.

Six thousand techies (about 98% male!) descended on the Messe Berlin for a full week of presentations, hands-on-labs, a vendor showcase, and lots and lots of coffee.

Microsoft divide their "technical" audience into "IT Professionals" (i.e. people that manage infrastructure and keeps systems running) and "Developers" (i.e. people that build new applications). Lots of presentations at TechEd start with a few questions for the audience - "Which of you out there are the IT Pros? Ok, and how about the Devs?" I don't put my hand up for either. So why would I go to TechEd?

I haven't really written much on my blog in recent years about what I actually do for a living, other than the tagline "crossing the chasm between business and IT". I've spent the best part of the last three years doing "solution architecture" within financial services organisations. This essentially means recommending which technology combinations to use to help solve business problems. This requires good business analysis skills and a broad understanding of the capabilities of particular technologies and the skills that are available within the organisational context to leverage those technologies. It also involves a bit of politics, but we'll save that commentary for a separate blog post some other time.

My current contract has been heavily focused on the business analysis end of the spectrum. With significant changes afoot in the technology industry, and with my legacy as a Microsoft consultant earlier this decade, I thought it wise to spend some time getting a better understanding of what's going on in the IT industry today and what's coming up in the next few years on the Microsoft technology front.

The big theme for the conference (and indeed for most technology conferences at the moment) was "the cloud" - Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This is all about replacing as much of the technology (and the roles to support technology) as possible in corporate servers rooms and data centres with commodity services delivered via massive data centres managed by the big technology companies. In essence, the future is about renting your software, platforms, and servers on an as-needed basis.

While this is all good news from an economics point of view, it will have a significant impact on the people that work in the technology industry. If you are an infrastructure person (and this includes the application server admins out there), and you want to remain an infrastructure person, you'll eventually be working for one of a dozen or so big infrastructure companies, most probably in a (relatively) low cost employment location. I think almost all the corporate IT Pro jobs and small business "IT guy" jobs will disappear very quickly over the next ten years.

These IT Pro jobs will be replaced, to some extent, by data analysis and financial analysis jobs - monitoring the performance and cost effectiveness of infrastructure, platforms, and apps in the cloud, and making financially justified decisions on whether to ramp up or ramp down the service offerings that your organisation subscribes to. Get out your spreadsheets ladies and gentlemen - we're all about to become Excel experts!

Note: Mostly for personal reference, I've created basic back-dated blog posts for some of the key break-out sessions that I attended at TechEd Europe, but if you want to ask me about specific topics or sessions that I attending please email me or contact me on twitter @adrianhind.  Despite the hype around the cloud, I predominantly attended sessions related to methodologies (agile, scrum, etc), application platforms (SharePoint, Azure), and business intelligence.

TEE10 Highlights: Giorgio Sardo - "HTML5 and Internet Explorer 9 Demo Fest"

Giorgio Sardo (Microsoft), Senior Technical Evangelist. Blog.

Go to http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive, download the latest Internet Explorer 9 Preview, and then check out some of the HTML5 samples linked from Giorgio's blog. Awesome!

I particularly like Never Mind the Bullets.

TEE10 Highlights: Chris Mayo - "How to Customize SharePoint Online for Your Environment Using SharePoint Designer 2010"

Chris Mayo (Microsoft), Technical Specialist, SharePoint Online. Blog.

A very good overview of Office365 and SharePoint Online - Microsoft's emerging Office/SharePoint software-as-a-service product offerings for the cloud.

I'll seriously consider using Office365 for my Microsoft Office licensing for my limited company as soon as it goes into general release. Check it out and sign up for the Beta!

TEE10 Highlights: Rafal Lukawiecki - "Analysis with Microsoft PowerPivot"

An enthusiastic overview from Rafal Lukawiecki and some great demos of the new PowerPivot functionality for Microsoft Office Excel 2010. This is incredible technology, allowing end users to store millions of rows of data in memory in Excel and perform extremely fast data analysis tasks. Definitely worth skilling up on this one.

Welcome to "the twitter" @rafaldotnet.

TEE10 Highlights: Aaron Bjork and Peter Provost - "An Agile Talk on Agility"

Aaron Bjork (Microsoft), Program Manager on Team Foundation Server. Blog.

Peter Provost (Microsoft), Program Manager on Visual Studio. Blog.

Agenda for a one hour presentation:

Introduction

4 x 10-minute Sprints (2 mins planning, 8 mins work)

1 x 10-minute Retrospective

Topics: Well ... we'll see what's on the requirements backlog and prioritise at the start of each sprint ;-)

TEE10 Highlights: Sander Hoogendoorn - "How Frameworks Can Kill Your Projects, And Patterns to help you avoid getting Killed

Slide deck available on Sander's blog post.

Twitter: @aahoogendoorn

Dinner at Vapiano, Berlin

[  ... and again on Thursday 11th November ;-)   ]

TEE10 Highlights: Tim Huckaby - "Using Natural User Interface (NUI) Technologies to Improve User Experience"

Tim Huckaby, Founder, Interknowlogy.  Blog.

A great overview of some of the very cool apps that have been built for the medical and gaming industries using the Microsoft Surface in the past couple of years, and some insights into neural- and gesture- interfaces for apps in the near future.

TEE10 Highlights: Stephen Forte and Joel Semeniuk - "Scrum, but"

A very entertaining, insightful, and interactive presentation from Stephen Forte (@worksonmypc) and Joel Semeniuk (@Joel_Semeniuk) from Telerik on how the Scrum development methodology is adapted for different organisational environments.

On board the Stena Line

On board the Stena Line
Originally uploaded by adrianhind

Stuff flying! This is the way to travel to Europe.
7:16pm train from London to Harwich, walk straight onto the massive Stena Line for a comfortable overnight journey to Hook of Holland, then get a connecting train to anywhere in Holland, all for only £65.