Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

Well I did have this really nice 2000 word blog entry to go up but I pressed ALT+HOME instead of CTRL+HOME by accident and lost the entire thing so instead I'll just say that this is the last entry for me in 2003 and to be sure and look for a nice big one come the 9th of January when I'm settled in at home again. Till then, Happy New Year everyone!

Mack D. Male a nice guy from Canada has launched AcademicLonghorn.com. I'm really excited to see it up and running!

It now joins the UCLA Passion site and the Microsoft Student Partners. Dom, Mark and I are all hoping and counting each site as they pop up. I think I can safely say we'll be seeing a site run by Oxford University soon as well as another portal for the Society of Women Engineers over at UCLA as well.

I also wanted to say Mack did a class job on the graphics for his site. While not a substantial shift from the original skin I think the colors he used go well both with the skin and align nicely with the original Longhorn logo. I couldn't have done better myself. Great work!

I just received these comments 10 minutes ago:

Dear Corey,

My name is Justin Doh, and I have met you at the Comdex at the ASP.Net booth.
I chatted with you on Monday.

I was able to find your websites and read about your works.

Thank you for the opportunity to know about Project Hurricane and know about you.

I was very impressed with professionals like you in the IT field who have knowledge and passion in what they do.

As a web developer, I got more motivation to become MVP in ASP.Net someday!
I am still in the process of learning C# and ASP.Net myself.

Justin Doh
www.nexcore.com

That's awesome, I haven't even had the chance to send out emails to all the people whose business cards I collected. I'm glad I was able to help you out and get you excited about the MVP program and Project Hurricane. That's partly what the MVP program is all about.

If you're really interested in learning more about ASP.NET and a little bit more about C# I'd like to recommend giving Project Hurricane a whirl. You can grab a copy of the source and then start playing with that, it should give you a nice jump start and provide a good base to build upon. If you wrote a plug-in for it that would even be better! We're actively trying to get developers to develop ontop of PH everyday.

Thanks again for the email!

You can tell Mark is happy as well. Just met up with him and Dom at the PDC Pre-Conference. We can't make it into for free food or any of the sessions since we don't have the nice little orange wristbands but we can still use the WiFi . The goodie bags are pretty darn nice too. More to come tomorrow I think when we receive the bits and other stuff. Hopefully I'll get a load of photos today while this place is still pretty empty. Everyone is talking about Longhorn... This is awesome!

So today was awesome! It started off at 5AM and after an hour and a half drive which should've been 45 minutes due to fog I made my way to the Bonaventure hotel. After I parked I got out of the car and noticed I didn't have my wallet so I checked again and couldn't find it in the car. So I assumed I left it at my aunts, I found out later when she called me on my cell that it was found under the bed. I remember it falling off last night but forgot in the morning. I also thought all my nice business cards were in my wallet and in my MSDN CD Case but it turns out they were in my backpack all along, argh! Anyway once I found the meeting room and things got started, it really flew by so I must have been having loads of fun .

One thing I forgot to expect was to be overwhelmed with names and faces. I'm pretty bad at remembering that sort of thing usually so I've come up with a simple way of at least remembering what I talked about with each person I meet... Simply get their card and write their IM and quick reminder of who and what they are all about. This way when I do get the chance I'll be able to follow up. So Chris Muench, I haven't forgotten, I'll make sure we figure out your Optical Out on MCE .

So today we saw a number of people present:

• Emily Freet, Community Program Manager - Academic and Tony Hynes, MVP God opened things up
• Sean O'Driscoll, Director, MVP & Community talked about the MVP Program as a whole and also displayed the stolen MVP Ad that's really from Project Hurricane
• Wes Miller, Program Manager (forgot to ask which program but it says Windows Server on the handout?)
• Lenn Pryor, Director, Longhorn... nice demos from him
• Keny Levy, Product Manager, he talked about the XML Data Designer in Whidbey
• Jamie De Guerre, Program Manager talked about the Compact Framework

From what I saw just today, I can safely say that Longhorn is going to blow everyone away! Even the Apple people with their little kitten they like to call Panther will be wishing they could be the big alpha lion that is Longhorn. Their jaws are going to drop. Anyone that doesn't develop using VisualStudio.NET or anyone that doesn't even develop with any Microsoft technologies is going to drool. Best way to sum it up is that Longhorn is real!

We ended about 6PM, had some more pretty yummy finger food and free drinks. Dom and I didn't leave till about 9PM. Some of the time we talked to Joel Schonbrunn a Digital Media MVP plus my MVP Lead Andrew Brown, both of these guys kick ass . We quickly chatted with Tony Hynes about Project Hurricane and I think we got him interested. Alex Feinman was also on hand to help chat about MCE plus his skills came in handy when he helped repair a demo for the Compact Framework peeps. In the end a good majority of the time was spent talking to the extremely cool, and awesome Emily Freet. She kicks ass. Half way through the convo Tony came up again, and he said "Emily, I want to tell you about this cool thing you've really got to look at, it's call Project Hurricane". Me and Dom just burst up laughing. So I guess we got him more than interested and from the sounds of it Emily is too. Woohoo !

So I dropped Emily off at her hotel, and then we stopped off at Dom's hotel to grab his stuff and get directions to Mark's hotel which was much easier to find since Dom was simply reading me the directions off his TabletPC through MapPoint 2004. So I drop Dom off at Mark's hotel and leave back to base at my aunt's. It's now 1AM, I got in at 11:45PM.

I'm shattered. But I told myself that I must blog. It's my duty. And it's my goal that for this entire week, I will have more personal blog (self written content) entries than any of the current personal blogs I read (might be hard since that includes Scoble as well ). This isn't just for my own personal benefit and record. It's also because I know there are many many people out there that want to know as much as possible about this stuff but couldn't make it. People like my friend Jon, who's stuck with the entertainment of people talking about supposedly leaked 4051 builds on IRC, LOL. Jon, I really wish you could've made it down... You know, the Bank of Corey is currently offering very attractive interest rates . Activate today, wink wink.

I really can't wait till tomorrow, and the next day and the days after that, should be quite the experience.
So with that, I bid you goodnight.

Sitting here at the MVP Regional Summit in LA. One of the slides Sean O'Driscoll just showed for the MVP Program has a crop circle. Fancy that... That's the same exact idea we used on Project Hurricane. It's an uncanny resemblance!

  

I've been pretty busy the past couple of hours and can't believe I forgot to post about Project Hurricane going live yesterday. I wanted to do it before midnight so I'd actually be posting the same day, but oh well. Dom and Mark did all the coding for it. I did the the CSS and graphics/GUI. So really all the credit goes towards those guys. Oh and please, if you don't like something, axe them, I didn't code it . Seriously though, they did a damn good job. Here's the standard blurb about what PH is:

"Project Hurricane is an online community portal built using the .NET Framework. It is an easily deployable skinnable community for students by students."

And did I mention, like WinFS in Longhorn, it's going to solve ALL of your problems, yes Jon, even yours! So don't delay, activate today!