I just sent the list of the people who won a copy of Vista to Microsoft, hopefully they’ll be able to ship them out soon. Congratulations again to everyone who won a copy!
If anyone’s interested in helping out at the next event(probably something similar to this) feel free to send me an e-mail at giraffeh@gmail.com I look forward to seeing everyone again!
If you weren’t able to get a copy of Vista from the party, Foothill College is part of the MSDN Academic Alliance program which means you can get a basically free ($5 for administration costs) copy of Vista if you take any one of their CTIS classes.
The CTIS classes at Foothill are amazing, I’d recommend taking one of Mike Murphy’s classes. He was my first computer science teacher and makes even the most tedious topics seem fun and exciting. The CCNA 1 class in particular is great for anyone who wants to get an overview of networking; you cover an incredible amount of material, the labs are fun and extremely fitting to the curriculum, and overall it’s just a great class. There’s, also, a variety of classes relating to administration (of both Microsoft and Linux servers), programming languages, and security. The spring quarter doesn’t start until April 9th so there’s still plenty of time.
3 days left!!
I just sent out an e-mail to everybody who registered with a quick update and some more information. It took like 4 minutes to finish e-mailing everyone O.o I was really worried that it would stop 1/2 way through and I wouldn’t have any way of knowing who’d gotten the e-mails but luckily everything worked out. I really hope everyone can make it!
I’ve also updated workshops page so now it has a LOT more information about the workshops, huge thanks to everyone who’s presenting! And the presenters page now has relevant information about the presenters rather than a login/register thing. To be honest I was kind of sad to get rid of the login option since it was the first “real” thing I’ve done in PHP but bios are a lot more useful.
This is going to be my temporary blog until I come up with a cool name. I was thinking “aftereffects” but then I realized that it just sounded good because I’d been reading about Adobe products all day. Whoops.
On the topic of Adobe, my investment is finally positive, an entire $1.80! Forbe’s 500 better watch out. I never planned for it to be a short term investment but for long term I think it’s great. One of my friends pointed out that they have a monopoly on nearly everything graphics related: photoshop(cs3! <3), aftereffects, fireworks, dreamweaver and flash. How can people even suggest that Microsoft has a monopoly? There’re competing programs for Photoshop like Gimp or Paint Shop Pro but they really don’t stand a chance. Apparently Adobe’s Flex is uber awesome too but I don’t have any experence with it.
Dell also seems like a great investment, PC sales went up 65% (wow..) when Vista was released and they just switched back to their original CEO. Best of luck to them!
I’ll resist the urge to talk about my other investments in case they all flop =]
The vista party is in 8 days. Wow.
I still remember the first e-mail I sent to Doug back in December asking him if he thought this crazy idea of a “Vista Release Party” had any merit. Back then I was envisioning a small gathering of some Microsoft fans to hang out, eat lunch and perhaps chat with some Microsoft employees. Over the next few months this idea grew, we added workshops/speakers, we decided to have a giveaway of 100 copies of Vista Ultimate, we were able to provide lunch and parking for everybody, we got swag to giveaway and we even have a band! Thinking back it’s incredible how much it’s progressed, instead of a small gathering we have 450 people getting together to celebrate and learn about Vista.
And I have to give a speech in front of those 450 people O.o That’s something I’m definitely not looking forward to, even in front of 30 people I start to shake and get nervous but 450? ack! I’m not even sure what i’m going to talk about, I don’t really want to talk about the improvements with Vista since that’s what the workshops are for and after 3 hours i’m sure everyone will be tired of hearing about it. I think I might just keep it to a short “Thank you for showing up everybody..” and thanking all the awesome people who’ve helped me but that’s not really a speech. Oh well, I’ll ask Nima about it tomorrow.
If you haven’t already registered be sure to go to VistaParty.net and register, ignore the we’re full announcements, everyone on the waitlist is invited (and gets lunch!). I’m planning to start up a linkedin group for Vista party attendees but haven’t gotten it approved yet, hopefully it will be before the party.
