This might be a old news but I have just caught up with it from GigaOM network. A Indian lady, Sunaina Bansal is hoping to create 10 million rupees on the Internet (whic is one crore rupees) on the Internet using her crorepati page. All the good luck to Sunaina to run for this challenge. I see that big sites like Shaadi.com (shaadi=marriage) and Rediff.com are listed there.

This year I was fortunate enough that my work paid for me going to Tech.Ed 2006. What a time I had there! It was great.

The Tech.Ed welcome party was on Tuesday evening from 6:00 PM onwards. We rocked up there in the afternoon as my company had a booth in the exhibitors area. Soon I was caught by the security guards in the exhibitors area without a valid exhibitor pass and I had to stay out of that area doing not much for nearly 4.5 hours. I took this time to walk around George Street and around Darling Harbour.

The welcome party was quite funny for me but let me complain a bit before hand. Why is there not enough vegeterian food at these places compared to the amount of non-veg food they had. There was not much vegie food I could get my hands on. The funny bit for me was all the exhibitors trying to get their monies worth and trying to get as many people register at their stand as possible. There were these digital scanners which would be used to scan the pass that we had our details on it. So everybody was crazy scanning customer details so that they can use it later on.

Exhibitors were quite creative. One of the exhibitors was giving away hot pop corn for filling out a form with our details on. I heard CA was giving away a towel and then there were these usual raffle thingy which they raffle on Friday afternoon.

So to me welcome party was kinda OK but well I am sure exhibitors had nothing to complain about nor did the people who used this time to drink beer.

Wednesday morning was the time for the Keynote.

Frank Arrigo opened up the keynote. He was wearing his meego shirt :).

Ana who is a anthropologist spoke at the keynote about how Microsoft is listening to customers and getting things implemented into coming Microsoft products. Some of the stories that she touched on were heart felt. But overall I would give 5/10 for the keynote.

Then the rest of the day went attending sessions, doing hands on labs, checking things here and there. It was one busy day. I would say Thursday was the same too and so was most of the Friday. I tried Windows Longhorn Server which is in Beta 2 right now. I wish I could get my hands on that one.

Some of my thoughts on it are as belows: –

1) It is a great place to network with another people and to interact with people from Microsoft
2) Great venue to meet some of the guru’s in their respective domains
3) I wish something more can be done to get more networking happening with professionals. It is not simple for people not knowing others to go at looking at other people’s tags and see what their name is what company they work for. Something more organised can be done to get more networking happening.

Frank, I am all up for this. I can help you get something organised if you need me at the next event.
4) Hands on labs is an excellent idea and I think more emphasis can be added to it. More time should be alloted to the labs so students get a chance to do the labs when they are not attending sessions.
5) Free drinks is a great idea.
6) The bag that Microsoft gave this time is excellent as well, strong and will be serving me a lot.
7) We need notepad as part of the bag. We had pen but no notepad to write on 🙂
8) We can have some system networking challenge for IT Pro’s as well who are sys admins and engineers. Developers got a chance to prove themselves, I think sys admins need a chance too.

Why is CompTIA IT Pro not a part of Tech.Ed? They should have been there I think. Seeing ACS there was great. I was resisting becoming member of ACS all these time, but finally I signed up.

The good thing is I met quite a few people whom I would have never met otherwise. I met quite a few people who come from India, same state and same small town. That was amazing and exciting part for me. I met Alpesh Nakar (who rejoined ACS), Modi (ACS member too), Sadiq (who comes from Mumbai and works for Excom) and few other interesting people. Eric who is a trainer at Excom was fun too.

The last interesting bit at Tech.Ed 2006 was their lock note. It was just very interesting! I loved every minute of it and wished it could just go on and on.. But 40 minutes at lock note were 40 minutes well spent. I loved what Frank Soong had to say and show. Frank showed us demo of their research work. Frank Soong works for MSR in China. The demo’s he have about digital images and video were very great. I am looking forward to the time when such products come out. I am one of those photographers that Frank was talking about, whose pictures are almost always blury.

Lastly Frank showed us some statistics on Tech.Ed. The picture below says it all. 30000 bottle of drinks between nearly 3700 people in three days!

Although in the hands on live labs almost everybody was friendly and helpful, the guy in the picture below was a great help and always smiling. Thanks to him for all the help he offered and thanks to all the people who worked at keeping the labs going.

Overall, Frank Arrigo and team, it was an event well organised and I had heaps of fun. If given a chance, I will be at it again next year. Was any of my readers there at Tech.Ed too?

IE 7 RC1 released,

Got to try this soon 🙂

Hey guys,just stopped by to say a quick “hello” to my readers. I am enjoying my time here at Tech.Ed in Sydney. With all the sessions and all, I have been off the grid for a long time (compared to the time I normally spend). I am meeting quite many interesting people. Will put some pictures up soon, still have to catch up with Frank Arrigo though :).

For those attending Tech.Ed 2006, don’t forget to grab the copy of Tech.Ed 2006 Boston DVD set. It says it has the recording for all the breakout sessions.

I see Tech.Ed 2006 not only as a place to get education and learn about technology but also as a place to network with people from all over the industry. So the people I am looking forward to catch up with are as below for now: –

Frank Arrigo
Jeff Alexander
Alpesh Nakar
All my students studying at IT Masters/CSU

Apart from these, looking forward to catching up with all the bright people out there who would be shining as presenters. If anybody else reading this is coming to Tech.Ed drop a comment or an email to me and I will be glad to catch up with you at Tech.Ed too.

I will be at Tech.Ed 2006 which starts tomorrow in Sydney. I am all ready, sessions selected and nearly packed up for flying to Sydney.

We have a company booth there ( Charles Sturt University) in the exhibitors area, so I will be seen there. I am hoping to constantly check my email as well, so if you are going to be there and want to catch up, then shot me an email (email address can be found from the side of this blog). Would be great to catch up with some of you there and to meet new people who will be friends eventually.

What should be call a person who takes his/her own pictures daily? Not sure. But apparently Ahree Lee took a picture of herself daily for three continuous year and that too even without smiling once at the cameras and then compressed them all to one minute movie. Awesome. One thing I can say after watching the movie though, it doesn’t seem that Ahree Lee put on too much weight in that three years duration.

Time Quotient = Results/Time. I am a believer of this formula and I am sure most of you would agree to this too. According to this formula, success if the results we achieve in a given amount of time.

To take an example without going into too much detail, whom would you consider successful? One who would have 2 million dollar in his account for his retirement or one who would be struggling to gather food on a week to week basis till his death? I would go with the first one!

There are many positive things that we can do to improve our Time Quotient. They can be small actions that can masively improve our TQ overall. One action I take to improve my TQ is to monitor where I spend my time, what results I get in the time I spent on a given task and continously monitor my actions so that I am getting more and better results for the time I spend. Getting more output with less input is smartness I think.

Monitoring time spend can be daunting times at time, but it does not have to be so. There are many ways on how time can be monitored; from using kitchen timer to monitor time taken to complete a task to using sophisticated software to track time spent using different applications on the computer and elsewhere to using sites like SlimTimer to monitor time spend on different projects/tasks.

With so many things happening around us on the Internet,Office,Home it is easy to get distracted from our main task and drify away. We can use time monitoring tools to not only monitor the time we spend on various tasks but also use it to constantly remind us to stay on track as well (as we are analysing our own time spent at the end). Earlier today I wrote a brief review on SlimTimer which is a simple website which can monitor the time we spend as individual or as a team on various tasks.

Since I have started monitoring where I spend my own time, I was simply writing the time I spend on a peice of paper at the end of the day and used to analyse it at the end of the week. But now I am going to give SlimTimer a good try, as it has the reporting tools I need and if I want I can analyse at the end of the day as to how I have spend my day.

Improve your Time Quotient (ThinkTq.com is a good site with some great tools) and as part of this monitor how wisely you are spending each and every minute of your day.

This message is for Alpesh Nakar, who I found through a blog post on Frank Arrigo’s blog. Alpesh, I could not find your contact detail, so can you get in touch with me please. I see that you are attending Tech.Ed, may be we can catch up there and have some fun :).

I know inside me that I will start up a business one day. To me that is a natural urge that comes from within. Are you an entrepreneur type? Dane Carlson links to a Motivational Quiz. It is interesting. Yes, it confirms that I scored more on achievement then the other two sections that we are tested on.