“Only one day after the nation’s birthday came a cold day in the great capital city of Washington D.C.”

If that wasn’t the corniest description for an event, I might’ve actually used it to describe The DC Freeze. All we did was

1. gather a large group of people (on facebook in our case)
2. waltz off to a place to stun (the Natural History Museum)
3. freeze in place for five minutes straight.

We didn’t invent the freezy flashmob, but we know we had fun. Video embedded after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a few people request my hardware setup for the conference. My setup isn’t the most efficient one because of the size of the equipment which I had to take with me. However, because you guys asked, I’ll provide the relevant information after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

All you need to do is follow a few steps. See, Asli is trying to get donations to the YWCA (a non-profit which aims to help women and eliminate racism/sexism, etc.) , and her plan is to get people to donate to the YWCA by handing out these awesome t-shirts for women (guys, please don’t wear these) to those who donate. Any amount is acceptable, but donating more is preferred.

Want to know how? Simple:

1. Donate to the YWCA and remember to save proof! A screenshot should work.
   
2. Email Asli’s alias (in the video for the sake of antispam) with said proof.
3. Receive your shirt in the mail!

YouTube vid after the break, but if you count on reading anything in the video, you might be better off downloading one of the HD clips below. They both weigh in at under 80 megs a piece.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I finished tweaking my interview with Jensen Harris. Thankfully, this one was under ten minutes long, which means I could upload it onto YouTube! I’m encoding the Jensen Harris interview in 720p right now, but if you don’t feel like waiting, you can either download it in 1080p or watch it via YouTube.

• Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager for the Office User Experience team at Microsoft.
  Jensen and his team work on the user experience behind Microsoft Office. They came up with the Ribbon UI, which many see as one of the best things to come to Office 2007 since spell check.
  

The biggest lesson you can learn from this video is to opt into the Customer Experience Improvement Program. Do it, seriously. It makes later versions of Office, Windows, etc. better for everyone. They don’t collect anything that can be traced back to you. They just collect things like which buttons or UI elements get accessed + how often, which functions are performed + how often, and other non-traceable things. No file names are collected. No file contents are collected. It’s all perfectly clean.

Corrections have been made to the previous two interviews. Feel free to update your copy (sound fixes on both interviews as well as a minor correction to the content of the Tim Harris interview). Sadly, I can’t upload those two to YouTube due to time constraints. The Jensen Harris video can be watched after the jump.

Update: I uploaded the 720p version for those who are interested.

Update 2: I switched to Vimeo as the video host since they allow for much higher embedded video quality. You can skip downloading the video if you want to watch it in 720p. The video enclosed after the jump isn’t in HD, but it is in HD over at Vimeo. Read the rest of this entry »

Long Zheng posted a video of Rafael asking Steve Ballmer a question. The end result is in Long’s blog post and at 56:04 on the official on-demand webcast of the keynote.

Steve, I owe you two quarters. How do I pay you?

(update: removed youtube link because youtube repeatedly killed the audio. I’ll upload it as an flv when I land in DC.)

Most of my time with MIX so far revolved around interviewing influentials within Microsoft. Yesterday, I interviewed Tim Harris and Chris Wilson. They are both from vastly different areas within Microsoft, as you can see from the interviews themselves.

• Tim Harris, Program Manager for the Platform Strategy Team at Microsoft.
  Tim plays a huge role in event logistics. Just about every major Microsoft event (think MIX, PDC, WinHEC, etc.) is an event which he and his team play a huge role in planning and coordinating.
  
• Chris Wilson, Platform Architect for Internet Explorer.
  Chris is deep within the nuts and bolts of Internet Explorer, as is likely implied by his title at Microsoft. He has a heavy hand in the design and development process behind Microsoft’s web browser..
  

The codec used for the videos is the DivX codec simply because of how fast the codec encodes the footage on my rendering box. Want the codec? Click here to download it from the DivX home page (avoid installing the crapware) or simply grab it as a part of many of the freely available codec packs (be careful with these).

Update: The Chris Wilson and Tim Harris interviews have been fixed. Feel free to re-download either

Just one day before MIX and everything is coming together. The skin is filling the place up earlier than planned (Again, thanks Sam!) and I’ve got most of the supplies and software/templates/etc. ready to go.

The first video I’ll post will focus on the hardware I’ll be using as well as other miscellany. As a reminder, all of my coverage from MIX and subsequent conferences will be licensed under a Creative Commons license. Look at the bottom of the page for information as to which license I’ll be using.

It’s modest for now, but conhopper.net is now up, just in time for MIX08! The site skin is still being worked on (Sam Johnson is due lots of credit for helping me out here. He dealt with the hassles of skinning Movable Type before I finally buckled and went with WordPress.

The first event which will grace the (currently dull) pages of this site will be Microsoft’s MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. I am attending on behalf of AeroXperience. My thanks goes to everyone who helped me get this project off the ground.