Still alive

I just looked at my blog and found that I haven’t written anything in more than three weeks and not anything of any substance in more than 6 weeks. I can’t even believe it’s been that long. Time flies by when you’re busy. I still owe a follow up to this here, and will try to get that done in the next two weeks or so.

So what happened in the past 6 weeks? I learned how to stand and “surf” for several seconds at a time on a snowboard in Vail (Colorado) and bruised every part of my body the next week when my friends put me up on a real mountain in Keystone. I had the honor of sitting on the review board of the Microsoft Certified Architect program in Redmond, attended the Indigo Software Design Review in Seattle, spoke at the Visual Studio User Groups in Denver and Boulder (Tim Huckaby gave me 15 minutes of his time at the latter), and had several customer meetings in the US and Germany. I recorded 8 hours worth of webcasts on Service Orientation and spoke at workshops on the same topics in Belgium and Germany.  I spoke at the Microsoft Gulf Developer Conference GDC2005 in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), at the Microsoft North Africa Developer Conference NDC2005 in Algiers (Algeria), and between all these things I ported an application to Indigo and prepared my talks for several conferences that are happening this next week and later this year and for which the content deadlines were due.

Now, if that sounds busy, consider next week: Today I fly to Istanbul at 17:30h, get there at 21:30h. I will do 3 talks at a large MS conference in Istanbul the next day. Tuesday morning (really: middle of the night) I have to get out to the airport and catch a 5:40am flight to Ljubljana in Slovenia. From there I will be picked up and driven to Opatija in Croatia where I’ll do a track keynote and another talk at the WinDays conference in the afternoon. After dinner, I go back to Ljubljana aiport and fly (at 11:45pm) back to Istanbul, getting there at 2:50am. 3 more talks in Turkey on Wednesday. Then, Thursday morning, I catch the same flight to Ljubljana at 5:40am, but will connect through to Vienna in Austria where I will arrive at around 8:30am and will hurry to the Microsoft office to do two full days of Visual Studio 2005 training for the MS Ascend program and then fly home to Düsseldorf Friday evening. By Saturday I will likely need medical attention.

The upcoming week is so crazy that I will try to document it here. Let’s see whether I can pull it off.