I went to Puerto Rico to give two presentations, one for the Puerto Rico Open Source Congress on the 20th and one for the Services Network Application Platform (SNAP) at the Interamerican University's Bayamon Campus on the 21st.
The one for the PROS Congress went fairly bad. I had been going over my presentation for two days and felt very confortable with what I was going to deliver. Two little things broke me down.
The first and most crippling was the fact that my new super fancy Compaq presario R3000 refused to hug the only LCD projector that was available to all presenters. Not to say that all the other presenters that where using Windows and PowerPoint to present had the same problems. I resorted to reading of a printed version of the presentation -- ouch!
For the most part, as it happened in many of the IT events that I attended in Puerto Rico up to my departure in 1999, the majority of the speakers had English speaking presentations. Yet I was encouraged by the organizers to do mine in Spanish. I remember commenting to the organizers that it would have been nice to have prepared for that with a little more notice. So I decided to do some "Spanglish" which works out pretty good with Puertorican IT audiences.
There was also a little moderated panel discussion that took place between PJ Cabrera, Carlos Casaldeiro and my self about application development in Linux. That was decent.
The following day I went to the Bayamon Campus of the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico to do a more extended and technical presentation to an audience of software developers and program managers members of the SNAP. In this instance, the facilities where un-par and the audience kept it interesting and lively. This intervention permitted me to even show a little bit of Red-carpet as means to install Mono and we even demo some of Monodoc and MonoDevelop. I was so happy.
| Related Links |
Mono Presentation -- Presentation about Mono that was used in the Puerto Rico Open Source Congress (PowerPoint format) Project Mono -- Open Source .NET initiative sponsored by Novell MonoDevelop -- Mono's Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Prj2make -- tool for assisting with Microsoft to Linux interoperability |
Ironically one very nice and somewhat related development that is taken place is that I have established contact with my long time friend and disciple Angel Rios in the days leading to my trip to Puerto Rico. Angelito is one "Bad Ass" .NET developer that has been in the IT consulting trenches of Puerto Rico for many years now. He was not able to attend the event, but he has begun exploring the use of Linux/Mono as means of .NET application development!
I want to thank Laura Gorbea and James O'Malley of Altamente who I believe organized the PROS Congress event. I made great friends like Stormy Peters from HP, PJ Cabrera from SNAP, Carlos Casaldeiro from Centrix and Mr. Peter Quinn from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Of course, there has to be a special mention to the man that always make things happen, my friend and mentor Kevin Shockey.
Posted by martinf at May 24, 2004 05:52 AMIt was rather funny to watch you squirm. However, to your great credit you pulled it off as only you can do.
I want to acknowledge, once again, your great powers of analysis/observation. I had never really put 2 & 2 together to explain why IBM and HP love Linux. It helps them sell more boxes, duh. Sometimes it takes a brilliant mind to bring into focus what is right in front of our eyes, or an optometrist.
P.S. At least I used Open Office for my presentation, although I'm running into to difficulties getting SuSE installed on my laptop. Kinda of like you trying to remove the "Designed for Windows" sticker from yours. :D
Posted by: Kevin at June 21, 2004 12:56 PM