The Atlanta Mobility SIG Kick-Off went OK

First of all thanks to Doug Turnure for helping us out. Your time is very much appreciated, and thanks to your understanding wife too!

Once everyone arrived there were about three empty seats which was pleasing to see. The attendance also means we are now official Ineta members. This is awesome and means we have access to a who’s who list of .Net speakers.

About 50% of the attendees were the ‘Usual Suspects’, but it was great to see new faces. The newcomers were very bright and full of mobility information – I look forward to learning from them.

For some reason the meeting kicked off twenty minutes early which caught a few people by surprise. Sorry to those who were ‘late’, my introduction was lousy anyway. It was down to lack of preparation and my mind drawing blanks. The slide notes went out of the window after the second slide and everything was off the cuff – it must have been very easy to tell, for example I’ve only worked with .Net for 3.5 years not four. Random ‘almost accurate, but not quite’ junk like that just kept spouting out of my mouth, but at least no jokes fell flat (Jokes are the most important part, right?). I speak at the main .Net User Group in January, and promise to attend a few Toastmasters meetings + really prepare the material (only an NUnit intro which should be easy) before then. Having a demo to present always makes it easier anyway.

Matt did a much better job and talked for around an hour with a lot of focus on persisting data; especially SQL CE. Considering he had no demos it was an impressive stint. Martin (the English chap) was a great source of information on SQL CE. Talking of impressive; at Kirk’s dinner Martin and I got talking about things with wheels. He owns the actual car used in the Swordfish movie (it is a TVR which are made in the UK). This is probably his car, though I guess the bullet holes were removed and John Travolta or Wolverine did not come with the deal:

So it was not a bad start to the Mobility Group and it will only get better. For at least our next two meetings the speakers are experts in their fields. Looking forward to February, I’ll start tapping contacts and researching local firms looking for meeting sponsors and more good speakers.

We’ll try to stick more to the main .Net group format in future starting meetings with a 30 minute presentation. If anyone has material they would like to present please email me. Otherwise you’ll hear me talk about ‘Gaining Business Value from Mobility’ next month for about 30 minutes. I know I need the presentation practice, but I am sure someone else could do a better job.

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