{"id":22053,"date":"2008-06-05T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-05T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/06\/05\/portugal-techdays-2008-a-report\/"},"modified":"2008-06-05T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-05T10:00:00","slug":"portugal-techdays-2008-a-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080605-00\/?p=22053","title":{"rendered":"Portugal TechDays 2008: A report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in March, I agreed to make a brief appearance at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techdays.pt\/\"> Portugal TechDays 2008<\/a>. My arrival was delayed due to heavy traffic: I had taken the number 15 tram, which was jam packed, and the traffic on the road didn&#8217;t help either. And then when I found the building labelled <a href=\"http:\/\/wikimapia.org\/1458221\/\"> <i>Centro de Congressos<\/i><\/a>, I found the doors locked. That&#8217;s because the big sign facing Rua da Junqueira is not the main entrance. The main entrance faces Travessa da Guarda. But of course, when you&#8217;re standing on Rua da Junqueira, you don&#8217;t know that. And right next to the big sign is a door. Which is locked. And there&#8217;s no sign on the door that says &#8220;You idiot, this is the side entrance. The main entrance is around the corner over there.&#8221;\n All these problems getting to (and finding the entrance to) the meeting hall meant that I had eaten into my entire scheduling buffer and even gone a few minutes over. Fortunately, we operate on <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2008\/05\/27\/8553639.aspx\"> Portuguese Time<\/a> and people were still settling in when I rushed onto the stage.\n The conference organizers had sent me a slide deck template. It went roughly like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Cover page &#8211; talk title, speaker name <\/li>\n<li>Pages labelled <i>Do not remove<\/i> <\/li>\n<li>A template labelled <i>Agenda<\/i> <\/li>\n<li>A place to insert the bulk of the slides. <\/li>\n<li>Template pages labelled things like <i>Other Resources<\/i>,     <i>Call to Action<\/i>, <i>Q&amp;A<\/i>. <\/li>\n<li>Pages labelled <i>Do not remove<\/i> <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> My completed slide deck therefore looked like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Cover page &#8211; talk title, speaker name <\/li>\n<li>Pages labelled <i>Do not remove<\/i> <\/li>\n<li>Agenda:     &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/agilior.pt\/blogs\/rodrigo.guerreiro\/archive\/2008\/03\/14\/3901.aspx\">Tell stories<\/a>&#8220;. <\/li>\n<li>Other Resources:     <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/michkap\/\">     Michael Kaplan<\/a>,     <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/LarryOsterman\/\">     Larry Osterman<\/a>. <\/li>\n<li>Pages labelled <i>Do not remove<\/i> <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> As a result, my slide deck consisted almost entirely of the <i>Do not remove<\/i> mandatory content.\n When I was invited, the conference organizers had told me that I had a one-hour time slot and when I arrived, I asked, &#8220;So this is one hour, right?&#8221;\n &#8220;One and a half hours&#8221; was the reply.\n Oh, okay. Fortunately, I brought about two hours of material, so I had plenty of content to slip back in, but I had to adjust my pacing so I hit my conclusion at the right time. I also had to be elsewhere after the talk, and extending my talk by another half hour meant that it would be a tight squeeze getting to my next scheduled event on time.\n At about the one hour mark into my talk, people started leaving. Gosh, I&#8217;m sorry my stories sucked. Maybe they were too technical, or they were not technical enough? I don&#8217;t know, because people who leave early don&#8217;t leave feedback.\n I wrapped up at the 90 minute mark, got my polite applause, and packed up my things to leave. Maybe if I rushed, I could catch the 15 tram back to my hotel in time.\n A conference organizer person asked if I could do a short interview for a Webcast. Okay, we set up the camera and the microphone, and we were rolling. The interviewer then asked questions that I obviously can&#8217;t answer, like &#8220;So tell me when Windows&nbsp;7 is going to ship.&#8221; I pointed out to the interviewer, &#8220;You know I can&#8217;t answer that.&#8221;\n &#8220;Yes, I know but our viewers want to know.&#8221;\n As if I&#8217;m going to say, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m sorry, I didn&#8217;t realize. Let me talk about something I&#8217;m not authorized to talk about so your viewers won&#8217;t be disappointed.&#8221;\n Fortunately, I have a standard story that I tell whenever an interviewer asks me a question I obviously am not allowed to answer.\n The interviewer continued by asking questions that I had answered in my talk. I thought this was strange, but afterwards I realized that the people who will watch the Webcast probably didn&#8217;t see my talk. After all, who wants to see me any more than necessary?\n Each of the questions after the first two was of the form, &#8220;One last question. Blah blah blah blah?&#8221; I think there were five &#8220;last questions&#8221;.\n The interview took about a half hour, and now I had no chance of making it back to my hotel by public transit. I hailed a cab and just my luck, I got an older cabbie whose farsightedness prevented him from reading the address I had written down on a slip of paper. I was forced to try to read it to him by reverse-engineering on the fly the pronunciation rules for the Portuguese language based on what I could remember from how the station names were announced on the subway speaker system.\n By some miracle, I was successful.\n What my cabbie lacked in short-distance vision he more than made up for with blood pressure. He drove aggressively through the streets, liberally honking his horn at everything in his way. The pictures I took out the cab window all came out blurry. I arrived at my hotel with plenty of time to spare.\n I glanced at the conference schedule included in my speaker ID tag. My talk was scheduled for 60&nbsp;minutes after all. That&#8217;s why people were leaving. And they must think I&#8217;m a jerk for going over my time slot.<\/p>\n<p> And I never did get my speaker shirt. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in March, I agreed to make a brief appearance at Portugal TechDays 2008. My arrival was delayed due to heavy traffic: I had taken the number 15 tram, which was jam packed, and the traffic on the road didn&#8217;t help either. And then when I found the building labelled Centro de Congressos, I found [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-22053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Back in March, I agreed to make a brief appearance at Portugal TechDays 2008. My arrival was delayed due to heavy traffic: I had taken the number 15 tram, which was jam packed, and the traffic on the road didn&#8217;t help either. And then when I found the building labelled Centro de Congressos, I found [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}