Dave Donaldson

MVP Summit Shenanigans

Wednesday, April 23 2008

I had an extremely fun time last week at the MVP Summit meeting everyone and geeking out 24/7. But what really made the week was all the joking with people, so without further adieu, here are some recaps.

I Locked My Laptop and Still Got Pwned

It's Tuesday, the first day we're on the Microsoft campus for sessions with the product teams, and ScottW and I show up to ScottGu's Silverlight talk. As we walk in the door we hook up with Steve Harman and Jon Galloway. We're sitting at a table in this order: Jon, Steve, me, Scott. At one point during the talk I needed to use the bathroom, so as I got up I locked my laptop, which runs Vista. When I come back, I find my laptop completely screwed, and the other three trying to hold back from laughing so hard. It took me a couple minutes to figure out what happened: Steve turned on all accessibility features (except the sound), with one of those being the on-screen keyboard option, which meant the actual keyboard didn't respond. Well, unbeknownst to me, the Vista accessibility features are available on the login screen, so when I locked my laptop, Steve simply clicked on the accessibility button and went to town (I think Escape gave me my keyboard back). The funny thing is that by locking my laptop, I actually called attention to it, which then gave the other three the idea to mess with me. I'm glad we were near the back because the laughter was pretty loud. Lesson learned.

Steve Harman, the Very First MSTest MVP

Naturally after that happened, I had to find a way to get back at Steve. The opportunity came when Scott, myself, Steve, and Keith Elder were in the next session. See, before the previous session ended Steve gave his phone to someone to update the version of Windows Mobile (can't remember who). Well, in that next session the guy who was updating Steve's phone brought it back to him and in his excitement, Steve got up and left his laptop wide open, with Twitter on top. So I pull Steve's laptop closer to me to type something in Twitter as Steve, at which point Keith sees what I'm up to and runs interference with Steve to keep him preoccupied with his shiny new Windows Mobile OS. Seizing the moment, I first tweeted "I hate unit testing" from Steve's Twitter account and then tweeted "I love MSTest", which if you know Steve at all is blasphemy. Steve's all about TDD and loathes MSTest, so for those messages to be posted from his Twitter account was like death to him. Sure enough, there was a flurry of people on Twitter asking what was going on, or saying that his true colors were coming out, etc, etc. From there on out, Steve was known as the very first MSTest MVP.

Jon Galloway Wants to do Bad Things to Keith Elder

It's Thursday, the last day of the summit, and a bunch of us went to The Taphouse Grill for lunch (pics on Jon's blog). We're all having a good time and most of us are Twittering (yes, it's been turned into a verb). At one point Jon gets up to use the restroom and unbelievably, leaves his phone on the table, unlocked with Twitter open no less (you'd think by this point in the week everyone would have learned something). As you can imagine, as soon as he was out of hearing range, Keith was all over that and tweeted from Jon's account something about wanting to have hot passionate monkey love with Keith. I'm not sure there's anything else I can say about it other than that it was damn funny.

Hi, My Name is Doug

Remember a couple of posts back how I wrote about some people not knowing what my real name is, but recognizing Arcware? Well, that doesn't hold true for one special person: Sara Ford. See, Sara and I have been formally introduced 2-3 times and every time she doesn't remember my name (not unnatural, but still). So at the attendee party Wednesday night, I run into Sara and say hi, and I realize she doesn't remember my name, and therefore I introduce myself to her yet again and give her a ribbing for it. Well, about an hour later I see her again, and she says, "Hi Doug". I couldn't help but start cracking up. I applaud her for remembering that my name started with a D but that it's Dave, not Doug. But it gets better. The next night was the Geek Lager at Kells Irish Pub. I'm drinking my Miller Lite, chillin with Steve, Keith, and Scott Koon among others, and Sara shows up. I turn to Steve and tell him I bet she doesn't remember my name, so I ask her if she finally remembers and says, "Yes, it's Doug, but I messed up once and called you Dave". LOL. Classic, just classic.