Various

Praga Kahn in Second Life Tonight

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:17:00 GMT

~~Tonight~~ Tomorrow night, there is a concert of Praga Kahn in Second Life. Looking forward to it :). Read more about the WOW experience on David's blog. If you are looking for me, I am the cute boy with the glasses called Neelix Kline.

Update: More info on Tom's site and some nice pictures.

5 things about myself

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:07:00 GMT

Oh boy! I've been tagged a couple of times. Trying to avoid this but now I've got tagged by Joanna and I have been encouraged by a very enthousiastic email. Well here we go. By the way, Joanna has an excellent blog you should add to your subscriptions - that is if you are interested in the Office Business Applications (OooooBAaaaaaaa!!!).

So what should you boys and girls know about me :)

1/ Education? Degree in business informatics. Kept on studying until the law stating that all young men should serve 1 year of their life in the army, was abolished. I know some readers will have difficulties with this but hey, I dislike the military. So, studied knowledge information systems (that is expert systems and artificial intelligence), did some work in virtual reality. Yes yes, crazy times, even tried to get ballet dancers virtualized 'A Hybrid Approach in Vart-Applications, the Design and Simulation of Ballet Choregraphies (P. TISSEGHEM) . You did not expect this of me, did you :). Studied psychology and then finally decided it was a good time to start a real job.

2/ Hobbies? You kidding? My work is my hobby and I guess I've made travelling a hobby too. But I like a good reading, mostly science fiction and Dan Brown-related historical books. And of course music. Couldn't miss that in my life. Love the iPod, hate the iTunes software.

3/ Favorite countries? Cyprus and Russia. Loved China too. Would love to go back down under though.

4/ Favorite drink? Of course, a good beer. Best beer? Well, not a Belgian one! Nope, Irish beer is the best in the world. And definitely also a single malt.

5/ Ambitions? Finish the book, make a lot of people excited about SharePoint, work for 15 more years, get lazy and die peacefully while looking at the see in Limassol.

I'm not going to bother others with more tagging. Everyone has been tagged already :). Have fun everybody!

Reflections on this week

Patrick Tisseghem — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:25:00 GMT

This week was the first, of the many weeks, abroad in 2007. And I must say that the start was excellent. Croatia seems to be a very nice country, young and driven. I of course must admit that I was not able to see a lot besides the hotel, the training room, the restaurant, the Microsoft building, and yes, a little bit of the nightlife. But it was very nice to see participants from Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Roemania, Lithuania, Latvia, Greece and not to forget Poland :), having a good time together both in the classroom as well as outside of it. Thanks Roman for being an excellent host.

Yes, I will go back to Croatia. They have their annual WinDev conference end of April and it's on my agenda. Actually, the next couple of months are going to be filled with conferences: Berlin, DevDays in Belgium, SharePoint Advisor in Anaheim, TechEd US in Orlando, SEF 2007 in Sweden and WinDev in Croatia.

Fitz pointed me to a nice site: www.dropload.com. If you ever have to send a big file to somebody, you can use this site to upload the file, keep it there for max 7 days, and have somebody pick it up.

Of course the wildcard search posting is causing some debates but that is how it should be. Sometimes we have to be critical, even if you don't like to express negative feelings about something that means a lot to you. And believe me, everything flows ... also this one.. and it is going to flow in the positive direction.

Many many interesting questions this week and I have learned a lot of stuff. For example, I finally got around the problem in RTM concerning the variations label not getting displayed on a page that has variations. In the variationslabelsmenu.ascx in the \12\Template\ControlTemplates, the line responsible for showing the menu is commented out. Credits to this posting for solving the problem. Just remove the <%-- ... --%>.

And I have good news regarding the book. I got the permission from MSPress to go for the 700 pages instead of the 448 pages popping up on many sites. That is good news because I am way over that amount already and still have 2 more chapters to go. Trimming content is the thing I don't like to do.

Next week is Dubai and Cyprus.

My house is on sale

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:39:00 GMT

Oeps! What happened @ home? I should be there more often :) Yes.. we are selling our house and moving to a better location. The girls need more room! So we decided to move to a new location with the family (5 girls and one poor guy). A lot of green, sheep, cows, horses, around us in the new home.

Bands you should know about

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 23:30:00 GMT

I was just IM'n with Fitz and he was very in doubt about who Joy Division was (one of my favourite bands). I was just listening to it when he called. Now don't blame him, maybe Ian Curtis and his gang were not that popular in the States (question: do Americans know what good music is? Dangerous question I know) but it gives me a good topic to reply to the many 'tags' I have received the last couple of weeks.

Update! Fitz told me that Joy Division became know when New Order was born.... Da!

I'll break the chain however and talk only about my favourite bands or better category of bands, if you don't mind. Here are the 5 I personally like the best:

When I was 18 (yes ... a long time ago) I was into the Manchester scene as it was called those days. I went every week to concerts of bands like The Charlatans, Ride, Slowdive, Galaxie 500, The Happy Mondays, The Farm, The Soup Dragons, My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses, The Chameleons, The Verve, (probably not mentioning a lot of them here) and all of that stuff. I must say, I still am a big fan of that kind of music.. lots of good memories.. aah. my favorite one and my motto of life ...Let It Flow by Spiritualized..Really love that band!
The Smiths! Yes, Morrissey is my hero and will always be my hero. Anything he brings out, I buy!
Godspeed You Black Emperor is a band most of you will say.. what's that all about. Well, listen to a song like Moya and you'll understand (or maybe not)!
Luna and Mojave 3 are kind of the survivors of Slowdive and Galaxie 500. Very addicted to Dean the last years.
And yes, I am always looking for new bands. To be included on my IPod, you need to be very alternative, no commercial stuff allowed. So, favorite current bands are Grandaddy (love the 'I'm on standby'), The Cooper Temple Clause (oh man.. promises promises promises!), The Artic Monkeys, Kean, Hope of the States, and many many more 'Indie' type of groups.

Oh boy.. so ashamed of myself.. best band of the last years is definitely Muse. Tx Muse Wunderlich!

Well, I am going to tag Fitz. I am very curious about his favorite music. Go Fitz .. go!

SharePoint 2007 Trainer Position

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:05:00 GMT

A new year has started and in my opinion, it is going to be a very exciting year for SharePoint geeks with a lot of training and coaching opportunites in the near future. Due to the amount of work already in the pipeline for me and Jan, we are looking for a re-enforcement of the U2U SharePoint team. The guy or girl we are looking for must have experience with SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007, either from a developer or an administrative perspective. Since you will be involved in a lot of training jobs, we require a good to excellent background in delivering trainings. Because of practical reasons, applicants should be a resident in Belgium or decide to make the move to our lovely country. Your domain of action however will be the whole of EMEA (Europe/Middle East and Africa). In addition to delivering trainings, you will also be participating in SharePoint consultancy jobs and the goal is also to integrate you in all of the work we are doing for Microsoft EMEA and Microsoft Corp evangelizing the SharePoint 2007 story. So, if this is something you are interested in becoming part of, let me know. Send me an email on patrick@u2u.be and we'll contact you as soon as possible.

Happy Ending of the Year

Patrick Tisseghem — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 08:56:00 GMT

I am all done for the year and getting ready for the final week. It has been a very good year for me, spent a lot of time in exciting places, met many many new people and enjoyed the new experiences. I want to thank you all and hope that you have a good and relaxing ending of the year. Special thoughts to my friend who unfortunately has to spend his time in the hospital. I wish him and his family a lot of strength the next coming days.

Kisses from my girls to all of you.

Congratulations SharePoint Product Team

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:50:00 GMT

With this post I want to congratulate the whole team at Redmond involved in either the development and the evangelization of the new SharePoint version. Travelling the whole world, I have definitely felt the enormous interest in this new version. SharePoint is going to rock! Here in my room at the Radisson in Oslo, I toast to all of you with a bottle (small one :) ) of champagne! Congrats to all of you! Well done!

The best search engine ever!

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:06:00 GMT

Experience it yourself! http://www.msdewey.com/

Trips for the next coming months

Patrick Tisseghem — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 10:11:00 GMT

Last week at TechEd I have met a lot of people that were asking when I would be in their country to have a pint of beer with them, a social talk or even a presentation for one of the local user groups they are involved with. I promised to post my schedule for the next coming months, so here it is. Feel free to contact me (patrick@u2u.be) if you want to do any of the previously mentioned activities :)

13-17 November 2006 - Oslo (Norway)
20-24 November 2006 - Johannesburg (South Africa)
27 Nov - 1 Dec 2006 - Athens (Greece)
8-13 December 2006 - Dubai (Emirates)

15-19 January 2007 - Zaghreb (Croatia)
21-25 January 2007 - Dubai (Emirates)
29 Jan - 2 Feb 2007 - Copenhagen (Denmark)
5 - 9 February 2007 - Budapest (Hungary)
12 - 19 February 2007 - Berlin (Germany)
6 - 8 March 2007 - Paris (France)