Matt McSpirit

You may (or may not!) be interested to learn that I have started a 'professional' (or at least more professional than this one!) blog, over at TechNet.  The idea of this blog is to raise awareness of areas such as Virtualisation and Management Technologies here at Microsoft, and also talk about areas of technology that I find cool!  It's not too geeky, honest!

 

Feel free to check it out at http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit

After returning from Warsaw on the Saturday, I was flying again, this time on the 350 mile trip to Edinburgh.  After driving round for what felt like an eternity, trying to find the right long-stay car park, I eventually made it into Heathrow, but then I couldn't find my flippin e-ticket!  So, I'm stood at the BMI self-check-in kiosk, with my tabket PC, looking like I'm about to perform some kind of upgrade on this kiosk, searching for my booking reference!  I found it eventually!

 

When I actually did get on the plane, as usual, I get placed next to a mature lady (silver surfer ;-)) who, upon seeing my laptop, asks me what I do.  As soon as I mention the M word, the lady in question is asking me when the best time to buy a new computer is!  After a short while, I persuaded her to wait until next year, if she could, in order to pick up a PC with Vista installed.

 

Upon arrival in Edinburgh, I decided to save Billy G some money and get the bus to the hotel, rather than taking a cab.  I hope he returns the favour one day!  I was staying at Rick's, on Frederick Street.  The hotel is situated above a bar, which is pretty nice.  I stayed for a quick pint, which just happened to be the most expensive pint in Edinbrough I do believe!  £5!  Peroni!  Hardly cheap as chips hey!  My room was pretty nice - I think they are trying to achieve that whole minimalist look, but it has been done a little bit on the cheap in some places, but overall, it wasn't a bad place!

 

The next day, we were meeting with partners at the Edinburgh office.  It was really cool to get out there and meet some more partners and also customers who were really receptive to our technology offerings.  I think I will be returning to Edinburgh when I get back from Portugal, to continue the project - should be awesome!

 

After a nice meal that evening in Pizza Express, it was time to fly back to Heathrow and then make the long and boring journey back home from the airport.  I was knackered the next day!  I suppose one small consolation is that I will be flying again, to the third different country this week, on Saturday!  Watch out Lisbon - the boys are coming!

Another week, another trip, this time to sunny Poland.  I know, I know, 2 words you may not instantly associate together, Sunny and Poland, but it was!

 

My faithful compadre, Mr Senior, and myself arrived at Warsaw airport on Sunday 23rd April, in order to do abit of sightseeing before the training course started on the Monday, however, for hunger reasons, we found ourselves drawn to "Champions" sports bar, located within our hotel, the Warsaw Marriott for some food and drinks.  This was a cool hotel, it had quite a few restaurants, along with a really top notch gym and swimming pool (including a jacuzzi) and also a....Casino!  We walked into Champions only to hear banging disco music and a cocktail-making competition in full flow!  Champions has a full sized boxing ring right in the middle of the venue, and this is where the cocktail-making competition was taking place.  There were guys throwing bottles all over the place, shaking their drinks to crazy euro-pop tunes!  It was nuts!  Not enough to put me off my food though!

 

Before we knew it, we were well into the evening, and decided to test the water in the old casino.  I wasn't brave enough to play, but James never lets us down and gave his best shot at blowing as many chips as possible!  He's a jammy git!

 

So, what was this training all about?  Well, this one was aimed at improving our presentation skills, and we'd all heard from previous graduates that it was an intense week, with a great deal of evening work, and they were not wrong.  We didnt leave the hotel, not even to eat, until Thursday evening.  Every day, we'd be tought different techniques and aspects of presenting and how we could improve on them.  We'd also have to prepare a presentation for the following day, that often had us working late into the night.  Over the 4 days, I presented on topics such as SuperComputing (High Performance Computing), Virtualisation and finally, Competing with Google.  Each presentation was recorded to a personal DVD, which was then reviewed with your mentor that evening, and problem areas were identified to build upon for the next day.  Overall, everyone's presentation skills improved, and this proves that the scheme is very effective and will enable all of us to present more effectively in the future.

 

By Thursday, we were all pretty tired, and our energy levels had been pretty much dropping day by day, yet there were alot of people up for a night out!  We started at a traditional Polish restaurant, but beleive it or not, it didn't even serve alcohol!  Instead, we indulged on a lovely apple-based beverage known as "Compote" - yum!  After about 26 jugs full, and what could only be described as about 6 animals, we left the restaurant and headed to a club, which had 40ml Smirnoff Red vodka shots at less than £1.20 a pop.  Ding Dang Doo.  Considering it was a Salsa & Latino night, everyone had a brilliant time, and the training room was a very quiet place the next morning ;-)

 

Friday afternoon, once the training had completed, was spent in the pool and jacuzzi, followed by a trip by the remaining graduates to another nice restaurant, followed by a trip to another club, but everyone had partied a little hard the previous night and we left a little early, apart from Mr Senior.... ;-)

 

Saturday was a bad bad day for English football, for 2 reasons.  Number 1, Chelsea bought the Premiership for the 2nd season in a row, and Number 2, the clumsy plonker, Paolo Ferriera crunched Wayne Rooney and he could potentially miss the World Cup.  Great.  There is always next time I guess....

 

On a final note, and this is one of those times where a picture is worth a thousand words, on Wednesday night, I thought I felt particularly hungry, and decided to order the "large" hotdog from the menu at Champions.  I did wonder why the waitress laughed at me when I confirmed the order, but I realised why she laughed when she brought out my meal.  Not only were people coming over to take photos of said hotdog, but it also came with about 7 potatoes worth of chips.  Did I finish it?  Not even close.  I'll never look at a hotdog in the same way again!  God bless Champions!

Just a quick note this time (Yes - really!) to say that last Friday, the 31st March, I passed my first 'Microsoft Certified Professional' examination.  This particular one was 70-270 (Installing, Configuring & Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional) and I achieved a pass grade of 778, which equates to about 78%.  The pass rate is 700 (70%).  Some of the questions are pretty darn hard if im being honest!

 

If you want to know more about the 70-270 exam, and what it measures, click here.  Like I said, this is the first MCP exam I have taken, and before the end of my graduate year is over, I need to have taken another 6. Great!  Eventually, all things going well, I'll have the MCSE, which is the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer!  Sounds reet posh for a northern boy hey!

Some of the other exams I will be taking are listed on the right hand side.  Click on them for more information!

 

Cheers!

Without doubt, one of the best weeks of my life, from both an enjoyment perspective, and from a personal development perspective.

 

So, what was the deal?  Basically, 24 of us Technical Sales grads, from around Europe, Middle East & Africa, piled on the coach from Reading at about 2pm on the Sunday afternoon, and set off on the 5 hour journey into the depths of Wales.  Things were going fine until I realised a had brought absolutely no form of musical device with me, apart from the 12 tracks that I had stored on my phone, which meant a number of loops to start off with before that got boring!  Of course we had to play the obligatory “Guess the celebrity within 20 questions” and also I-Spy, where Bans (Yes, Bans “Frisk Me” Sagoo), took it upon himself to introduce a Birmingham variation of the word Window.  No wonder we gave up after finding out the word was in fact “Bindow”.  Nice one Bans!

 

Just after crossing into Wales, we had a team stop at Burger King!  Classy!  We still had about 2 hours to go, and I'll tell you know, 15 minutes is not enough to get a whole Super-Dooper-Mega-Double-Bacon-Whopper Meal with extra Chicken Bites down my neck!  I had a good go though!

 

After meandering through the Welsh countryside (think Postman Pat, and you’ll understand!) we arrived near to the destination, but the final 400 yards cannot be accessed by coach, so we all piled out and walked the remaining distance.  This place was pretty darn remote.  A couple of miles further into Wales and there are some places without electricity!  Now that is remote!

 

So, where were we staying?  Check out Elan Valley Lodge, which can be found in (wait for it…), Elan Valley!  As you can see from the pictures of the lodge, it is no Hilton Hotel, but it’s not meant to be.  The accommodation was more than enough, and the food was also pretty good, with a wide variety of choices each day.  The first evening was a kind of introductory session, which enabled us to get to know our trainers for the week, and also each other a little more!  After these frolics were completed, we were introduced to our new best friend for the week – the honesty bar!  The basis behind this was, there was a big fridge, stocked with Wine, Fosters, Guinness, Strongbow, Coke, etc, and whenever you take one, you mark it off on your sheet and this is totted up at the end of the week.  Dangerous!

 

So, the week itself kicked off properly on the Monday morning, where the 24 of us were divided up into 3 teams of 8.  Each of the teams trundled off to do some short exercises, all with teamworking as the essence of the activities.  These activities included floating an egg down from a first floor window using materials provided, describing shapes blindfolded and working together to pass an assault course!  Pretty cool me thinks!  After each session of activity, mainly in the evening, there was a chance for you to give feedback to your other team members, and they can feed back to you.  It's also a chance for you to discuss the positive and negative aspects from the day’s activities.  We also had to complete a personal diary for each day of the week.  The day’s work concluded at about 9:30pm, so quite a long day, but the evening gave us chance to sit around and chill, and get to know each other a little better, playing some card games etc.

 

You know in my Chertsey entry, when I said I went to the gym and couldn’t last 5 minutes on the treadmill?  Well, Kristian, my good Danish chum, and Lee, from Belgium, decided it would be a great idea to go for a run before breakfast.  At 7am.  So off we went, freezing, starving, running along for what purpose exactly?  To see how unfit we are of course!  I thought I was going to be sick when I got back to the room!  The theme for Tuesday was Support and Challenge.  Basically, as a team of 8, we had 5 exercises to choose from, and we could choose 3 of them, and 1 as a reserve.  The choices were Rock Climbing, Leap of Faith, High-Y, Orienteering and a Journey on Foot.  As a group, we decided to take on the Rock Climbing, the Leap of Faith, Orienteering and if we had time, the Journey on Foot.  I'm sure you can guess what the orienteering entailed, aswell as the Rock Climbing, but the leap of faith, well, that was pretty scary!  A small triangular platform, suspended on 3 wires, between 3 trees, 13 metres up in the air, with a tiny rope ladder up to it!  You had to basically climb up and jump off!  So who’s first?  Yours truly!  That evening, we had to made a video, in our team, to demonstrate characteristics of effective teamworking.  Don’t ask me where it came from, but we decided it would be a great idea to revolve our film around our fictional character, Mr Egg!  (We’d had a drink by this point!)  All 3 team’s video’s were pretty funny to be honest!  A hard nights work!

 

We awoke Wednesday morning to find Elan Valley covered by about 10 inches of snow!  Great!  As you can imagine, it was flippin freezing, and it also meant we couldn’t go for a run first thing!  Shame….  It also meant that some of the activities for the day would have to be changed, so mountain biking, archery (we’d lose all the arrows!) and a few other things were out of the question, but they were replaced by snowman building and blindfolded Land Rover driving to name but a few!  The whole idea of this exercise, that would take 24 hours in total, and involve the 24 of us being split into 2 teams of 12, was to give each person an experience of leading the team, coordinating resources, organising and allocating tasks etc.  It was a brilliant experience.

 

Our last full day was Thursday, and it was a continuation of the 24 hour exercise, that would conclude around midday, and what followed was an entire afternoon of feedback and learning from our experiences.  That evening, back in our original teams of 8, we had to give a presentation of our week at Elan Valley Lodge.  Everyone was shattered, all out of ideas, and it's not until we had a few drinks that the ideas started to flow and we got through it!  After all the presentations were done and dusted, it was time for a few drinks, a few card games and lots of laughs.  The next morning, and more to the point, the 5 hour bus journey home, were not pretty….

 

When will I learn!

Another week, another training session….this time, Sales & Business Acumen were the order of the day!  We arrived in Staines on the Sunday evening, checked in to the Thames Lodge Hotel and then decided to go out to dinner, and following on from Seattle, there was only ever going to be one thing on the menu….Steak baby!  We went to a restaurant called Outback, and as you can guess, it had an Australian theme.  The food was pretty darn nice, so if you are ever in that area, make sure you pop in.

 

The training started on the Monday morning, and was actually based in Chertsey, where Microsoft have some small offices.  The week was due to be split into 2 courses, the first over 2 days, and the second was to last 3 days.  The first 2 days was purely Sales training, and involved a lot of PowerPoint slides and reading with some elements of interactivity.  The second half of the week was Business Acumen training, the idea of which was to teach the group about business processes, using an interactive format.  Basically, there were 4 teams of about 6 people, and we had to each run our business, using a huge board-game style board, for a total of 2 years (8 quarters).  We learnt such aspects as Balance Sheets, Profit & Loss, Revenue’s, Gross Margins etc, so for someone with a Computing Science background, it was pretty darn useful.  After we had completed one quarter, the instructor would introduce a new concept that we would have to take into account for the remaining time.  By the end of the week, our team, Synergise, came out on top (We had to present to a Venture Capitalist on why he should invest in our business rather than any of the other teams).  To celebrate our success, we went for a team lunch to Ask Restaurant, in Chertsey.

 

Other highlights during the week included amassing a respectable bar bill, eating some pretty nice food and having a really top meal with 6 of us at Pizza Express in Staines.  The food was pretty good and we were all full to bursting when we got back to the hotel!  We also found a pretty smart pub called “The Town Hall” in Staines.  We decided to go here to watch the 1st Chelsea vs. Barcelona game .  We went with some of the Spanish grads – it was awesome!  Chelsea score – the crowd goes nuts in the pub, but when Barca score, there are 2 guys jumping up and down and all eyes looking at our table!  Time to leave me thinks!  One night I also decided to indulge in a visit to the gym.  I wish I hadn’t.  I've decided that I really do need to start playing some kind of sport again and get fit!  I lasted about 5 minutes on the treadmill!

 

For the final night,  there were a few birthdays among the EMEA grads, so a large number of us decided to go to Pizza Express.  We had a huge table, nearly the length of the restaurant!  I was being taught a few pieces of Italian in preparation for our trips there at the end of the year.  I was starting to pick it up!  It came to the end of the night, and we had to pay for it (obviously), but there was no way that 1 person was going to pick up the whole bill for 37 people!  Out came about 30 AMEX’s!  The waiter’s face was an absolute picture.  30 minutes it took to pay!  Crazy!

Don’t forget to look in the photo album for some of the pics from Chertsey & Staines!

What a nuts week!
 
On the Monday I had the chance to visit the MSN offices in London.  The offices are actually in Soho, but they bear a distinct resemblance to the batcave as I have no recollection of how to get there!  I'm sure my loving colleagues probably drugged and blindfolded me to get there, but hey, not to worry!  Some of the guys and I decided to have a quick bite to eat at Wagamama's while discussing the intricacies of Dave's PSP.
 
The point of the actual trip to London (yes...there was one!) was to visit Life Squared.  The idea of Life Squared is to give visitors a showcase of the latest digital lifestyle technology.  Compared to the eHome in Redmond, it falls abit short, but that is aimed pretty far into the future.  Life Squared is more of a realistic look at what Microsoft can offer in the very near future.  We looked round things such as interactive TV, Windows Vista, powerful media centre solutions and more.  Pretty funky me thinks!
 
In the evening we paid a visit to an Indian restaurant in Chelsea Harbour; Chutney Mary which was just about the poshest curry I've ever had!  From having curries in Rusholme in Manchester, where your plate is piled high with everything, it's abit of a change being presented with delicately positioned chicken and expertly shaped rice!
 
So that was the Monday, now what about Tuesday you ask?  Quiet day in the office!  Wednesday was where it picked up again, with a team meeting, again in London, but this time at a members club, called Home House.  Now this was a swanky place, especially for a Preston boy!  Put it this way...We pile out of a taxi outside the place, in Portman Square, dressed in jeans, trainers, t-shirts etc, and who walks out of the place?  Guy Ritchie!  Now there are certain people out there....cough...Senior...cough...that say they saw him first, but I did!  All the waiters and waitresses had suits on, there were expensive murals on the walls - it was just about the poshest place I've ever been!
 
Thursday was another meeting-filled day, with an early start at the Hilton in Wokingham, near Reading.  This finished about 2pm, and from there, it was straight to the Novotel in Hammersmith, to get ready for the Microsoft Mid-Year Party!  The name of the night was Decadence, and as well as to celebrate the Mid-Year, it was also to celebrate 30 years of Microsoft.
 
What a mental night!  MS had booked out Hammersmith Palais, and put on a free bar with snacks, and the night started at 7:30pm!  Gina Yashere was the compere for the night, but the list of acts, for a staff party is just crazy:

As you can imagine, a 7:30pm start, combined with a free bar means Matt has a bad head in the morning.  Say no more.  The office was very quiet when I walked in the next morning....

 

I hope you enjoy the photo's!