Martin Shoemaker is speaking on April 17th at the West Michigan .NET User Group. His topic is Dee Jay: A voice-controlled Juke Box for Windows Vista. This is an application that Martin is working on. For those of you that don’t know Martin, he is one of the greatest advocate for a lot of the new human interface technologoes that are coming our of Microsoft in the Ink and Voice areas. He is the creator of Tablet UML and a lot of other tools that work well on tablets. He has called me on many nights cursing the speach recognition engines in Windows XP. However, he’s been absolutely thrilled with the voice recognition in Vista. I’ve actually heard that from a couple of different sources. It should be, as most of Martin’s talks are, an entertaining talk with a lot of content. For a preview of some of the content, you should read Martin’s posts on the subject here – http://www.tabletumlnews.com/speech_and_voice_(managed_sapi)/.

BTW: Martin also wrote these books.

Link to West Michigan .NET User Group

I’m in the middle of the ArcReady tour around the Heartland district (That’s Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee). Tim Landgrave spoke in Detroit, MI yesterday and did a bangup job as always. It was fantastic to sit and soak in the knowledge that he has gained through the many years that he’s been in business as a consultant on a tremendous number of different projects. He brings a lot of great stories and antidotes that we can all relate to from these varius projects. The only issue is that each of the presentation brings out slightly different sets of antidotes depending on the questions and audience reactions so really, I’d like to sit through all 11 of these rather than just 3 or 4 of them.

I got some questions about the presentation so I thought I’d answer some of them here. First, the names of the books that were referenced in the Patterns and Anti-Patterns section were:

Second question that I’m getting a lot is when and where can I get the presentation? We will be posting it on http://www.ArcReady.com as soon as the tour is over.

The question that I have for you is what topics/speakers would you like to see in the future for this series? Feel free to email me direct or leave answers in the comments.

Link to Microsoft ArcReady: Reinforcing the Foundations of Solutions Architecture

Ever since I read Bill Wagner‘s post on the topic I’ve been sitting here in stunned silence not really knowing how to react. I guess it really does just take few bad apples to spoil it for everyone.

I truly hope that there is a resolution to this quickly and I pray that Kathy’s voice is not lost forever. It’s an amazing voice that can post on everything from Crash course in learning theory to Tech T-Shirts for Girls and every post is a gem.

Link to Creating Passionate Users: Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

I get this question quite often – as do a lot of Microsoft folk. I can’t answer it better than Gerardo Dada does on his blog here – Link to GerardoDada : Windows Mobile 6 Upgrades for your phone

I’m putting this on my blog because it’s easier than remembering and typing in Gerardo’s blog… 🙂

In context of selling very exclusive high dollar items… “I’d rather sell the bricks for the Great Wall…” – Bill Gates, Chairman o= f Microsoft – 3/13/2007 at the MVP Summit.”

I can’t believe that they actually put the word doodad in the instuctions! That’s fun…

* Sent from a Windows Mobile 5 Device