Rolling Through Missoula and the University of Montana
3/18/2008 6:13:39 AM
Hi, Lance here in Missoula, MT. Last Wednesday after pulling nearly an all-nighter (coding of course), I woke up in the early afternoon and checked The Code Trip website. Wow! The map was online, and the little bus icon was right in the middle of campus. I had to get down there.
Several weeks ago, when I first found out that The Code Trip was coming through Missoula, I sent off an email to Tim. All I had to hear was "developers", "RV", "Road Trip". This was something I wanted to be a part of.
We came up with the perfect place to park the bus. Smack in the middle of campus. The center of the UM campus is a nice big park surrounded by trees and buildings with students crossing back and forth to class, throwing frisbee, and slacklining. What better place for a bus to stand out?
And it did get lots of attention. There were lots of questions. Apparently, not many students knew about The Code Trip. Tim, Jason, and Woody spread the word about Microsoft's new DreamSpark program where students can get MS Developer tools for free. One student stopped by to share a problem that she was having cutting and pasting in Excel. I bet when you work for Microsoft you always get questions like this. It's hard enough to know the few programs that I've written well enough to troubleshoot without seeing, let alone any problem in any Microsoft program.
I arrived after they had shared with students what it was like to be a developer, but I made it to the main presentations that evening in the UC (University Center). Woody talked about IE8, and the webcams he's been working on for the bus using the directshow.net library. Jason showed off the code he wrote that pulls the GPS coordinates from the bluetooth GPS, and posts the current bus location to the website along with their bearing and the closest city using some "math crap" to calculate distance on a spherical Earth and some XML from NOAA listing city locations. I bought "the best freaking GPS" that he recommended, and I keep bugging him to send me his code. He says it will be up on CodePlex soon. Tim presented Expression and some cool Silverlight stuff, he also gave me the floor to announce the newly-formed Missoula .NET User Group.
Afterwards, Jason lost out on rock paper scissors and had to ride in the back of my truck to the hotel. It must have been a cold ride, I had the heater cranked up. He threw paper against two scissors. I guess he didn't know that scissors are the safest opening move against experienced RPSers, since "rock is for rookies." Better luck next time.
I'm kicking myself that I didn't hitch a ride back from Boise to Missoula on the bus. That thing is posh (and I'm not talking about plain old semantic HTML). Jason showed me and my friend Andrew around the bus down at Code Camp. It was our first time presenting, and it was good. If you get a chance I highly recommend Code Camp in Boise. There were over 400 attendees.
Thanks Code Trip, for giving me a chance to geek out in Missoula!