Jeff Makes Software

In case you haven't already seen it, this is the drool-worthy thing using Silverlight 2. Gasp!

Kawasaki took no time to take cheap shots at Ballmer, working in chair throwing jokes in the first minute.

I just got out of a panel discussion that included the guy from Me.dium, a VC, Scoble, Kevin Rose, and some other guy I don't remember. Interesting discussion, and the general theme was do right by your users, and find the mix of advertising and subscription models to pay the bills.

I'm sitting here in Nikhil Kothari's session on ASP.NET AJAX, and he's going through some of the more basic stuff to start. So I'm reading e-mail and kinda scoping out the room. First of all, there's a guy with a MacBook Air sitting in front of me. It's very cool. I couldn't help but notice he was looking at Google Analytics, and that his site has had 14 million visitors and 124 million page views in the last month. Gasp! I guess he can afford that laptop.

Here's something I did not expect. This is the first session I've gone to that was very heavily code/developer-centric. I'm very surprised to see how many women there are here. It's no secret that this profession tends to be a sausage party, either because of gender tendencies or some kind of discrimination (I honestly don't know or care). The only reason I even notice is because gender and racial diversity in work, to me, feels more like real life. It's hard to explain exactly.

OK... Nikhil's getting to the good stuff, gotta pay attention.

If you're in the SEO session about to start, and you're trying to take a picture of one of the speakers with your big zoom lens, I'm sitting behind you, watching you. You're being creepy.

Ozzie has been regarded as the thinker who will take the place of Gates and set the tone for the direction of the company's software. I think that's a pretty huge burden.

Only in Vegas, right? I just sat down for the first keynote, and they've got a Johnny Cash impersonator singing on stage to warm up the crowd.

I didn't know they were doing it, but they're screening [i]King of Kong[/i] here. I figured I might as well hang out and watch it and surf for porn on Microsoft's dime. There's a Q&A after the movie... and if it's the guys from the movie (the "champ" is supposed to try and beat the record at the party tomorrow night), I gotta say, they'd make the computer geeks in this building look like well-adjusted lady's men. I mean, this Billy Mitchell guy had a perfect Pac-Man game... every dot, every ghost. Who does that?

They have an epic sound system.

Looking around at the crowd for the first time (there are around a hundred people here for the screening), I'm surprised there aren't more Macs around. But the composition is what made it exciting when I was here two years ago... nerds, designer types that look like rock stars, a few suits, lots of 'Softies. I dig that vibe. As I've said before, I picked this conference over others because it's not just endless code demos.

Really looking forward to this week!