Kenny Spade

I didn’t write about it before, not wanting to jinx it, but a couple months ago, I interviewed with Microsoft, and was offered a position as the Academic Developer Evangelist for Northern California. I’m on my third day today, and I’m finally at the point where I can actually start doing work rather than spending my time filling out paperwork and getting set up, though I still have plenty of that to do. My position as an ADE is great in that I’m given a chance to get students and faculty excited in the Microsoft Platform. One of the ways that I can do this is by giving presentations to students about Visual Studio, XNA, PopFly, or just about anything I’m interested in, and feel that they would be interested in. I also have the ability to write code of my own and post it online, or make up videos or screencasts. I’m looking into getting some video equipment to record some of the sessions I attend, and to make some videos of my own. One of these events is the Silicon Valley Code Camp, which I hope to be able to present at this time around.

The second day of Maker Faire was much more laid back than the first. I did a few presentations, learned some more about the projects I was sharing a booth with, and helped fix some code for a couple of them. One of them was a robotic whiteboard, for which I helped get the pen toggling code running. You can now click the stick to toggle an actuator's position, which will lift the pen off of the whiteboard or put it back on. The guy who made the board told me he needs a stronger motor to make it work, but he knows exactly how to implement it now that the code is going. The other project I got a chance to help out with was a web cam to LED sign application. He wanted to make sure that you could only take one picture at a time and wait for the screens to render to prevent errors, so we added a delay timer. He also wanted to fix the aspect ratio a bit, because the gaps on the LED boards were elongating the picture. We looked at stretching the width to make it look better, but ended up just skipping some lines, so the picture looked like you were behind bars. It looked good, but I think the other fix would have been better.

I also had more of a chance to look at the other booths. I joined the EFF, who wanted a whole lot of personal information, considering. One of the booths was for a magazine called Ambidextrous, which is a project running out of Stanford. I'm going to see if I can work with them once I start working with more schools. And, I got a bag full of ducks from one of the ADEs who was looking to offload some of his swag.

I'm absolutely determined to go back to Maker Faire next year.

I'm in a session geared towards students at Community One. The presenter is talking about gamers raising gamers. I think about this topic all the time. I'm absolutely sure that my kids will be gamers. I'm making sure that they read some of the books that I read as a kid, and are playing games with me. In fact, my daughter can own the game I'm writing now.

I haven't decided yet which other sessions I'll be sitting in on, but I do want to see the Project Darkstar talk.

I'm at a friend's house right now in Mountain View, getting ready for the second day of Maker Faire. The first day was a lot of fun. I got to walk around and take a look at some of the booths, but spent most of my time with the guys over at the Microsoft booth.

There was a pretty cool game they had there where you used a cell phone camera to pick up game pieces to build an Incredible Machine with. I was #1 for a short time, but my reign came to an end after I suggested a way that someone could beat my score, and they used the method to absolutely trounce me. One of the guys there showed me some of the other uses for the tech, including an awesome augmented reality app that displayed 3d objects oriented based on the marker. I'm going to talk to them a bit further to see if this is something that I can use in some of my events.

I also got the chance to spend some time demoing some of the tech they had at the booth, giving the other guys a bit of a break. I got to practice demoing tech that I'd never seen before, similar to when I was at the Imagine Cup event a couple weeks ago showing off Microsoft Sync. This time I showed off Clint's self balancing skateboard, garnering a lot of sympathy for the fact that it wasn't functioning because the gyroscope was stolen, along with a couple of laptops, in a smash and grab from Clint's car. I also showed off Deep Zoom, which I had played with before, and Photosynth, which I was seeing for the first time. I watched the demo for Photosynth twice, then figured I knew as much about it as I needed to, so I jumped right in and started demoing. During the brief breaks I had, I played with the different features a bit and found it to be a cool little system. I can't wait until they release it in whatever form it's going to be released in and let me play with it.

I'm heading to the Bay Area this weekend to attend a couple tech conferences. I was invited to meet up with some of the guys from Microsoft to hang out at their booth at Maker Faire, so I'll be there on Saturday and Sunday. I should be working on the game I'm developing with XNA for my senior project to get it ready before my presentation in two weeks. I also hear that the Popfly team is going to be showing off something new, so I'll be at their booth for a bit. Then, on Monday, I wasn't going to be able to make CommunityOne, but the instructor for my class on Monday is going to be attending, so class was canceled, freeing up my day. It's great how things work out like this sometimes.