“Travel Broadens the Mind but Shallows the Pocket” – there has to be a better word than Shallow there. Moving on.

Just got back from Teched in the wee hours of Sunday morning, it was a good flight on many different levels. Firstly on a “We didn’t die – Huzzah!” basic nutrient form but also surprisingly from the richer course of Jet Blue being surprisingly attentive and friendly. Am I the only one who didn’t know this while I was getting abused again and again on the more mainstream airlines? Let me iterate the ways Jet Blue did things right:

- Bigger plane, even though it was half full. The mainstream airlines tend to fly turbo props into our little airport which are fun but bumpy as hell. I feel like a kite in a wind tunnel sometimes.
- Direct Flights even from my pokey little airport. So sick of “Hubs”.
- In Flight entertainment, even though it was only a couple of hours in the air.
- Actually friendly people. I am normally surprised when I encounter the lesser spotted friendly flight attendant but my admittedly limited two flight experience of Jet Blue netted all friendly people. Maybe they provide free happy pills?
- Good snacks, I haven’t even heard of Tera Blue Chips before but I like them much better than the sad bag of pretzels or now more common “Sweet FA”.

Anyway, unpaid plug for Jet Blue aside (all my plugs are unpaid, in that no one wishes to pay me) lets move back to the more major subject at hand, TechEd. TechEd was good this year, a lot of new stuff coming out – almost too much.

Visual Studio 2012 will mean nothing to non programmers in the crowd but it will significantly change my landscape, a lot of awesome changes in there for us .NET programmers.

Windows 8 will be huge I think – so much so that I bought an extra SSD hard drive that both Newegg and Amazon completely failed to deliver. For the record, Amazon, Tuesday is not Overnight Saturday Delivery. Some fairly hairy complaining later I received a stunning $15 credit which fails to impress me on almost every level. The thing about Windows 8 is that it will probably spur a real uptake on touchscreen monitors – they have baked touch functionality so deep at the core of the experience I genuinely feel that it will be lessened by just using mouse.

The concept of the Metro App on Windows 8 is really cool to me as well. Think, simple apps maybe ones for online shops that you like that actually run on webpages locally but connect back to the server to gather things like products or add items to shopping carts. It is a similar system to that used on iOS or Android apps today but much simpler to make, more fluid and more powerful. So much so that when I have my Windows 8 Release Candidate and Visual Studio 2012 installed, I am going to attempt to make a Hell Inc metro app and then a failytales one.

I will be doing that around my day job, writing comics (down to just a couple of weeks buffer after all our gallivanting around Europe and Florida), my mum arriving for a holiday from England (and really, everyone needs a holiday from England now and then), 4th of July, my birthday, Connecticon and Pici’s mom’s birthday for which we will be traveling to Buffalo. So … wish me luck with that.

-TM Out.

PS People asked about the game in the Sunday comic – it is called Reset and is in fairly early stages. Go to reset-game.net, watch the video and dry hump your screen – I can wait.