Skip to main content

2 posts tagged with "microsoft"

View All Tags

· 2 min read
Greg Roberts

Part of my job involves keeping up on the latest technology, which sometimes means going to geek tech conferences, like PDC,  all in an effort to keep my "nerdness" as high as possible. For those of you that are normal and don't follow such things, the PDC or Professional Developers Conference, is a Microsoft only event that is sort of like a Car Show for Microsoft Products.   Although, at this car show you get to meet the people who make the car, have classes about driving them, get to actually take a test drive and are wined and dined throughout the whole week.  So really, it's nothing like a car show except that they are both usually in a enormous convention center.

Some of the highlights for me involved the free dinner that our team got that was sort of a result of the work we had done earlier in the year with our GPS product.  Microsoft also rented out Universal Studios for a night and gave everyone free alcohol and food, which is sort of every kids dream to be in an amusement park with no lines and everything is free.  Here are some pics from that debacle:

IMG_1037 IMG_1081 IMG_1050

Above is the peeps from my team (Sitara, Jamie, me, Kevin) and in the middle is what you get when you give away things for free.

IMG_1068 IMG_1074 IMG_1042

Oh yeah and the park was done up for Halloween which was really sweet.

IMG_1034 photo.jpg

Pdc2008 Pdc2008

And yes I did go to the convention...

photo.jpg

Finally#

I also made it on to one of the Microsofties blogs,Virtual Earth PDC Team, just another notch in the old nerd totem pole (see below).

image+ image2 = ME

· 2 min read
Greg Roberts

I'm not sure if everyone knows about where I've been working the past year and a half, but I've been at a company called DriveCam.  We build a two-way camera that gets mounted in a vehicle and is always recording video/audio and g-force information.DC3-Mirror-R2 When the driver exhibits risky driving behaviors we capture that data and send the video to our analysts for review and through that process drivers for fleets get graded on how good of a driver they are.  The end output is a web site that our customers use to see how well their fleets are doing and they end up saving tons of money on lower insurance costs and less accidents. wheeww.

Anyways, there is a point to all of this... One of the things that I've been working on is adding GPS to our unit to allow for real time tracking and to give us more detailed reporting data.  I ended up using a beta version of Microsoft's latest database software (SQL Server 2008), and when they got wind of it they got really interested in what we were doing.  Long story short, they made my project sort of a poster-child for their release and they came out and did some filming and sent me out to Seattle for an interview.  The whole thing is now being released and you can see my videos on their site: