By Admin Account on 7/14/2008

The venue for your event is one of the most important decisions you will face when planning a conference. There are trade-offs with every location so be prepared to compromise.  A few vital things that you want your venue to offer are:

• Parking which will support your maximum capacity
• At minimum of 3 rooms, one of which must support you maximum capacity
  • Why 3 rooms?  Because you want to give people a choice.  Two sessions are fine for a small event, but when you are talking over 150 people it is rare that two topics will cover something of interest to everyone.  Additionally, it allows you to spread out your attendance more which makes many people feel more at ease to pay attention, ask a question, etc...
  • Your capacity planning should not be set to your largest room size.  If you have a room which sits 200 people, but your other ro ... Read More »
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By Admin Account on 7/7/2008

So I came across this neat tool called ZoomIt which was put out by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals fame. This is really a nice way to give presenters a way of bringing parts of the screen up close and personal.  I have played with it some and recommend you give it a look.  I did notice that it doesn't seem to work with my mutliple montior setup, but I wouldn't have that during a demo/presentation anyway.  The screen shot below is of the options screen, the application itself runs in the System Tray and is actived by keystrokes or the tray context menu.  Nice!

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By Admin Account on 6/23/2008

     I want to tackle the most important question you should ask yourself before moving forward with your technical event. Why do YOU want to do a technical event? I do not intend to make all my posts philosophical, but to a degree this one requires it. For different people you will find different reasons. If you are deciding this on your own it makes it easier because you know why. I hope you will think deeply though to make sure you are doing it for the right reason. If you have some others involved who want to put the event together sit down and discuss everyone’s reason. Yes, there will be those who won’t be honest, but if you ask it may make them think about what to expect.
     For me it started as an opportunity to do something special for our User Group, as I discussed in my previous post, but it quickly turned into something bigger for me. I developed a passion for growing other developers and the d ... Read More »