Last week the man in the brown truck brought me a small black box with very exciting contents, my Samsung Q1 Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC).

What a great little device! So far I'm totally impressed with it. The out of box experience was excellent, getting me up and running in no time. As an existing Tablet PC user, the Q1 was a logical choice for a mobile device, especially during my trip to Germany later this summer. It's light weight and small size will make it an easy addition to gear. I'll post more on the detail of the device, but for now I want to say thanks to Samsung for making it, and thanks to Best Buy for selling it!

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Greg said that my blog looked too dreary, so I decided to make it look at little more cheery.

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A whole lot of thanks need to go out to Fred Stutzman and the rest of the BarCampRDU organizing committee (Paul Jones, Scott Morningstar, Robbie Allen, Ryan Daigle, Terrell Russell, Jackson Fox )for putting on an extremely good event. Thanks to all of you! Thanks as well to Red Hat, Lulu.com, 6th Sense Analytics ,The Aurora Funds, rPath, Council for Entrepreneurial Development, and Blogads for sponsoring the event.

The energy created by brining together such a group with common, yet diverse technology interests is amazing. I hope that was discussed by a few, that we can find a way to get together with more of those people on a regular basis. See you next time! (Pictures of the event can be found here!)

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I'll be spending this weeked attending BarCampRDU (@RedHat HQ, Raleigh, NC) I'm very much looking forward to meeting more of the local geek community, and a few geek celebs that are making a trip out for it. The session list is pretty cool, including (But not limited to):

• Refactoring Your Wetware - Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers likes to talk about how your brain works. Pole-bridging, pragmatic learning, the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and even a little of Getting Things Done are all fair game.
• Social Networks - FredStutzman. We'll spend a session talking about Social Networking Websites, such as Myspace, Facebook and Linked In. We'll look at them, figure out why people use them, and share ideas about how businesses can leverage social networks.
• Open Source VOIP - Scott Morningstar We will take a stock Linksys WRT54GL and install OpenWRT Linux Firmware and Milkfish Open SER implementation. We will set up an account with Junction Networks for inbound and outbound PSTN calls. I will bring several SIP phones ranging from the budgetone 101 to the Cisco 7970G as well as several 802.11 wireless SIP phones. This is everything you need to replace your land line phone using hardware you probably already have. If people bring routers we can flash them up as we go.

THis session will be a good dose of non-Microsoft focussed topics for change.

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In honor of the re-branding of WinFX to .Net 3.0 (Or NetFX 3.0 as some are picking up on) I thought I would share this excellent poster that was so graciously (Shamelessly?) given out at Robert Ingebretsen's most excellent WPF talk at Tech Ed.

There just wasn't enough room in the suitcase to bring it home, so this image is all I have, but I did proudly hang it in my suite in Boston before leaving!

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