Monday at SWMUG and Tablet PC is OK!

Monday the 6th of March 2006 saw Uber Tableteer Hugo Ortega once again join the rambunctious crowd that is Sydney Windows Mobile User Group (SWMUG). Not only is this group a charming, eloquent, geekish conglomerate that demands the latest and greatest from each other, but their also fun to hang out with [I highly recommend you join them once a month for a chat!]

My fist encounter with SWMUG was inspirational, enough for me to come back for a second look - but this time with company. In town was Craig Pringle, Tablet PC MVP from New Zealand, and Dr. Neil Roodyn also a Tablet MVP. While Dr. Neil and I have history together, the tale of the night was how Craig and I met. Craig, upon perusing the internet for Tablet related blogs (now a habitual act) came across my Uber Tablet Blog! We started commenting on each others sites and continued offline our Tablet related banter via Skype; a little ol’ lady sitting next to Craig on his inbound flight even went as far as to express concern over me picking Craig up at the Airport – considering that we’d never had a face-to-face and only met via blogging.

SWMUG is run by Microsft Employee Roger Lawrence, an uberly geekish man that stands over his gathering with much accord. He brought a notebook running Vista (very impressive) to only be challenged to a game of one upmanship by Neil with his Tablet PC running Vista (impressive too). For the evening Roger had managed to negotiate, for the third year running, access to the “XBOX 360 Lounge” (Digital Life Room) within the confines of Microsoft. For those of you not yet exposed to this lounge it is a limited access room only, because once you walk in, there's no real work get’s done!!!

This time I strolled into SWMUG monthly with my Sahara Slate PC under one arm, my sexy Lenovo X41 under the other and a head full of inking. I'd been given the chance to talk about Active Words but realised that delegating the responsibility to Craig was a good move, especially when you consider that it was a New Zealander that had Ink Enabled the application in the first place. If you haven't tried ActiveWords then I highly recommend it; it really is the multi-purpose programmable button missing on all PC's, Tablet or not.
You can download a fully functional Strokeit. Believe it or not, this app was developed to be used by a mouse on a normal PC; the fact is that when installed on a Tablet PC it is a very powerful tool. (Download Strokeit Here!)

The XBOX 360 lounge Microsoft Australia

The evening was hijacked by the Three Downunder Tableteers (Neil, Craig and Hugo) which caused Dr. Neil to write on his blog: “I was going to give a presentation on ActiveSync development but for various reasons that got side tracked and then canned.” For your pleasure I have recorded a quick pan of the XBOX Room with my digital camera. Be Quick! Have a look before someone from Microsoft forces me to take it down.

During the course of the evening I also managed to sit with Dr. Neil and Craig long enough to record “Talk’n Tablet Downunder – Show #3.”