Looking at the calendar I realize that had I not left Keane 5 weeks ago I would be celebrating my 15th anniversary with the company today. Looking back over the last 5 weeks I have learned a lot and had a chance to work on projects that I think will prove to have a bigger impact than the work I was doing at Keane. I do and will continue to miss my friends and colleagues at Keane but I am loving the chance I have to learn and do new things with Advaiya. In the end I think the decision to change jobs was a good one. In a bit of irony, my last day with Keane I came home and had a letter directing me to a web site to pick out my 15 year anniversary gift from the company. I did go and look but didn't order since I knew I wasn't going to be working there today.

I got back from Malaysia over the weekend. I intended to post after each talk at TechEd but for some reason I couldn't connect to my web server. I had a good time speaking at the event. I met a lot of smart people who asked good questions. The only thing that I would have liked to do better is to have my demos work better. I was really disappointed at the one that worked in the hotel room and the speakers room but when I got on stage it broke :(

I think the best part of the speaking was when I went off on a tangent on Tuesday and successfully associated an information card with my Windows Live account on stage. It was the first time I had tried it and I was hoping that the beta wasn't closed or that I wouldn't hit an error with the process in front of 200+ people. It worked and I have been using CardSpace to log into my HotMail account ever since then. I will post the steps I followed in a subsequent entry.

I am really excited about the direction that CardSpace is taking and the different scenarios that it will enable.

I also got to do a little sight seeing before I came home. I  had the chance to visit an elephant sanctuary at Kuala Gundar. I saw an add for a credit card in the airport today. It had a family with some of the children touching an elephant. The tag line was something like "reminding your children what awesome really means". I felt that touching and feeding the elephants was truly an awesome experience. The saddest part was seeing this little elephant.

She is about 8 years old and she lost her left front foot in a poachers trap. It was a very sobering sight and makes you think about the impact you have in the world

After the conference was over I went on another tour where I got to feed some silver leaf monkeys. They really loved the green beans that we were feeding them. I was surprised when they started to climb up me. I was really surprised the first time one of the monkeys jumped on my shoulder but I found that they didn't really care about me. They just wanted their food.

I hope to be able to go to Tech Ed South East Asia again next year.

As I prepare to head off to Kuala Lumpur I realized that I hadn't published my schedule. Just in case you are in the area this is what I will be speaking on and when