As some of you may know that I moved from Indonesia to Australia last year for pursuing my PhD degree in computer vision in Queensland University of Technology. Effectively I was off from MSP activities at that time. And after long await, I got a MSP acceptance letter from Microsoft Australia. I started being an Oz MSP this year.
Being an MSP in Oz, is quite challenging for me. The culture is different. Language is 
different. People in here, tend to be more active and open. Open discussion is usually more often happened in Q&A session. Sometimes, I couldn't catch up with the discussion well. This is maybe because the accent is different from what I have learned before. There are a lot of things I need to catch up in order to do this task smoothly. But, I take that challenge in the admist of my heavy work load as a PhD student. I believe this is a very good opportunity for me to learn something new. Also, the best part of it is that the message is still the same. The main MSP's business is, how you inspire people.
Okay, enough for introduction. Now, I just went home from Ozy MSP Bootcamp 2008 in Sydney. It was a fantastics experience. I still could feel the same atmosphere as I got in Indonesia. Yes, indeed, that's techie talk. We talked about Visual Studio, C#, XNA 
Game SDK, XBox, ASP.NET, MS Office, Ajax, you name it. Their enthusiasm dragged me in. They're very warm, crazy, smart, geeky, inspiring, and funny. Each of them has 'WOW' thing that inspires me. Like for example, there's an MSP from Western Australia. I think he's quite knowledgable in techie hardcore. After he sat, and then he started talking valuable information about techie things. Another example is that MSP who comes back to uni as an undergrad student after working as an IT consultant for 10 years. He's very insighful and experienced. There're many more. I wish I had a faster speaking ability so that I could catch up with the conversation.
So What's on the Bootcamp. It was in Microsoft Sydney Australia office. The office is around
1.5 hour from airport. The office is absolutely bigger and more spacious than BEJ supplied with Big Biztro where you can order some food, capucino, coffee or hot choco (my fave). First Phil from Atomic magazine dropped in, and then it's continued with Office Live meeting demo. Oh btw, the bootcamp was in boardroom 
which is very spacious and luxury and big. It has a multi-view camera which I've never seen before. It's great to see how it works. Lastly, we had a session with Diana Lam about It's Not cheating (A program giving an Office Ultimate for only 75 AUD for academic people instead of paying 1300 AUD). That's for day one. Well, we still had a dinner in Northen Hotel. Too bad, I got a little bit drank there. We started on 10 O'clock on day two. Nothing special in the activities except the lunch :P.
That's a scoop of update from me. Officially, this blog will report not only my hardcore activities but also MSP oz activities. Stay tunned guys! Thanks for Nic (you have to stay tunned with his blog if you wanna see what we're doing in Australia), Karlo, Z and Bernard Oh for this opportunity.
