Microsoft Dreamway 2008
This Microsoft event is taking place on October 3rd, on Lisbon at the Centro Cultural de Belém, and guess what? That's right, I will be there 
thanks to being an MSP I get to attend the event without having to pay a dime. Neat huh? Can barely wait to see Monke.... I mean, Steve Ballmer on stage with all his energy 
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Here's the schedule I picked:
8h30 - Welcome Coffee
9h15 - Dev01 - Software development: The current status and future trends of technological development
10h15 - Coffee Break
10h45 - Dev02 - Creating rich applications using Silverlight 2.0 (2 sessions)
12h45 - Lunch
14h40 - Keynote
Dreamway: Microsoft today and tomorrow, Steve Ballmer
IE8: pushing the web forward, Miguel Caldas
16h00 - ITP04 - SQL Server 2008 as an enterprise grade database platform - How to manage and provide robust, reliable, scalable and innovative solutions
17h00 - Coffee Break
17h30 - Dev09 - Windows Presentation Foundation: How can we take advantage of this technology to improve the user experience
So, yeah, it's my first event of the kind and I'm hoping it will be a great experience to learn 
I'll keep you readers posted on how it goes.
MSP Team Building 2009
First off, my apologies for having gone for so long without posting anything, but the truth is that I have been too busy to think about my blog. I have had my vacations on Lagos and right after that, I went to the far North of Portugal with the rest of the Portuguese Microsoft Student Partners.
It was a great experience, an amazing chance to learn from people who have been in our shoes at some point and have thrived brilliantly, and also a fabulous opportunity to get to know the other MSPs and to make new friends. All of this was certainly achieved. I met some really great people, some really smart and brilliant guys and the scenery was absolutely amazing. I know some people prefer beaches and all sunny weather and that stuff, me I enjoy mountains, cool breezes and deep, green valleys so the place was perfectly picked, except that it was oddly warm for this time of the year, but oh well... you can't understand weather these days anymore.
The funniest/weirdest experience was definitely showering to the light of a flashlight. Right as we were getting ready to leave, a massive thunderstorm fell upon the place with lots of raining, and all I remember was hearing a big *KABOOM* and all of a sudden I was in a completely dark bathroom. One of my mates (Nuno Sousa) kindly borrowed me his flashlight and that's how I had to finish my shower.
All in all and everything considered, it was a wonderful weekend and well worth the effort of spending 6 hours in a train 
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Me Giving The Keynote Speech
(Not really the keynote that is just me receiving the MSP card and presenting myself)
Solid State Musical Tesla Coil
Ok, so this isn't much in concordance with what I have posted before but hey, it is still technology at its peak and I loved the concept. For those who don't know, Tesla Coils get their name from their inventor, Nikola Tesla. The initial idea was to actually transport energy through wireless means, very much like Intel is attempting except that with Intel's plans apparently there's no human electrocution involved. I know, sad 
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Anyhow, I'm going to leave you to the point of this blog post which is the use of Tesla Coils pretty much as speakers. Some guys built the paraphernalia needed to convert musical waves into digital tones, so that they can afterwards be used as triggers to the coils. Typically we wouldn't hear such a coil ressonate, but the whole idea is that they turn the coil on and off enough times per second to insert the noise into a range that is actually audible by humans. You can learn more about it on this video, which explains it briefly. Don't bother if you're not a tech geek.
Now, to the actual amazing videos, we have:
Tetris Theme
Mario Bros Theme
Zelda Theme
Ghostbusters Theme
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, simply because it jaw-dropped me. If you did enjoy it, please feel free to drop me a comment, or better yet, DIGG this article .
As an end note, if you like this concept, I would also recommend watching the movie The Prestige with the great Christian Bale (I'm sorry, now I'm just teasing the Batman fans...) which happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time. Enjoy!
Google Chrome Released
Here it is, the browser made by the guys at Google. First things first, and a thank you to Pedro Sousa is due for having brought this to my attention as I had no idea that Google was even working on their own browser.
To be honest, I have been trying Google Chrome for a few minutes now and I was very impressed. It looked like and improved Firefox but now I've just logged into my blog and the rust started to show. Basically, in the admin panel of wordpress, everything is out of place and a real mess. Who is to blame? I have no clue. But all of this worked on Firefox...
I think that the major advantage I have found so far is the fact that each tab runs on a different process, which is the way things should be. That way, when one page crashes, it isn't your whole browser that goes down but just that very page. In a time where web exploits are at their peak, this is very important. Also kudos to the fact that you can easily detach tabs from a window into a separate window, and then add tabs to that window that you just created. It really is THAT easy!
The major disadvantage, is the fact that you can't switch dictionaries quickly and conveniently from the context menu inside a "textarea" which you can do on Firefox. For someone who has to alternate between Portuguese and English dictionaries, this is a major turn-down. Specially because it seems that you even have to restart the browser for the changes to take effect. Bad, bad Google. What were you thinking?!
Other than this I have also loved the seamless integration with Windows Vista. Chrome just integrates much better on Vista's look than Firefox does. Firefox barely supports transparency, whereas Chrome allows for transparency, even on the zone where the tabs reside.
In a nutshell, it's still a beta version, and that does show. Try it at your own peril, but try it nonetheless. I think you will be impressed.