REMIX08 Australia is a two-day event held in Sydney and Melbourne, focusing on the best of the Web. 

REMIX08 is your opportunity to experience all that is new in Silverlight 2, Expression 2, IE8, Live and a host of other great web technologies coming fast and furious from Microsoft. Mark Pesce, Panellist from ABC’s “The New Inventors” will perform the opening keynote! You will also see how local Australian innovators are creating the next generation of engaging websites and unprecedented user experiences for the web.

I traveled from Seattle to Australia May 17 – 23 to give two presentations: “Introducing Microsoft Expression Studio 2″ and “Becoming a XAML-Ready Designer.” 

SATURDAY – MONDAY

I left for the airport to catch a flight which boarded at 7:00 on Saturday evening with my wife, Tami, driving, and daughter, Sophie, in the backseat reading a book and drinking some milk. She’s 1 year old and very smiley.

The flight across the Pacific to Sydney was uneventful. I’m fortunate enough to have the uncanny ability to go to sleep easily when travelling. Often, I’ll be asleep before the plane takes off, and wake up on landing. Unfortunately, the flight across the Pacific took about 14 hours, so even under the best of circumstances, I’d have some time to kill. They showed half of Charlie Wilson’s War, but then switched to a very, very sad John Cusak movie about dealing with his little girls and his wife who went away to war, etc … very, very sad.

We landed at about 6:00, Monday morning, Sydney time. After a somewhat
suspiciously-long cab ride, I arrived at The Four Points Hotel, which is right next to Darling Harbour, right in the middle of the city, and next to the monorail which rings it. It’s a beautiful hotel with charming people.

I exchanged some cash on check in. The Australian money is super-cool and very well designed, IMHO, by the way. I exchanged a couple bills at the counter maintained by a very pleasant young lady. The exchange-rate, however, left a bit to be desired.

I went up to my room, got ready, had some breakfast, and headed out to The Powerhouse Museum, where REMIX08 Australia, Sydney was being held.

Getting to the Museum was super-easy: it was basically: leave the hotel, turn right, walk around the corner, up some stairs, and hop on the Monorail – a 7 minute walk at a leisurely pace. 7 minutes later, I’m at my stop and hop off. From there it was just a short walk down a nice covered walkway to the Museum entrance.

The Museum uses the tagline “science + design”, however, really, I saw very little of that there. The “Vectorlab” was closed, which was a drag. Most of what I saw was centered around, basically, the history of Australia told through its machines and culture. Maybe that’s “science + design”? (See photos for some visual examples of what was there)

I arrived early, but things at that point were pretty chaotic: people setting up booths, tables, displays, putting up signs and placing swag.  Later in the afternoon, we gathered in the Speaker room for a couple of hours, and I met the other speakers, “DelicateGenius”, “ShaneMo,” and the crew. We all worked on our presentations for a few hours, and got to know one another a bit. The presentations that we discussed mostly centered around Silverlight 2, Expression Studio 2, and Deep Zoom. Deep Zoom, really, was the talk of the town, though, so-to-speak, and a lot of us collaborated on generating Deep Zoom experiences for our slides, rather than PowerPoint. This was to later be proven a brilliant thing.

At around 6:30 I started *crashing*. I almost fell asleep in a chair while waiting and watching the other run-throughs in the main hall. I made my apologies for having to miss the dinner that night, gathered my stuff, and returned to the Monorail once again, to return to my hotel.

I woke up at Midnight, still in my clothes, my feet underneath some balled up comforter at the end of the bed. Yes, I was *tired*. Whew.

TUESDAY

Tuesday was the first day of REMIX08 Australia. I arrived early and attended the keynote, given by Shane Morris (http://blogs.msdn.com/shanemo), “DelicateGenius” (aka Michael Kordhai (http://delicategeniusblog.com)) and Mark Pesce.

Well known Author, Inventor and TV Personality from ABC’s “The New Inventors” show, Mark Pesce will open the day and help us all understand the important role we play in the future of the web. This will be followed by a showcase of the great work being done by Australian companies in Silverlight, WPF, Expression, ASP.NET AJAX and beyond – the REMIX 08 keynote will deliver the “Wow” before we send you out for a day showing you how you can start using these technologies
now.

The attendees were enthusiastic and friendly.  Before the keynote I was able to meet with a few designers who were quite keen on discussing Silverlight 2 and it’s future.  I found many of the attendees had a cursory knowledge of the tools, and were anxious to get some insights on how to fully exploit the Expression Suite.

My first presentation, “Introdcing Microsoft Expression Studio 2,” was at 11:45, and I was extremely nervous while waiting to go on stage. Once mic’ed up and ready to go, though, everything fell into place. My first presentation was general overview of the tools in Expression Studio 2. For this presentation, I worked up a demo that incorporated all of the tools, including Deep Zoom Composer, and with the exception of Expression Encoder.  The demo went well and seemed to be well-received. I was completely exhausted, though, due to the time-difference and could feel myself moving a bit slowly.

We broke for lunch during which I had some great conversations with attendees who had been in my previous presentation. I sometimes forget that these tools and technologies that I’ve been working with are *brand new* to most people. It’s exciting to field great questions from enthusiastic designers and developers. The questions I received often were about Deep Zoom, and Silverlight 2 in general. The crowd seemed a good mix of people brand-new to Silverlight, and those who have had some basic experience with the tools and technology, but have yet to implement in a enterprise (or even business in-general) setting. There seems great interest, but slow-adoption to this point.)

My second session, “Becoming A XAML-Ready Designer,” was originally a presentation developed by Arturo Toledo, and presented at MIX08 in Las Vegas. He did a *great* job, and the “shoes I had to fill” were large, so-to-speak. It was his presentation, for instance, that led me to use Deep Zoom for my slides instead of Powerpoint. You can find his presentation by searching for Arturo at http://sessions.visitmix.com.

The event ended with a couple of drinks and some great discussions of Silverlight, Deep Zoom, and Blend. Afterward, I took the opportunity to walk around Darling Harbour and had dinner. Sydney is an absolutely *beautiful* city. I can’t wait to return.