I’ve been totally intrigued by the idea of scooters lately. In the light of $3/gal gas prices and a plain necessity of driving a few times a week, I’ve been considering alternatives. After all, it’s summer!

Living here on Cap Hill, I’ve been noticing an increasing number of scooters. They’re coming in all shapes in sizes, but most are fairly recent-looking models of the Vespa, Yamaha, or Honda type. There’s even a scooter dealership that’s opened up around 12th and Pike.

There’s a Yamaha that’s regularly parked next door on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building and I ran into the owner one day while throwing a frisbee around our front yard. The testimony was spellbinding–75 miles to the gallon, park wherever you’d like, and walk out the door for <$2500 new.

Sure, the engines are about 50cc on the small end and they’ll only get you only to about 40mph, but considering how people drive around here, 40 is plenty. There are larger models that will approach 60 and beyond, which qualifies them for the occasional freeway ride (and free carpool lane!). However, it turns out that parking wherever you like, on the sidewalks and such, is not technically legal in Seattle, but I think there’s a running theory that if you’re sufficiently parked out of the way of pedestrians on the sidewalk and it’s not very busy, they’ll let you go.

Admittedly, the scooter is only really practical in the summer, so I can’t see myself actually getting one. Actually, considering the weather during the month of June, it’s wet enough this year during the summer to deter usage. I’ve done a little glancing on Craigslist though–$1500 could get you into a pretty decent scooter with about 5000 miles on it.

Maybe it’s something I should think about if I ever find myself working exclusively in Seattle…

I’ve returned from Microsoft’s Tech Ed 2007 and hopefully this signifies a return to a normal life. I was a speaker at Tech Ed, which is a Microsoft tier 1 event with a total draw of 12,000 and nearly 2000 more in Microsoft attendees. Needless to say, speaking there was a Big Deal and I was swallow whole by the presentation beast—building demos, practicing my presentation, going to presentation training, etc. In the weeks leading up to Tech Ed I found myself working my usual five days a week, plus 3-4 full nights, and likely a weekend day. Marcie, who’s an event planner, has been giving me grief that I was working more than she has, which is a big statement.

Whew, glad that’s over. Marcie, who is an event planner, was giving me far too much grief that I was working more than she was. But my perseverance really paid off—my feedback scores came out to 7.74 out of a possible 9, with 94.12% saying the session was effective. These are considered excellent scores and my session is one of the top two in the Business Applications track (it’s not entirely clear to me who has the top spot—another session scored slightly higher than me, but I had a larger attendance and more submitted reviews).

My topic was Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 as an Application Platform—where users can use CRM to springboard the development of custom business applications. The abstract goes something like this—people build custom business applications for their businesses all the time. It’s a pain, especially since every custom application has its schema, object model, deployment story, and often a reporting engine. It’s a lot of duplication of effort and labor intensive to maintain. CRM was built as a platform for business applications where common CRM modules—sales, marketing, and service were built on top. However, in designing a business application platform, we designed a solution to all the traditional custom app challenges and more. Your business or your customer can gain a lot of value by building your applications on top of the CRM platform.

I’m hoping that this presentation will open up some new doors and opportunities to present, which typically entails going to some fun destinations. In fact, things are looking likely that I will speak on my same topic at Tech Ed Hong Kong at the end of August.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to having a life again! The weather’s getting awfully good up here and I’m looking forward to some hiking and climbing.