In December, I had the privilege of spending an hour or so with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell on .NET Rocks. We talked about Silverlight and R/C aircraft. (Turns out Richard is an R/C guy, too.) You can listen to the program here.
I haven’t listened to the program yet. I probably never will, because I can’t stand to hear (or see) myself speak. I’m always thinking “gee, I wish I had said it this way instead” or “boy, did that sound stupid.” I often get DVDs from conferences I’ve spoken at with videos of the presentations. Occasionally I watch presenters do other sessions, but I never watch my own.
Maybe the problem is that when I listen to my own presentations, I don’t learn anything new. Go figure…
On an unrelated subject, sometimes I wonder if I’m becoming a liberal. People that know me know I’m a pretty conservative person. But I’m shopping for a new family vehicle right now–my wife’s ready to replace our van–and I am appalled at the lack of choice. I want something that comfortably fits five people (or an airplane or jet, of course), looks good, and gets decent mileage. I won’t buy a huge SUV as a matter of principle. I’m very interested in hybrids and desperately want to do my part to reduce America’s oil dependency. I’m not so much concerned about the price of gas as I am the fact that we send billions of dollars overseas to people who want to kill us, and who could wreck our economy by shutting off the oil. But just try finding a vehicle that can hold a family and gets decent mileage. We’ve actually gone backwards mileage-wise from when we bought the van we currently own in 2001. Hello! While consumers were drunk on cheap gas this decade, did none of the automakers have enough vision to realize that it wouldn’t last forever? Do we have to wait years for technology that reduces (or eliminates) our dependency on fossil fuels? I want America to undertake a Manhattan Project-style program to roll out hydrogen vehicles. We performed a miracle in World War II and we could do the same again.
To make matters worse, you can’t even get an AUX jack in a Honda Pilot so you can plug in your iPod. In a BMW X5, you can plug your iPod into a USB port and select songs from the console of the car. Honda is so far behind the times.