empower yourself blah blah
New posters went up yesterday. Perhaps this will temper the visual onslaught of the "who's your buddy" posters of the previous campaign. (That campaign apparently was for an ISV partner program, but also served as proof that an ad which tells you nothing (in the guise of "peaking curiosity") will in fact be ineffective, no matter how artistic you might feel making it). The new campaign is for some sort of women's empowerment thing, for MS women employees, two days in September to realize your potential.
I'm just incredibly puzzled how this got to the top of the priority stack. Here's why:
* Having a blue badge at MS is an incredible achievement, and only those already empowered will be in that group.
* If you're a woman, this is even more of an achievement, so you're not only preaching to the choir, you're preaching to the preachers.
* What women around the microsoft space need empowering at the moment. Need I say contingent staff? New mothers? People considering a job move? People considering leaving on a retreat to muster resources? People sensitive to work life balance? Folks overwrought with guilt at being or not being stay at home moms or dads? People suffering from unintended repercussions of taking "leave" (meaning vacation time you were due anyway)? People with incubation or venture-capital ideas but no time or funds to pursue? The whole campaign begs the question of what this conference was designed to do and why.
Perhaps I'm just crabby because I can't get doc.Load to work. You guessed it, it's some sort of security problem with accessing a local file. Security is a great gaping void in my knowledge set, so I may spend a fruitless day or two on this. By the way, all "A" works (local client app), but app "B" which also uses doc.Load barfs. It's ASP. Here's the message of doom:
System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\orgwebservice\cdcatalog.xml" is denied.
My next tactic will be declaring a machine name and trying to see if somehow I can declare explicit permissions for ASP to access my machine. Sigh.
A smashing week otherwise, though, all the underlying feature set done and deployed, people returning my calls, contacts made, general "back in the saddle" type feeling. I'm talking to a potential telecoach today who works with David Allen to see if I can keep on a roll.