Last night I gave a short technical presentation in Sydney at one of my employer's monthly customer marketing events. Nothing too fancy, 30 minutes on 'What's new in Windows Workflow (WF) in version 3.5' to about 60 people.

However, the choice of topic and slides weren't my own (credit: Chris Padgett); also some time in the afternoon I started coming down with a mild case of the perennial winter nose/throat infection (I am on the cold & flu today) and I was feeling pretty nervous as a result of it being over a year since I formally stood up in front of a group bigger than 1...heading for a train wreck, or so I thought...

As it turned out, the event didn't go too badly (no disastrous demo crashes or even (noticeably) bad pauses) but then again, I still haven't seen the collated feedback forms; and either way I was still outclassed in both material and presentation by my colleague who followed me with an excellent presentation on production debugging.

Anyway, the most important thing to remember is that these things are never quite as bad as you think!

As you can see have I have added a Google Map to my blog.

In less than 30 mins (15 of which was spent looking up the right CSS class for the brown border in the theme folder) I now have a nice little embedded map showing my location over my next trip. This was remarkable easy to create. As soon as I went to maps.google.com (whilst logged in to my gmail account) there was an immediately obvious link to 'my maps' which took me to a simple, responsive and intuitive interface for pushpins/lines/areas the lot.

However, despite this easy set up you'll see my map does have one disappointing aspect to it - zero coverage of North Korea - for whatever political reasons (although I can find no explicit mention why it is omitted) Google does not acknowledge the existence of any civilisation in the DPRK. However MS Live Maps does; now what prevents one and not the other (both US companies, in identical legal situations) from showing what is obviously available information (every paper atlas I have ever seen has Pyongyang marked) I can only guess.

So after a little more research I discovered that Live Maps have just added support for Google's KML, now along with the ability to return the KML from any Google My Map I can pipe these two together (check the second link) to have my pushpins shown on either map (Google for the world, and Live for when I am in DPRK).

Technical details from TechCrunch here.

I have been playing with NHibernate again recently.

Unless you have been on Mars for the last 6 months you will know that Microsoft has reignited the interest in ORM generally with their recent entry into the foray (in the form of the ADO.Net Entity Framework); and this has prompted me to get out, dust off and polish up my NHibernate knowledge. Whilst doing this I came across this page which is a nice succinct page written by Tom Sedge explaining the HBM syntax for various relationships.

"When it comes to picking our next president, I can't decide if I prefer the smooth-talking, inspirational candidate who promises to give my money to people who don't work as hard as I do, or the old, short, ugly, angry guy with one good arm who graduated at the bottom of his class and somehow managed to shag a hot heiress and become a contender for president. It seems dangerous to underestimate that guy." - Scott Adams

So here I am writing my first ever blog post. 

Where do I start? What insightful and visionary thoughts will I choose to share on this first endeavour into the blogosphere? ... Well after an interesting half hour wasted on googling 'first blog post' in the hope of inspiration it seems the prior art in this area is pretty uninspring, but good nettiquete would seem to suggest that I should at least include the following:

Just who do I think I am?
This one is easy. A 34 yr old male by the name of Mark Scott Johnson (the blog title kind of gives it away); one who has been residing in Sydney, Australia for the last 5+ years (after growing up in the UK and making my way here after aborted attempts at living in Japan and Canada). If that is not enough, you can find out more about me socially (facebook) here or professionally (linkedin) here.

Why am I bothering with this blogging thing?
The jury is still out on this one... At this early stage I have to admit I am still not 100% convinced this will be a successful endeavour. As anyone who knows me personally will certify, I don't have the slightest issue with either self-indulgence or self-promotion (which, IMHO are the primary driving forces behind 90% of the blogosphere); it's just that there is something (paranoia, British hang-ups?) about permanently sharing my personal thoughts with all and sundry that, quite frankly, doesn't fully agree with me (yet)...

What can you look forward to finding here?
Well, as of September, the (semi-)daily highlights of my annual birthday vacation trip (to China and DPRK (North Korea)). Outside of that, probably some irregular observations from my professional life as Consultant in the IT industry and, as my girlfriend likes to say, the odd lambastering (sic) episode. In general probably nothing of value to anyone I am not related to or haven't already met in the flesh.