Esther Duflo: Social experiments to fight poverty

We (Narelle, friend Jane and I) watched this TED video last year, and somehow tonight’s conversation came around to TED talks and this one in particular. It took a while to find it (we were searching for “malaria”, “mosquito”, and “nets” on the TED site without luck as we’d remembered the bit about mosquito nets).

A most impressive and compelling presentation.

A busy, but enjoyable weekend

It’s been pretty full-on in the Gardiner household over the last couple of days. We’ve managed to pack car-shopping, basketball carnivals, entertaining friends for tea on Saturday, and Church, car-cleaning and visiting friends for an extended afternoon tea today on Sunday. Perfect Adelaide Spring weather certainly didn’t hurt. It’s nice to be sitting down Sunday evening to catch our breath before the work/school week begins again tomorrow!

Saturday morning, I left a bit earlier than normal to pick up my parents and head out to Nuriootpa (in the Barossa Valley) to check out a potential car to replace our trusty but outgrown Camry. The car in question is a 2010 Kia Sorrento Si (petrol). After test driving the current model the previous weekend I was impressed, though the price tag for the 2011 SLi diesel was a bit high for my budget (I felt a bit sad for the salesmen as their faces dropped when I informed them of that).

Searching around for used cars that didn’t have too many kms on the clock had turned up this particular specimen. The challenge would be driving up to check it out and still get back home in time to take the kids to basketball.

We made good time (thanks to the new Northern Expressway) and after a test-drive I agreed to purchase the vehicle (subject to a satisfactory mechanical inspection).

Just enough time to visit the Nuriootpa Bakery before racing back down to Adelaide.

The basketball carnival was good fun, but sadly the team I coach had to be content with just participating rather than winning. There were a few close games, but it wasn’t to be.

No rest yet – then racing back home to get ready for some friends coming over for tea. With Narelle cooking up a storm, it was a very enjoyable evening. Her Crème caramels were a particular hit, with some people going to extraordinary lengths to pry out the last bit of toffee left in the bottom of the dishes.

Sunday morning, and off to Church. Then some time at home to do a bit of gardening and clean up another friend’s car that we’ve been borrowing while she’s been away on holidays.

Then just enough time to head around to some more friends who were celebrating a successful morning’s participation in the City to Bay fun run. I think the kids (not to mention myself) thought we’d landed on our feet when we saw all the yummy things for afternoon tea. A wonderful, relaxed afternoon.

ps. If you’re looking for a well used but reliable car, I plan to sell the Camry in a few weeks time.

TechEd 2011–Day 3

Having now completed my instructing and hands-on lab duties, I was free to immerse myself in the breakout sessions for the remainder of the conference.

I took in two Windows Phone sessions. Firstly – WPH305 - Multi-tasking and Application Services in Windows Phone 7.5 with Chris Walsh and Jake Ginnivan.

They delved into the new background agent and search integration features coming in the Windows Phone 7.1 update. I can see myself using the background agents as a way to download new data for my Aussie Toilets app. The search integration is also relevant. It would make sense to offer the nearest public toilets when someone is searching for a particular location.

Next, in WPH307 - Analyzing and Improving Windows Phone Application Performance, I got to see Jeff Wilcox go through tips on improving app performance. Again, some ideas on how to improve Aussie Toilets, and Jeff kindly emailed me a code sample that I will make use of.

After morning tea (a muffin and a muffin!), I battled the crowd to get a seat in DEV411 - The Future of C#: Good things come to those who ‘await’ with Joseph Albahari. One of only a few ‘400’ level talks this year, Joseph delivered an impressive presentation on how easy it is to make your code work asynchronously with the new language features coming in C# 5. This was made even more compelling as he contrasted how difficult it was to achieve the same results without the new features.

After lunch, on a whim I went along to SEC311 - SCVMM 2012 Network & Storage with Alessandro Cardoso. I’ve used SCVMM 2008 R2 in the context of managing TFS Labs, so it was interesting to have a look at the next version, but a fair bit of this talk went over my head.

Finally the ‘locknote’ presentation by Norm Judah. I was a little disappointed with this, as I didn’t think Norm really spoke about anything particularly new or revelatory. It was ok, but not riveting.

One lovely surprise today was getting an Amazon gift card email from Microsoft! Enclosed was the following text:

Thank you very much for your extraordinary effort and flexibility as a TLG at TechEd 2011. We are honored to have had worked with you.

That so was totally unexpected, so I popped back into the hands-on labs to personally thank Kim and Ronald (the lab organisers).

The second surprise was chatting to a fellow conference delegate on the way back to Brisbane airport. We were talking about Windows Phones, and when I said I’d written an app ‘Aussie Toilets’ he smiled and pulled out his phone and showed me he had it installed on his phone! A real buzz to meet someone who’s using my app and likes it!

So TechEd 2011 ended on a positive note for me. I did enjoy my time doing the instructor and hands-on labs. I do like helping people learn new things work through problems they might be having.