After 18 months of good service in Florida, it’s time for Lionel to leave us and to go back in France. For this event, we had a great diner with the team in our favorite steak house and then, we had drinks with Mike in every single bar in St Pete. I will definitely remember your face bro’ at the end of that night :)

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We have some tickets for the NHL game tonight thanks to Transitions Optical, official sponsor of tonight’s game to promote their golf tournament in couple weeks: Transitions Championship.

Tampa Bay Lightning	vs.	Pittsburgh Penguins

I was not expecting so much fun! When the hockey puck is behind the goal, players burst against the window so hard that the stadium sounds! And I don’t know exactly the rules but when they fight each other it is very impressive!

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Unfortunately, we lost 1 - 3…but still a great game :)

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With Lionel, we managed to have a training on Microsoft SharePoint at San Francisco, CA! In fact, it should be his boss Mike who goes with him but he wasn’t available so I took his place (thanks by the way!). And it’s not too bad because I changed my field at work. I’m not working with SAS anymore but with SharePoint by supporting the Intranet and by building some applications on it. It’s very an oppotunity for me to learn something new and interesting :)

So at this conference (in the holy land of IT by the way), there are a lot of workshops during 3 days. You can check the program right here. So for my first conference, here is my course:

Tuesday, January 27

• 8:30 am - 12:00 pm: W-6 Getting Started Wtih SharePoint Development by Jennifer Mason and John Ross

• 1:30 pm - 5:00 pm: W-7 Leveraging SharePoint for Project Management by Dux Raymond Sy

Wednesday, January 28

• 9:30 am - 10:45 am: 104 SharePoint Best Practices: Doing It Right the first Time by O’Connor, Goodloe, Stegink, Obraztsov and Perez

• 11:00 am - 12:15 pm: 202 Building Business Intelligence Portals by Darrin Bishop

• 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm: 301 To Code or Not to Code: SharePoint Customization Vs. Development by John Ross

• 2:45 pm - 4:00 pm: 405 Create an Electronic Form Solution Using InfoPath and SharePoint by Nicola Young

• 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm: 506 SharePoint Workflows - Form Out-of-the-Box to Out-of-This-World by Derek Neiding

Thursday, January 29

• 8:30 am - 9:45 am: 601 Fast Track to SharePoint Feature Generation by Bjørn Furuknap

• 10:30 am - 11:45 am: 704 Tuning Memory Management in SharePoint by Michael Lotter

• 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm: 801 Building Scalable, High-Performance SharePoint Apps by Andreas Grabner

• 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm: 902 Excel Services as a Business Intelligence Solution by Jeremy Beaumier

I’m very glad to do this conference because I have a big overview of SharePoint now! But actually, I already have some basics thanks to Lionel who trying to train me! For more information about SharePoint Technology Conference, a blog is also available in The SPTechCon Blog.

This year, the Transitions Optical Holiday Party is going on at Don CeSar.

We started with cocktails and some pictures. When the dinner is over, some prices are distributed to employees. After that, tables are removed to make room for the dance floor, and the casino is open to a level upstair. It was a wonderful evening!

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The week after, we have a Holiday Luncheon at the Bayou Club with the team. After the lunch, we played to White Elephant Gift Exchange with a gift $ limit of $20. Below is the description of how it’s played:

How the game is played…

The game is fun, because each person gets to select a wrapped gift, unwrap it and then possibly lose it to someone else and have to select again. Being able to select from unwrapped gifts or “steal” a gift someone is holding is what makes this game so much fun.

Here are the rules:

When planning the party, decide how much should be spent on the gifts. Twenty dollars is the gift price limit since each person is buying only one gift. The amount can be more or less. It’s your group’s call.  All gifts should be. Put the gifts together under the tree, on a table, wherever convenient.

Each person selects a number from a basket or bowl to determine the order in which a person gets to select a gift. Number 1 goes first and gets to select and unwrap a gift. Everyone oohs and aahs or mentally thinks, “Boy, I’m glad I didn’t select that.”

Number 2 goes next. s/he may take Number 1’s gift or may select a gift from the pile. If s/he takes Number 1’s gift, Number 1 gets to select again from the pile. Then on to Number 3 to select.

Once again, s/he may select any opened or unopened gift. Each time a gift is taken away from someone, that person gets to select again. S/he may select any gift except the one that was just taken fromhim/her. /She may however, have the opportunity to select it again later.

Some gifts are occasionally more popular and may get stolen several times. At the end of the game, Number 1 gets to select again, and take someone else’s gift or keep the one they currently have..

Don’t be afraid to swipe a gift from someone. The more takeaways and turnovers there are, the more fun the game seems to be. Some of the best times have been when a particular gift gets swiped several times. There are always lots of laughs and sometimes gifts get swiped just for the fun of it. This is especially true when men are playing. They don’t seem to care about the gifts as much as having fun stirring things up.

And after the game is over, if you and someone else wants to trade gifts, that’s O.K. too.

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