[Disclaimer: Geek content = 0. Fun content = 100. This is a really great show that I produce once a year. -Stuart]

The Portland Juggling & Vaudeville Extravaganza is the annual show of the Portland Juggling Festival, featuring the festival’s special guests, and it is always an amazing evening of talent, laughs and entertainment. This year’s show is going to be INCREDIBLE, so please tell all your friends, family, colleagues, everyone to come to the show. We depend on your word of mouth to get the message out and people to the show, so please spread the word!

Juggling & Vaudeville Extravaganza
7:00 PM, Saturday, September 26, 2009
Benson Auditorium, 546 NE 12th Ave, Portland, OR

$16 General, $10 Student with ID, $8 Child (12 & under) and Senior

Tickets available at:
Brown Paper Tickets: 800-838-3006 or click here.
And at the door, day of the show (cash or check only)

Facebook Friends! If you are on Facebook, it is easy to tell your friends about the show. Simply follow this link to the event page, add yourself to the event, and click on “Invite People to Come” under the logo. It is quick, it is easy, and it will make a big difference to the success of our show!

Okay, what about those performers? I’m glad you asked!

This year we are extremely excited to have Sean Blue from New York City headlining the show. Sean is an artist, juggler and teacher, a creative force whom the famed Bill Irwin called a “master juggler.” Sean received the Award of Innovation from the International Jugglers’ Association in 2007. His versatile and technical juggling skills will astound you.

We are fortunate to have not one, but two of the world’s leading women unicyclists in the show. First, Kaori Matsuzawa, Japanese Women’s Unicycle Champion, returns to the Extravaganza this year. She was a huge hit at last year’s festival and show, and we just had to have her back! Last year she brilliantly transformed unicycling into modern dance on our stage, performing in a long flowing dress. Yes, you read that correctly, unicycling in a dress. Kaori has an all-new routine for us this year!

Second, Becky Banning is the reigning North American Women’s Freestyle Champion, having successfully defended her title from last year, and won 5 gold medals in artistic unicycling in the process. At 17 years old, she has competed in seven North American Championships and two International Championships, and is the leader of the Panther Pride Unicycle Team in North Bend, Washington. We are honored to have two highly talented unicyclists on the same stage, showing two wonderfully different approaches to riding on a single wheel.

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Beth Clarke to Portland. Beth is a rope walker (or funambulist if you’d like a fancy word to impress your friends) who will perform a slack rope act like none you’ve ever seen. Well, I suppose that is unless you’ve seen Beth perform as a member of the highly acclaimed Sweet Can Circus from San Francisco. She has studied and performed all over the world, and I bet the end of her performance will surprise you!

There are many more acts in the show, including Poetic Motion Machine (2009 IJA Team medalists), Stanford Juggling Research Institute (2004 IJA Team medalists), Circus Conspiracy, and local favorites including Rhys Thomas, Charlie Brown, Curt Carlyle, and more!

You can see that this is going to be one incredible evening of live entertainment without equal anywhere! It only happens once a year, so plan to join us and bring all of your friends!

The world is filled with the beautiful, elegant offspring that come out of the marriage of different disciplines. Often the person creating such a work is called a genius, although to him or her it may seem a straightforward matter of applying a solution from one part of their life to another. I want to work with people who have rich and diverse experiences in their lives: the odds are just so much better that something incredible might happen.

And so it’s a mystery to me why it is exceedingly rare for a developer to know anything about being a consumer of the software she or he creates. When it comes to user interface, graphical design, human interaction or any other element of the user experience, the majority of professional developers I meet have not taken the time to learn what these disciplines are about and what they have to offer. It remains such an enigma to me because so many of these same professionals do have varied backgrounds and draw on other perspectives to inform and guide their software. Like the woman who started out in chemistry, worked in a lab, was appointed to analyze the results using a computer, found she liked computers more than chemistry, and decided to change her career. There are things she learned, for example about the scientific method, that make her an excellent developer. But it is hard to find many developers whose paths have crossed disciplines like graphic arts and design, or studied how normal human beings interact with objects or software applications.

Ian Voyce has a wonderful short exposé-cum-confessional, The 7 signs your UI was created by a programmer. Read and wince: been there, done that, billed the client.

Do you suspect a programmer may have put together the terrible user interface on that “enterprise” software you’re forced to use every day? There are some give-away indicators. Look out for them in your software, hunt down the developer and force them to read a book about user interface design. If you’re suitably senior, force them to a) improve it, or even better b) get someone with real UI experience to fix it. More…

I would prefer both options a and b: have the developer learn what UI design is about and work with a real UI designer.

One place such a developer could start is Bill Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences. If you’re not familiar with Bill Buxton, do yourself a favor an watch the first few minutes of his keynote address at MIX09.

The Portland Silverlight User Group has launched with the unveiling of their website www.portlandsilverlight.net. The group is a special interest group of the Portland Area .NET User Group (PADNUG) and shares the PADNUG mailing list — a good choice IMHO.

The meetings will be on the second Tuesday each month, starting on Tuesday, 8 December 2009. Keep an eye on the website for details.

Erik Mork (consultant, trainer, and Microsoft MVP on Silverlight) and Kelly White (web technologist and self-styled part-time Silverlight zealot) are the masterminds behind this user group.

There’s never been a better time for Portlanders to get started or be excited about Silverlight, so mark your calendar now and plan to attend the kickoff meeting.

I am co-chairing the Birds-of-a-Feather track for PDC09, 17-19 November 2009 in Los Angeles, California. This is the seventh Microsoft conference that I’ve had the honor of working on behalf of INETA to organize the community-driven Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions.

A BOF session is a conversation among a community of peers around a topic about which the participants are passionate. There may be some participants who are more knowledgeable than others, or have more experience; some who have less. Some folks will be well known, some will not. Some folks may want to just listen.

The point of a BOF session is to bring together people who share an interest in the topic so they can express their ideas and experiences, questions and insights, and hear what others have to say. It’s not a presentation, there are no projectors; it’s about having a timely discussion together.

BOF sessions begin with you proposing a discussion on a subject that matters to you. If your session is chosen, you will host the session at the conference, getting the conversation started and keeping it moving forward.

Proposing a BOF session is fast and easy. Just copy and paste this simple form into an email message, fill in the title, description, some information about you, and send it to us at 2009@pdcbof.com. BOF proposals are considered on a first-come, first-considered basis, which means that submitting your session proposal early increases the chances for it to be selected.

Hosting a BOF session is a great way to network with people who are interested in the topic, and to share your experience and expertise with your fellow software developers and architects. And it is an easy way for you to give back and enrich our professional community.

What else can you do? Subscribe to the PDC BOF blog, follow the PDC BOF on Twitter, and join the PDC09 BOF event on Facebook. And, of course, attend the BOFs at PDC09!

If you have used SQL Server Express recently, Microsoft is keenly interested in your feedback so that they can improve future releases such as SQL Server 2008 R2 and  SQL Server 11. So take a few minutes to complete one or both surveys.

General survey around installing SQL Server Express

Survey that focuses on embedding SQL Server Express

Each link will take you to a blog post on the SQL Server Setup blog that has instructions and a link to the survey. Your opinion can shape the future.