Alan Dean

I was listening to the Radio 4 PM programme this evening and was astonished to hear George Osborne being attacked for having the temerity to discuss the parlous state of Sterling, which has already collapsed by 25% since July.

Gordon Brown indicated his displeasure from Washington, DC.

Labour rolled out John McFall, the Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee to offer further denunciation.

The programme even managed to find an unknown Tory grandee, whose name I forget, to join in the fun.

All of this, of course, is designed as misdirection to divert attention from the significant fall in the value of Sterling which does not appear to be abating. I seriously wonder if we will see Dollar parity in six months time.

I recall that in "Yes, Minister" Sir Humphrey explained how you "play the man, not the ball" when your policies fail or you are incompetent. This is an excellent example of exactly such behaviour. Osborne would be failing in his opposition duty if he did not discuss the truth of our current reality.

Update 16^th November: On the Andrew Marr Show this morning former Labour Minister John Reid was wheeled out to lay more recriminations on George for daring to speak an opinion and not being 'bipartisan'. Why on earth the Government thinks that the Opposition should collaborate in covering up their mistakes is beyond me. Vince Cable was also given a walk-on part. Vince at least had the decency to say "This shouldn't be some kind of secret business. Of course there is nothing wrong with George Osborne talking about it" (which is probably why there isn't a transcript of that part of the show online) but then when on to say "I am all for having an intelligent discussion about exchange rates, it just it wasn't very good way of dealing with it" without explaining in what way it wasn't very good. The good news was that George was given his opportunity to answer these critics at the end of the show. Unfortunately, Andrew Marr was far more interested in the George's position within the Conservative Party than with the substance (although, George has only himself to blame for handing out the ammunition).

Yesterday evening, the BBC Radio 4 "PM" programme reported that Hillary Clinton was being considered by the Obama transition team for Secretary of State. I was struck by how clever this would be. There have been further reports since.

Why do I think it is clever?

• Hillary is a big beast in the Democrat jungle and her supporters in the Party will not be happy if this is not acknowledged by the new administration.
• Obama will no doubt feel more comfortable with her "on the inside pissing out" than "on the outside pissing in".
• She needs to be offered a role with sufficient stature that turning it down would look bad
• On the other hand, I'm sure that Obama doesn't want her anywhere near domestic policy where he has an agenda to deliver.
• Ditto economic policy, foreign or domestic.
• Anything that also puts Bill on a leash would be good news for Obama.

All in all, being offered Secretary of State acknowledges her and neuters her in equal measure. Clever.

Last weekend I trawled through all the published sessions to separate out those sessions I was interested in attending from those that I wasn't (it turned out to be a long list of interest).

During the week, the Microsoft PDC site switched on the timeline planner so last night I did a second round of filtering to select the sessions that I intend to go to:

Sunday

10:00 - 17:45

Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft

Monday

11:00 - 12:15

A Lap around Cloud Services Part 1

12:45 - 13:30

"Dublin" and .NET Services: Extending On-Premises Applications to the Cloud

13:45 - 15:00

The Future of C#

15:30 - 16:45

A Lap around Cloud Services Part 2

15:00 - 18:30

Agile Development with Microsoft Visual Studio

Tuesday

12:45 - 13:30

WCF: Zen of Performance and Scale

13:45 - 15:00

Project "Velocity": A First Look

15:30 - 16:45

Project "Velocity": Under the Hood

17:15 - 18:30

ASP.NET and JQuery

Wednesday

10:30 - 11:45

Panel: The Future of Programming Languages

12:00 - 12:45

Panel: The Future of Unit Testing

13:15 - 14:30

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

15:00 - 16:15

SQL Server 2008: Deep Dive into Spatial Data

16:45 - 18:00

Windows 7: New Shell User Experience API's

Thursday

08:30 - 09:45

Dynamics Online: Building Business Applications with Commerce and Payment API's

10:15 - 11:30

Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR Futures

12:00 - 13:15

"Oslo": Building Textual DSL's

13:45 - 15:00

An Introduction to Microsoft F#

I have backed Obama since the start of the Democrat Primary season. I certainly hope that the following sentiment is well-founded:

I have recently been given the happy news that Charteris are sending me to the PDC in LA. I'm very excited. I had to miss the PDC in 2005 but was there in 2003 and I found it very worthwhile.

Benjamin Goeltz will also be going from Charteris. I was hoping to be at the same hotel as the Red Gate chaps, but sadly it was sold out so we will be at the Millenium Biltmore. I will be able to geek out with West Wing reminiscence (the hotel was used extensively as a set in Series 1).

We will be going to the Pre-Conference Sessions as well. I'm booked for "Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft".

  Developer! Developer! Developer! returns on the 22nd November.

As usual, there are lots of excellent sessions for you to vote on so you get to choose the conference.

You can check out my offerings and vote for them too!

Microsoft Log Parser Toolkit? What the heck is that?
Never heard of the Log Parser Toolkit? Then this session is for you! This cool piece of technology languishes in an obscurity that it doesn't deserve. This presentation will introduce you to the toolkit and show how you can use it in development.

Separating REST Facts from Fallacies
Still not sure what REST is or why it might be important to you? REST (Representational State Transfer) is still a deeply misunderstood architectural style. This presentation is designed to dispel some of the myths and demonstrate practical usage of REST.