James Carpinter, the current Student Ambassador and my successor as a Student Ambassader, has now started blogging. He is currently looking for someone to replace him as a Student Ambassador as he is leaving university this year.

Are you a student at Canterbury who is interested in this then let him know or let Paul Lo the Academic Advisor at Microsoft know.

The program is really great and there is a lot you can get out from it.

Got any questions about the experience? ask me or ask James

Also, I took the Student Ambassador role one step further and was involved this year with the first Student Advisory Board for version two (which is now live) of theSpoke. There is a big chance they will be arranging a new board next year, so if you think this will be an interesting challenge, then stay tuned and keep an eye on Mario's Blog

Probably all of you know that stuff already but for those that dont. ASP.NET by default does not treat non MS browsers as uplevel browsers leading to ASP.NET controls being rendered incorrectly. Well the solution for that is to include browser caps in the .config files of the application.

Here is a great article that explains all about this, and here is a browserCap section already written to handle non MS browsers including many of the unfamiliar ones.

Came accross this document today. Provides a detailed history of MS since it started back in the late seventies.

I also found it interesting that MS is only about 1 month away from its 30th anniversary! They'll probably have a big celebration then...

Rod blogged asking about how startup programs slow down your machine when too many of them are there leading to your machine taking ages to start here.

I found the answer to how to solve this here

Read this on the xtra news today.

"Microsoft moved to build its presence in the booming Internet telephony market on Wednesday, purchasing Teleo Inc, a Californian company that lets users make calls from their computers to regular phones".

In the article it also says "Will Collins, global messenger product manager at Microsoft, said the company hoped to integrate Teleo's offerings into its products by the end of 2005. Microsoft may add "click-to-call" features to Outlook or Internet Explorer, so that users can automatically call a phone number by clicking on it, he said. "

Personally I think they might extend that to MSN Messenger too to compete with products like Skype...

See the full article here

Also, here's the Microsoft Press release for that.

Will be interesting to see what the outcome of that is.

Lukas Svoboda of Orbiz has been elected president of the NZ .NET user group community. It looks like we will be hearing more of this sometime soon. I only read the news on his blog here . But I guess this will probably come up on the mailing lists soon...

Congrats Lukas.

Nic blogged about google talk here yesterday and on the NZ.NET Mailing lists seemed to be surpised no one responded. Well to make him happy! Here's me posting about it. I just downloaded it now and exploring it at the moment. First impression is, the UI looks too simple, compared to MSN Messenger which some people feel is a bit klunky, I think Google Talk is just wayyy to plain.

More on Google Talk later when I have a deeper play with it.

As you may have previously read here I have completed my degree in Information Systems and Technology just over 6 weeks ago. And hmm... for a graduate like myself the first thing you think about is hmm... a job!

Well, here's the thing, how am I going to get a job if even jobs that state they want graduates, or dont even mention what sort of experienece level they are after, reply saying "you dont have enough commerical experience for the job" or things around that line.

Another problem is the limited number of jobs available in prefered regions of work. Maybe Labour and National should think more about job opportunities for grads in IT (I'm not the only one at home without a job who did IT) I know a few others of which some chose different career paths after finishing their studies, including studying other fields.

Being only 20 years old and having completed my degree already alongside the other good things I've done, I believe I have done well so far. Although I have enough ideas and things I do that occupy my time when I'm at home without a job - that keep my brain fairly active - I want to get out there in industry and prove myself, I believe I can do a lot, only problem is no one seems to believe in me yet!

Things I'm Interested in in terms of what to do for a job.

.NET Development,e-business type stuff, business analysis, programming in general and a lot more.

Do you know anything out there that I may have missed which is suitable, are you interested in knowing more about me, then drop me a line.