michael eaton

First, let me say if you get a chance to stay in a Westin Hotel, do it.  The Westin of Southfield is by far, the nicest, most kid-friendly hotel I've stayed in.  The room we're in is great, although it could be a little bigger.

Ok, on to our ICCA Chapter meeting:
This was our first meeting since June (we took a couple months off for summer), so we hoped for a big turn-out.  Well, we had 16 people show up, which was better than our last couple of meetings.

The meeting started with Gloria Metrick, our Program Director and the National Benefits Director, and Lynette Rudzki, our Chapter President, telling the group about the ICCA, it's mission and it's benefits.

Our speaker from Microsoft was Keith Hurwitz.  Keith was a great speaker, who is very passionate about his work.  He gave us good advice about how we, as independent consultants, can build a better relationship with Microsoft.  While the advice was mostly common sense stuff, it was still good to hear.

Keith spent a great deal of time talking about the details of XP Service Pack 2.  Since I haven't installed it on any of my systems yet, I was really interested in this part of his talk.  He talked in-depth about the updated firewall in SP2.  He presented several slides that described how past virii and worms would have been handled by the new firewall (and SP2 in general).

He was nice enough to provide several people with names and email addresses of other Microsoft people if he wasn't able to fully answer a question.

Near the end of his presentation, Keith talked about Lookout (which as many of you know is a great tool).  I was actually surprised that more people in the audience hadn't heard of it before. :-\  Guess that shows you that some of us probably spend too much time on our computers. :-)  He ended with a quick talk about how you can use Google and IE more efficiently (by using the address bar overloads found in TweakUI).

Overall, Keith did a great job and I was very impressed.

The meeting ended with the Chapter Board members (Jeff Lipshaw, Lynette Rudzki, Gloria Metrick and myself) talking to the guests one-on-one to answer any questions they had.  This is always a great time, because many of our guests are in that “I think I want to be independent, but I don't know where to start” camp.  I always tell people that being an indy is tough and can be stressfull, but that I have no regrets about doing it.