Wined and Dined

So I went out with one of our customers last night (Bob). He's a serial programming guru who works for Avnet, basically selling Motorola (among others) brand microcontrollers, chips, etc. We had an awesome time BS'ing about everything from politics to programming.

It ended up being Jon (one of our testers), Bob and myself -- we went down to Shoal Creek Saloon after work for some good southern seafood. Bob's down in Austin doing some training on the new goodies being churned out of Motorola; something he does about this same time every year. He's a blast to get together with because he always showcases a lot of the neat things you can do with REALbasic when working with serial devices. In fact, he's one of the people who's taught me just about everything I know about serial devices and how they work -- without his help, I'd have a really hard time implementing or testing most of the serial programming goodies I've added to RB over the years. When I need some way to test new features (such as setting and testing line states or something) he'll usually build me a small device so that I have a way of verifying that my code works. Also, when I need some concept explained to me because there's almost no information about it on the net, I know I can email him and get the explanation I need.

It's always fun to get together with RB users since it's a fresh perspective on things. So much of the time, all I hear are complaints about the things that are wrong with the product. This or that doesn't work and my life is in shambles because of it. Bleh. But when I get the chance to sit down one-on-one with a user, they're typically pretty happy with the product. Everyone has their pet wish-list of things they'd like to see (which is always interesting to hear as well), but it's nice to hear about the things I'm doing right for a change.

So the short version of the story is: I got together with a user last night, had a nice dinner and had a good time. The End.