The organizers of TechDays 2008 Portugal have decided to lower their standards and invite me to speak at their conference in Lisbon, which by an amazing coincidence takes place during the same week as my appearance at XV Semana Informática do Instituto Superior Técnico (though fortunately not the same day). You don’t need to attend both events, since I will be giving basically the same talk at both of them, although the precise mix may vary based on audience reaction, my mood, and the presence of video cameras. (More video cameras means I tell less provocative stories.) The TechDays folks found a sneaky way of getting me to attend your conference without having to hold it in Redmond: Wait for Raymond to travel to your city and hold your conference while he’s there! Commenter Rick C sort of missed the set-up for the entire blog entry on what it takes to get me to attend your conference. I wasn’t writing about conferences where it’s my job to be there. Naturally, if it’s part of my job, Microsoft will pay my expenses. But as I noted in the base article, going to conferences around the world is not part of my job. My job is to stay in Redmond and bang on code. This blogging thing is just a side activity I do in my personal free time.

If somebody at Microsoft decided that it would be beneficial to send me to a conference (and that someone has the money in their travel budget), then I won’t object, assuming it doesn’t interfere with my day job. But the odds of that happening are pretty slim, because, as people seem to forget and I have to remind them, blogging is not my job.