British Airways have the best paid flight staff in the world. Their pay is sky high (sorry) – cabin crew can earn up to £56k a year! To put it in context that's more than junior and mid-level doctors – I really don’t see how any cabin crew job can be worth more than even the most junior doctor's role.

BA also run one of the biggest teams per flight – they have 14 on each long-haul plane.

The problem is that flights on BA are expensive. You would only ever fly them short-haul if you didn’t care about the price – that means business users and the rich. Everyone's tightening their belts at moment, and fewer people are choosing the (admittedly high quality) expensive BA.

Recently at TechEd Berlin I attended an optimising Javascript presentation that I described as having "lost focus".

I think this one (from Google) is far more the sort of level and detail that I expected:

This presentation is excellent - in fact I think every developer who ever does any Javascript should view it.

I think the current situation with bankers' bonuses shows a complete failure to understand risk and how markets actually work.

There's a TV show in the UK called Property Ladder. Every week through the property boom it followed someone buying and renovating a house with a view to selling it for profit. They found some proper idiots on that show.

There's a great deal of fuss at the moment about RBS's investment division's planned bonuses. They've made some money (great!) but want to pay over a billion in bonuses, which is over a quarter of the profit.

When .Net originally launched it came with first rate support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and at the time I was seriously impressed. Creating a SOAP client-server connection was amazingly easy - little more than adding a .asmx file and decorating your methods with the [WebMethod] attribute, and then point your client project at it and Visual Studio does the rest.

What Visual Studio actually does in this case is create a large auto-generated code file from the WSDL.

Sightseeing

By this point we were starting to feel the tech-fatigue. We took the opportunity to see a little of Berlin, before heading back to hit the labs and the convention stalls

DEV301r Microsoft Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

Scott Cate Nice session to finish on - most of these I knew already but a couple were new. They're all on Scott's blog.

Finally all the stands that had prize draws held their raffles.

INT303 Building RESTful Services Using Windows Communication Foundation

Jon Flanders I felt the presenter was one of the best and most engaging speakers at the conference. He began by describing pretty accurately all the pain that we've already experienced with SOAP - standards compliant but actually useless unless the client is also .Net.

DAT302 Top 10 Best Practices for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Markus Raatz I liked this session - I used to be quite the expert at OLAP optimisation in Analysis Services 2000, and it was good to see that, while the UI was much easier to use, the basic rules have stayed the same.

The rules are things like: define your hierarchies (rigid if possible); keep keys small (good for OLTP too); don't use ROLAP and so on.

I skipped the next session to go and see a little of Berlin.

DEV317 Agile Patterns: Agile Estimations

Stephen Forte (from Telerik) I quite enjoyed this - it was all honestly and well put. His explanations about the cone of uncertainty were good and overall I felt this was a good presentation. The only problem was that I think he was preaching to the converted.

Incidentally one of nicer bits of swag that I got this year was a set of VS2010 branded planning poker cards.
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