So, if you are wondering if I played softball yesterday the answer is no. Instead I was sequestered in a room with 10 other anonymous professionals answering questions for 2 hours. Let me take you back to the beginning. So earlier this week I get an email from an AOL email address saying she is looking for people to answer a survey. The going rate is $225. I had to live near Plano and be a technology professional. So I say, what the hey, and give her a call since she asked me to call her. At first she asked a few demographic questions as to what languages do I program in and what are my skills. So she says she will call back with more details. Around Tuesday I get a callback and she says Alcatel-Lucent is doing surveys and can I come in Thursday from 6 to 8. She says I will get it all in cash when I come in to the survey. So I decide to do it. Why not.

So I arrive there and the building is locked. I then notice the wrong address and walk around the building to get to the other one. It is Alcatel's corporate headquarters. I get in and walk into their staging room. They have drinks and popcorn and some of the people I will be with are in there. There are the teenager hobbyists that build XBOX games at home. There is the medical programmer. Then the boss at a gaming company. Then a cisco consultant. Then a iphone developer. We all are wondering what this is going to be for.

So then this guy opens up the Willy Wonka magic room and leads us in. It had gaming systems and phones and computer systems all with blinking lights. On one wall was a tv with an XBOX and a little chair for a child. We all sit on bigger chairs in a circle and introduced ourselves. There are cameras recording everything. Mr. Facilitator does this for a living. He sit and throws out questions and points to each of us for answers. He says stuff like,"Go with that. Good. More?" and "any other opinions." He points at me alot because I do have an experienced opinion and I am not afraid to speak it. The context of this whole survey is that the phone networks are looking at releasing their own version of the "cloud" and wonder if developers will use it. What is the "cloud"? Is is basically a set of online services that do billing, storage, authentication, profiling, user analysis, and with phones, location based services. Imagine instead of typing in your credit card number to make payments you do it from your phone. Say you want to pay the bill in a restaurant, you send a text of the amount to the restaurant phone and it takes it out of that. They had us come up with uses for all of this technology. It was fun. But the funnest part was walking out with $225. Happy Birthday to me!