I have friends and colleagues who are interested in doing what I do for a living. I think, more than anything, they're intrigued by the title "evangelist." They ask me what it is that  I actually do on a daily basis and I honestly have a hard time answering them sometimes.

This has been a particularly hectic week, so I thought I'd call out the high points so you can get a feel for what this life is all about...

Sunday, November 11
I got on a plane at 9:00 AM to fly from St. Louis to Seattle for the Microsoft Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF) in Redmond. This is a great event Microsoft puts on every year for 250 top technology leaders and chief architects from around the world. Flight went off without a hitch and touched down at SEATAC late morning.

I went to my hotel, got checked in and, later that evening, joined my friends and colleagues at Daniel's Broiler for dinner with some of our invited guests. The meal was superb, and it was a great opportunity to engage some really smart people in really interesting conversation. It's always nice to spend some time with you teammates as well, since we see each other so seldom.

Monday, November 12
I left my hotel at 7:30 AM to a cold, drenching rain -- typical Seattle weather -- and hit the I-405 on my way to Redmond while getting in a quick conversation with my wife.

SAF kicked off at 8:30 AM with a keynote address by Dr. Donald Ferguson. It was an interesting talk, but everybody was waiting for Bill Gates' Q&A session. Speaking of which, I was grabbing a can of soda from a cooler outside the auditorium and, when I turned to walk back to my seat, I literally bumped into BillG, who was showing up for his session. I said, "Excuse me, Bill," and he said, "It's ok." So, that was my first exchange with the Chairman of the Board. Nice!

Bill's Q&A session, which included Eric Rudder as well, was very interesting. The audience had an opportunity to ask some really forward looking questions and Bill was his usual visionary self.

That whole discussion promoted my friend and colleague Josh Holmes to poll some of us about who we think about when we think of technical leadership at Microsoft. The answers were somewhat unexpected and you can see the outcome of his thoughts on the post he put on his blog later that day.

The remainder of the day was a series of roundtable discussions, including a very good one presented by Darren McCormick, the role owner for the User Experience Evangelists on "design thinking" in software development lifecycles and teams. Since this was an architecture event, a lot of the people who attended the roundtable thought it was going to be about software architecture design, but stayed and engaged in a very interesting conversation and probably learned that the two design practices are probably more similar than different.

Monday evening concluded with a cocktail and hors d'oeuvres reception at the Hyatt in Bellevue. It was a good opportunity to chat with guests and colleagues, including my guest at SAF, Rick Morrison with Anheuser-Busch, who seemed unusually interested in the new Call of Duty 4 game for the Xbox 360.

Tuesday, November 13
First and foremost, Tuesday was my 37th birthday, and it was a beautiful morning in Seattle, the kind of morning that might convince me to live there someday. I caught the second half of the keynote address at SAF and then had the honor to moderate a roundtable discussion with Josh Holmes and Larry Clarkin on enterprise mashups. You might have seen my post about the article in the Microsoft Architecture Journal these guys wrote a couple of months back. Anyway, we had a great turnout for the roundtable and got some really interesting perspectives on this relatively forward-looking topic. The quote of the day came from a gentleman from the UK who worked in the military space: "We really want to make sure we build mash-ups, not mess-ups." Classic, and worth repeating.

After a quick lunch, Larry and I journeyed to SEATAC and got on a long, four hour flight to Austin, Texas. Larry was joining the rest of his team for an offsite meeting, and I was in town to speak at VSLive! the following day.

Since we lost a couple of hours coming back east, we landed at about 10:15 PM Tuesday night. I rented a car and dropped Larry off at his hotel and went on to mine.

When I arrived at the Renaissance Hotel in Austin, it was about 11:00 AM and I was tired and grumpy, because I knew that I had to go to my room and finish my demo for my talk the next day. I walked up to the counter and, after giving the desk clerk my name, she said, "Oh, happy birthday, Mr. Boynton." I have to admit, I was shocked. It turns out that my dear wife, Maria, had called after talking to me at SEATAC and got me an upgrade to an executive suite as a birthday present. The room was beautiful and there was a basket of goodies waiting for me. Needless to say, my mood was considerably lifted and my demo preparation was not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Wednesday, November 14
I left my hotel and met an absolutely gorgeous morning in Austin to make my way to the Sheraton where VSLive! was being held. This turned out to be one of the most frustrating navigation experiences of my life. The road system in the areas around Austin remind me of an M.C. Escher sketch. It even confused my GPS devise, because it took me to the wrong part of the city. After consulting a friendly public servant, I found my way to the hotel and got registered.

My talk started at 11:45 AM. I was doing a talk on building Silverlight applications using Expression Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008. I had about 15 minutes of slides and the rest of the presentation was me hand-coding a media player application live. There's nothing like the thrill or doing a live demo in front of seventy or so people with nothing but alpha and beta products. Anything can happen and usually does, but not on Wednesday. The talk and demo seemed to be very well received and I got some great feedback from the attendees. In fact, one gentleman told me that he thought my talk was better than Billy Hollis' talk the previous day on building WPF applications in Blend. Considering the great respect I have for Billy, I really appreciated the compliment!

I had the good fortune to run into my buddy David Walker from Tulsa, Oklahoma, He was doing a talk later in the day, so we grabbed some lunch and had a great discussion about some interesting work he and his company have been doing with MOSS in recent months. It's always great to bump into one of our MVPs and catch up what they're doing both within their companies and in the community.

Later that afternoon, I caught up with the rest of the community team at the Microsoft office and went out for an evening of dinner, fun and great conversation. So, hopefully by this point, you can see that a big part of my job is talking to people, something I never thought I'd actually enjoy doing. I mean, that's why I got into computers in the first place, right?

Another day, another 1:00 AM bedtime.

Thursday, November 15th
I woke up early this morning as I had some personal arrangements I needed to take care of right away. Once these were all wrapped-up, I decided to head to the airport early and try to catch an earlier flight to Chicago, where I'm meeting my in-laws (I'll get to that in just a minute). Anyway, I had no luck with an earlier flight, so I sat in the Admiral's Club for a couple of hours, caught up on email from the past three days and started this post.

I was standing at my gate waiting to board the plane when the gentleman standing next to me asked me, "Weren't you a speaker at VSLive?" I replied yes and then recognized his face -- he had asked one of the questions at the end of my talk.I learned his name was Alex Acquina (Alex, if you're reading this, please forgive any unintentional butchering of your last name!) and we had a great continuation of the Q&A session from yesterday. That is a shining example of how evangelism is a 24x7x365 kind of job, and one of the reasons I love it so much. You never know who you're going to bump into and connect with. Monday it was Bill Gates. Today it was Alex from Chicago.

Our plane took off slightly late, which is much better than several hours late, like my buddy Dave Bost's flight back to Chicago yesterday (If you follow Dave on Twitter, you could watch his saga unfold in near-real-time).

And so, I'm writing these words at 28,000 feet somewhere over the sovereign republic of Texas.

When I touch down in Chicago, I'm getting a limo ride about 80 miles west to my in-laws farm where I'll work the remainder of the afternoon and get ready to jump in a motor home and head south to pick up my family and move on to Georgia for a family wedding on Saturday.

I'll sleep in my own bed Sunday night and next week, I've got vacation time scheduled.

Week in Review
Not all weeks are as hectic as this one has been. Most are better and a few are a lot worse. But I truly believe that I have the best job in the world. I get to travel around the country and talk to smart, passionate people about technology and help them figure out how to make their lives and jobs easier by leveraging it. I get to talk to people about best practices for the work we're doing now and show them what they'll be able to do tomorrow. So, when I have weeks like this one, it's tough, but very rewarding. I hope this has given you some insight into the life of the technical evangelist. I appreciate you indulging me by reading it.