Deeps: What is your dream job?
SS: IT Director for the World Rally Championship. There are so many aspects that are incredibly interesting. Co-ordinating all the camera feeds, timing the cars electronically, generating statistics, sending SMS updates and hosting live feeds through their website are just some examples. Combine this with travelling around the world and working in all extremes of conditions it is a test of man and machine both on and off the track.

 

Deeps: What would you be doing now if you weren't a student?
SS: Working somewhere with lots of high tech equipment and cutting edge technology. Preferably somewhere where I get a sweet laptop and can work from a café.

 

Deeps: What is the lamest joke you have ever heard?
SS: What is blue and looks like a bucket? A blue bucket.

 

Deeps: Do you want to be Australia's next Idol and why?
SS: I think it would be great to be the Australian Idol because I would get all kinds of crazy stories. They would be heaps better than my ?exciting' computer related stories, which for some reason people find boring??

 

Deeps: If you were a hip hop artist, what would you call yourself?
Ice Block.

 

Deeps: What's the best thing about being a student?
SS: The concession card and the beautiful grass we have at Sydney Uni to lie around on.

 

Deeps: Worst thing about being a student?
SS: When union elections come around and you get assaulted with rubbish every 5 seconds.

 

Deeps: Why .NET?
SS: It gives me flexibility, speed and compatibility. I mainly use ASP.NET and I love having the flexibility of being able to use C#, J# or Visual Basic .NET depending on what problem I want to solve. It also encourages you to be a more balanced programmer and lets you experience the amazing things each language has to offer. The other main benefit is that because it is compiled code it runs a lot faster than other scripted languages. It runs so damn quick and smooth it is just awesome!

 

Deeps: Why Microsoft?
SS: I want to work somewhere where I can experience a vast range of technologies and have a say in where technology takes us. Looking at Microsoft's product range and global market adoption it is pretty easy to see that Microsoft is the place to be if I want to achieve my dreams.

 

Deeps: If you had one question to ask Bill Gates, what would it be?
SS: Do you think that people will continue to accept technology as a part of their everyday lives or will it have to increasingly focus on being transparent and non-invasive before it is adopted?

 

Deeps: What cool feature would you like to see in the next version of Office?
SS: I would love to see Office come with a Bluetooth headset and some video tutorials on how to take advantage of all the voice capabilities of Office.