David Giard

"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" Goodman Revival Packs Emotion

David Giard — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:51:00 GMT

The Goodman Theatre's production of August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" highlights a single day in the recording studio, giving us a glimpse into the lives of all those involved.

Blues singer Ma Rainey (played by E. Faye Butler) is a prima donna, often throwing tantrums until her demands are met. Her agent, Irv, and studio executive Sturdyvant placate her because they both know she generates more profit for the studio than all their other artists combined.

Conflicts arise within Ma's band as they await the tardy lead singer. Young Levee clashes with his older bandmates due to his inflated ego and differing musical tastes. Al'Jaleel McGhee steals the show as Levee, taking us through his range of emotions.

The show reveals how different people resolve conflict in different ways. Ma, the diva bullies her employers; Irv plays peacemaker, conceding nearly every demand; and Levee lashes out in anger.

Rather than changing sets, Linda Buchanan chose to segment the stage into different rooms and use lighting to highlight the area where the action took place. This kept the pace moving throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance.

As with all of Wilson's plays, this one deals with race. Ma knows her white patrons would dismiss her based on her skin color if they were not making money from her voice. Levee and the band members distrust their white employees but must work within a racist system, stacked against them.

Director Chuck Smith brought raw emotion and music to this revival.

GCast 214: Using M365 Copilot to Edit a PowerPoint Image

David Giard — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:58:00 GMT

GCast 214:

Using M365 Copilot to Edit a PowerPoint Image

M365 Copilot has a new feature that allows you to edit an image directly within your PowerPoint presentation. You no longer need to bring it into an external image editing tool.

Ken Versaw on How to Manage AI-First Software Development Teams

David Giard — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:24:00 GMT

Episode 897

Ken Versaw on How to Manage AI-First Software Development Teams

Ken Versaw discusses how Artificial Intelligence has changed the way that his team operates, he now manages his team, and the challenges AI brings.

Chris Woodruff and Joe Guadagno on morespeakers.com

David Giard — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:23:00 GMT

Episode 896

Chris Woodruff and Joe Guadagno on morespeakers.com

Chris Woodruff and Joe Guadagno are experienced speakers who would like to help new speakers. They created morespeakers.com allowing new speakers to connect with experienced once and schedule mentoring sessions. They talk about their motivations for creating this service, the technology and challenges that went into creating it, and how to use the service.

Links:
https://morespeakers.com
https://github.com/cwoodruff/morespeakers-com
https://aspnet-htmx.com/
https://www.josephguadagno.net/2026/01/30/the-technology-behind-morespeakers-com

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot

David Giard — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:06:00 GMT

Henrietta Lacks was 31 years old when she died of cervical cancer. Before her death, doctors at Johns Hopkins University scraped a few of her cancerous cells for future study. To their surprise, these cells outlived Ms. Lacks by decades and reproduced almost without limit. Scientists studied these cells, leading to numerous scientific breakthroughs. This all sounds wonderful until you learn that Henrietta gave no consent and had no knowledge of the use of her cells. Further, the market for these cells grew into a multi-billion-dollar business, while the Lacks family received no compensation and struggled to afford their own medical care.

Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," tells Henrietta's story. But it also tells more. Woven within the Lacks biography is a discussion of the evolution of legal and ethical standards around consent and the use of human body parts, the scientific advances resulting from the study of these cells, the effect on the Lacks family of the cells' success, and Skloot's attempts to pull this story from a family that had grown to distrust the establishment and a white reporter.

Skloot's book raises several ethical and legal questions. What rights do scientists have to use byproducts of medical treatment, including parts of a patient's body? What privacy and monetary rights do the patients have in these situations? Most doctors, scientists, and legal scholars did not even consider these questions in 1951. Surprisingly, some questions are still unresolved more than half a century later.

Do scientific advancements justify unethical practices to attain them? History is full of examples of this. Nazis performing medical experiments on Jews in concentration camps; Army doctors conducting syphilis experiments on black men in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is part biography, part investigative reporting story, and part human tragedy. I was unfamiliar with this part of history before picking up this book. I am glad I did.

GCast 213: Creating a Video Using M365 Copilot

David Giard — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:56:00 GMT

GCast 213:

Creating a Video Using M365 Copilot

M365 Copilot has the ability to generate videos using AI. I show you different ways to generate a video: from a PowerPoint presentation; from a Word document; and from a prompt.

AI Tour in Washington, DC

David Giard — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:29:00 GMT

On Tuesday, March 10, over 1,100 people attended the AI Tour in Washington, DC.

In addition to a keynote presentation, the Tour included 4 workshops, 25 lightning talks, 17 breakout sessions, and 12 sponsor booths.

PSAs David Giard and Husam Hilal were among the Microsoft volunteers.

Keynote

The event opened with a keynote presentation, titled "The Frontier Transformation," which outlined Microsoft's vision for using AI to transform our customers' applications and businesses.

Sponsors and Partners

Over a dozen companies sponsored the event and showed up with booths and representatives. We spoke with several partners, asking each about their relationship with Microsoft. We asked them to share what we are doing well, areas where we can improve, and potential opportunities where we can better support them. We suggested ways that our team can help them.

Every partner said that their interactions with Microsoft have been positive. When pressed, some offered opportunities to improve the relationship – ideas that I took back to our team.

Workshops

I served as a proctor for two of the four workshops offered at the event: "Prototype agents with the AI toolkit and Model Context Protocol" and "Real-world code migration with GitHub Copilot Agent Mode." The workshop room held over a hundred seats, and attendees filled them all for the first workshop, with some people standing in the back to listen. About twenty-five people attended the second workshop.

We received positive verbal feedback from attendees of each session. They had a chance to learn something new and try out their new skills in a sandbox environment. The most common complaint was about the Wi-Fi, which was slow and dropped too often early in the day.

Lightning Talk

Husam presented a Lighting talk session: "From Technical Debt to AI-Ready: Agentic Migration & Modernization on Azure" covering the migrations paths for customers today to get them in Azure, so their data can co-locate with all Azure data and AI services and allowing them to harvest power of all AI services available in the Microsoft ecosystem. The session helped serve a great starting point and eye opener for many of the attended customers and partners (50+ attendees) that were not even familiar with options we offer in Azure for migration, in addition to the recent released tools that form the new area of agentic migrations such as Azure Copilot Migration agent and GitHub Copilot App Modernization agent which helps refactor applications and make them cloud-ready and deployable to Azure PaaS, helping reduce the technical debt, and allowing customer to focus their spending on AI innovation.

Microsoft Booth

Husam also covered the Azure Infrastructure (Cloud & AI Platforms) Booth duties. He answered many customers and partners questions about latest innovation in Azure infrastructure services, with topics related to: Sovereignty Cloud, Compliance, Confidential Computing, AI integrations, Storage, Azure Copilot, Azure Migrate and Migration Options topics. He also had the opportunity to hear latest insights and what our partners and customers are seeing, identifying opportunities for impact to address any concerns or blockers they have.

Final Thoughts

This was an excellent opportunity to teach Microsoft technologies, to connect and build goodwill with our customers and partners, and to build relationships with others at Microsoft. The feedback I received about this event was overwhelmingly positive.

Photos

You can view more photos of the event here.

Sarang Brahme on Industrial Scale Agentic AI in Hospitality and Restaurant Analytics

David Giard — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:21:00 GMT

Episode 895

Sarang Brahme on Industrial Scale Agentic AI in Hospitality and Restaurant Analytics

Sarang Brahme of Long View describes an application his team created to track real-time analytics of restaurant reviews. Their customers can use this application to predict upcoming demand. He talks about the technology involved, challenges to overcome, and how they created a scalable application with secure data isolation.

Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbrahme/
mailto:Sarang.Brahme@lvs1.com

"The Reivers" by William Faulkner

David Giard — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:01:00 GMT

"The Reivers" was a departure for William Faulkner. Published in 1962, it was the last novel he wrote before his death.

Faulkner made a name for himself with a writing style that features stream-of-consciousness outpourings, complex sentence structures, and narratives that jump back and forth in time – a style that often made his works difficult to read. "The Reivers" contains none of these features. It is a straightforward, linear coming-of-age story, told in the first person.

Lucius Priest is eleven years old at the time of the story, which is presumably told years later by an adult Lucius. While the boy's family is out of town for a funeral, he travels from Mississippi to Memphis with his family's employees, Boon Hogganbeck and Ned McCaslin, in a car they "borrowed" from Lucius's grandfather. Boon initiates the journey to visit his girlfriend, a Memphis prostitute. Along the way, the trio trades the car for a horse, enters the horse in a race, and attempts to win enough money to buy back the car. Along the way, they repeatedly get themselves into and out of trouble, including several run-ins with the law, before returning home.

The experience changes Lucius, who learns about responsibility, consequences, and the relations between blacks and whites in the early twentieth-century American South.

Although "The Reivers" is an easier read than most of Faulkner's novels, it is still a thought-provoking story, told with humor and sentiment.

The Goodman Brings Alive "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

David Giard — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:41:00 GMT

I had forgotten much of Junot Diaz's 2007 novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" from when I read it a few years ago. So, when I heard that Chicago's Goodman Theatre planned a stage adaptation of Diaz's book, I re-read the story. I was surprised at how much I had forgotten from this complex tale of generations of Dominican-Americans surviving a brutal dictatorship and immigration to New Jersey.

The book and play tell the titular Oscar's coming-of-age story. He is obese, awkward, unpopular, and obsessed with nerd culture, including science fiction, fantasy, comic books, anime, and video games.

In the play, as in the book, Oscar believes that his family is afflicted with the fuku curse, for which he blames everything from his mother's cancer to his failures with women.

Marco Antonio Rodriguez's theatrical adaptation simplifies the written story by removing many of the subplots. Gone are the tales of Oscar's childhood, the flashback to the origins of the family curse, the aside told by Oscar's sister, Lola, and most of the brutality of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who terrorized the Dominican Republic for decades. The latter is mentioned only briefly in a flashback that explains why Oscar and Lola's mother, Beli, hates her country of origin. The story covers Oscar's college years, beginning at Rutgers and including time off to visit his Dominican homeland and confront the family curse.

Director Wendy Mateo chose a minimalist set, designed by Regina Garcia, to imply each location without recreating it. Set hands dressed in the same costume as Oscar placed and removed tables and beds to indicate a change of location. The video projected behind the stage served more to set the mood than to enhance the scenery. Flames engulfed the wall whenever the characters acknowledged or confronted Fuku directly.

An all-Latinx cast complemented one another well. Lenin D'Anthony Izquierdo was less pathetic and more optimistic than his literary counterpart; Julissa Calderon projected righteous anger as Lola, and Kelvin Grullon displayed impressive subtlety as Oscar's roommate, Yunior. Two actors who played minor characters stood out to me: Jalbelly Guzmán, who played the two women with whom Oscar fell in love, and Arik Vega, who played all the show's villains. Both actors gave their all to present over-the-top characters.

The Goodman Theatre is the first to present this play in English. It ran in Spanish in other cities as "La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao." The script retains many of the lapses into Spanish that Diaz included in his novel. My remedial Spanish was insufficient to catch every joke that made others laugh. But I was never at a loss to know what was happening. Some may think the nearly three-hour running time is excessive. It is not. The story and characters held me throughout.