Tech Ed 2006 : day 0

So, day zero is nearly complete. Today is Sunday. I arrived yesterday after completely missing my plane. I thought my flight was on Sunday, and when I went to print out my itinerary Sat afternoon I made the connection that 6/10 was indeed not Sunday, but that someone had rudely moved it to Saturday. This would have been ok had I noticed this incovenient change before my flight. But I noticed this at 1:30, and my flight left at 11:00. I called up the travel people, and they re-booked me for a flight later that day. Got to the Hilton just fine thanks to them.

While on the shuttle from the hotel I hooked up with Brian Loesgen, a fellow MVP and VTS'er.

I spent the day registering for the event, and doing my initial check in at the speaker lounge. Registering was quick and painless, and instead of a normal laptop bag this year, we get Man-Purses. They are actually quite nice bags, your laptop goes in vertically however.

The speaker lounge was less 'lounge-y' than I expected and more 'airport cattle coral'. Unfortable chairs, and basic snacks (which are the same outside the room.) There is rumor that the speaker area has it's own private network, so maybe I will check that out, since the hotel has less bandwidth than a remote farmer in Australia. Right after that I sat down and pawed through the marketing crap in the bag. Most went immediately into the trash can as worthless, meaningless crap. I had to work with marketing back in my .com days to put together inserts like this, and we always put more thought into than these people have. One had the title "Bring this card to our booth for a demo of our product." Ok, so you aren't going to give me a demo if I don't have this piece of dead tree? Ok, enough ranting about the marketing chaff.

I spent most of the day at the MVP summit. Got to meet with some great people, some old friends, and some brand new. I got to know my MVP handler, Kim, who is a blast to talk to, and met some of the other MVP architects.

After that we decided to walk to a restaurent called the "No Name" restaurent. A little seafood place down on the docks. After some 'agile' navigation we arrived to a nice feast. Reminds me of the places I was used to growing up in Maine (Ayuh!). Boston is really bringing back some of those memories.

After dinner we hoofed it back up to the center to see the key note. It wasn't bad. There was some corny 24 (the show) rip off stuff, and they had one of the actors from the show helping out.

They finally announced Visual Studio Team Data. This is going to be a great tool for data architects and data developers. It has a bunch of tools around unit testing and refactoring which are going to kill in my shop. They showed Windows Compute Cluster, which they showed at the PDC, and a few other things.

Now, for the important part. I am not normally a swag-whore. I have known people in the past that will go out of their way to get as much free stuff as possible, regardless of it's value. Brian L has a great notion to use the swag as geocaching presents. I thought that was a great idea.

So the swag count for day 0. I intend to log what I get. I do not intend to go out of my way to get stuff, so it will be interesting to see what I walk out with.

Here is a picture of my swag, and the contents.
1. Man Purse with random stuff inside. Nice to get DVDs of the stuff I spent days downloading just recently (Vista, etc.)
2. The hotel room key is office branded. (not really swag, but the marketing machine is set to 11). Same goes for the Windows HPC do not disturb sign.
3. DVD of random goodies I was given. No idea what is on it.
4. MP3 player from the MVP team.
5. Vista branded magentic stick and ball thing, from the MVP team. I guess they raided the Vista swag closet before coming here.
6. Bottle of wine for being a speaker. Nice presentation.
7. Two little compass keychain things from the keynote.
8. A shirt (thrown at me from someone) that says "Is your network up today? You're welcome.".

Can't wait for some of the sessions tomorrow. Time to go find something more to do.


-bhp