I think this is the earliest I have been at TechEd. The best flight I could find arrived around 10 AM in LA. It was cheap $280 and non-stop from BWI. One of the downsides was getting up at 4:30 AM EST or 1:30 AM PST, which means I will crash and fall asleep at some point today. As a result I got into to town way to early to check in to hotel. I took super shuttle to LACC instead. I am now hanging out near Starbucks overlooking the Registration / Materials Distribution. Not sure exactly how long I will hang out here, but for a while I suppose. Just listening to podcasts and blogging / twittering.
Recently in Pre-Conference Category
I walked over to the conference center from the Rosen Plaza Hotel where I am staying. I chose this hotel because it was very close to the conference center. The only problem was what part of the conference center it is near. It is near the West concourse. The west concourse is where the food and the keynote is, but everything else including check in is in the north and south concourses. It is about a mile from the point I entered the West concourse to check in. A good 25 minute from my hotel room. Still better than the bus I am sure.
Once I got to the South Hall I found the check in area. There is a line of 30-40 people to check in attendees. When I arrived there was only about 5 people to check in. After I got checked in the line of people began yelling out that they were available, it was like some surreal helpful carney's yelling for attention. I am sure tomorrow morning they will be swamped.
After I checked in I walked around the closed of show floor (from the outside) to get a feel for the layout. I also browsed the store to see if anything caught my interest. I will have to check the sharepoint stuff again later.
Well during the flight I realized the one thing I forgot, my badge for the show. It kind of freaked me out since it said plainly on it to not forget it. I blame the move, I can't tell you where it is for the life of me.
As soon as I checked into hotel I wanted to come to registration to make sure it wasn't going to be an issue. When I got my reservation for my hotel I specifically chose one that i could walk to the convetion center from. Well I can, however they have just doubled (at least) the size of the convention center here in Orlando. I can easily walk to the old one, however the new one is about a mile away. Still very walkable, but not quite what I had in mind.
Anyway back to registration. I went up to the badge pick up and they had a sign up saying $25 for lost badges. However they didn't charge me, just asked for ID and printed a new one for me. I guess the lost fee is after you check in. Much less painful than I was worried about.
I then went and got my first of probably many shirts. I must bring home swag for those who didn't get to come.
As I was riding the tram from the terminal to baggage claim a guy asked me if I wanted to share a cab to convention center. His name was Simon and was from the Security Response Center at Microsoft. We chatted while waiting for my bags and then in cab. Some really good questions from both of us. He was interested in how we deal with patches (SUS) and spyware. As well as educating our users as far as social engineering attacks, which are the most prevalent now. He asked me some questions that I admit I didn't particularly like the answer to. Very thought provoking though.
That is what this conference is all about. Learning and thinking, but not just from sessions just as much from other attendees either MS or not.
Well the flight was good and bad. The flight left about 30 minutes late or so. When I got to my seat it was taken, I am a window person. It was a family with a 18 month old I would guess. The guy sitting next to me saw my MTB '99 bag and guessed I was going to TechEd as was he. We chatted on and off throughout the flight, good guy. His kid was probably the best behaved of the 4 babies sitting within 2 rows of me. I just played Metroid on my GBA. No turbulence or anything so that was good.
On my way out of town I stopped by Tysons Corner Mall. I wanted to get some new Timberlands that look more normal when wearing shorts as opposed to the ones I have worn most the year at school. At least I finally switched from the old standbys.
Anyway back to the original subject. In Tysons is one of the Mac stores, I think it was one of the first. I still admire the Mac stores from a sales and layout stand point. They are wide open and have lots of items on display that you can play with. The big thing is you can actually buy stuff there. As opposed to the failed Gateway Country stores that you had to order and wait two weeks for anything. I still wish Dell / Microsoft could come up with a competing line of stores. In the Mac stores the store is almost as important for many of the shoppers as is the product.
Ok one more try at the original purpose of this post. Over the last few days there have been rumors that continue to build steam that Apple will announce tomorrow at WWDC that they are switching or at least offering the alternative of Intel (and AMD?) based Macs. I really wanted to run into the store and like a crazed madman say welcome to the dark side.
The more I think about the idea of Intel based Macs I like the idea. For the eMac line Apple could use the Celeron chipset line. For the PowerMac line the new Dual Processor and even the HT version could be used to enable four processor like versions. Apple could even go so far to offer a Dual Dual machine that reports itself as an 8 proc system using Intel's Dual Xeon chipsets. This box would be pretty expensive but would blow the doors off any existing Macs. The last piece of the puzzle is of course the Pentium M for the iMac and PowerBook platforms. This is really the area IBM has struggled with the PowerPC. Getting speed with low power and low heat has seems to have been a real struggle for IBM.
Of Course tomorrow Steve Jobs could come out and just announce a PowerBook G5 and this will all have been for naught.
I am attempting to blog via OneNote. We will see how well it works with my handwriting.
First some airport observations. I haven't flown in a while, actually sitting here in the airport I can�t remember for sure when or where it was. I believe it was either Whitney's wedding or Las Vegas. I am flying out of Dulles International (IAD). Often I will fly out of National and now with having moved to Baltimore I imagine I will go out of BWI more often. The filghts were cheaper and better timed out of Dulles though and my friend who is joining me later in the week can more easily leave from Dulles.
Apparently there is no longer a port office box in airports at least not that I can find. I need to send a graduation card to my cousin. I guess it will take a long trip from Orlando. The other interesting thing was an instant paper machine. The machine would print 250 papers from around the world on demand.
Well lets just say my handwriting appears to give OneNote fits. It got about 60% accuracy. It kept guessing different words based on my mess of writing.
I have a particular wardrobe I wear in summer post 9/11 air travel. It consists of my Teva's, shorts and T-shirt with no belt. This way I have no metal that can possibly set off the detector. Today the metal detector TSA told me he recommends I take my sandals off. I asked if it was required and he said no but he would send me to further screening. I figured whatever. At the wand and pat down station they basically took my sandals and ran through the X-ray. The wand TSA told me they decide if it is necessary to X-ray based on thickness. Apparently I need to get the thinnest and cheapest flip flops for the security area.
Pre 9/11 some airports were beginning to build up mall like shopping centers inside the terminals. The Pittsburgh airport even went so far as to do TV advertising talking about the prices being the same as normal malls to try and drive shoppers there. Now I must say I never thought of going to airport like mall. Then of course I don't care for normal malls either. Now of course no one other than ticketed passengers can enter the concourse area of airports so it is all somewhat pointless. However there are still some pretty high end and well known shops at least at Dulles; places like Brookstone, Borders, Brooks Brothers and a few others. That is just in the B concourse that I walked around.
I made up my schedule a week or two ago, but I am still sitting here with a list of sessions I want to go to. The problem I have is many sessions are only offered once and at the same time. They are certain presenters that I have to go to like Steve Riley and Mark Russinovich. Both are great presenters no matter the subject it seems. After that I am torn between my first love Exchange and then Server / Desktop stuff. I have to remind myself that I manage one exchange server with less than 1000 users not 20 servers with 20,000 users these days. My time is better spent on GPO's and server stuff given my current environment.
Moral of the story is if you can't find a session to go to you aren't looking hard enough.
I noticed there is a site for TechEd Bloggers so I thought I would get around to setting mine up in preparations for next week. I am really looking forward to TechEd, didn't get to go last year. This is my fourth time I think, '99, '02, '03 and now '05. Wow my memory is bad, this is why I need my blog to keep things straight. Hope to see you all there.
