OK, so I'm back home again after the long flight and a very busy few days.

Thursday saw the repeat of my Instructor Led Lab and once again it went well. Not quite as well as Wednesday, but good enough to have it in the top 10 for overall and for presenter scores for Instructor Led Labs. Tried to get in to sit the 70-620 Vista exam but they wouldn't book it for after 2pm since apparantly I needed 4 hours to do it, so I booked it for 12:30 Friday (where I had about 90 minutes free).

Thursday evening was the Attendee party at Universal Studios. This year I stayed with other MCTs instead of doing things myself. Good move. It is much more fun spending time at these events with others. Went on the Revenge of the Mummy and Simpsons ride with James Finley before we bumped in to Shannon, CA and others on their way to the Simpsons, so we went on it again with them. The Men in Black Alien Attack ride experienced "technical difficulties" after we had gotten inside, so after waiting for things to get fixed we gave up and exited - yes - we did the "line ride". Did Disaster Movie (with James being picked to play "Cupcake") and Twister. By that stage the time was 11:30 and they weren't letting people on to any more rides so we headed back to the bus back to the hotel.

Friday was more time in the Hands on Labs until 12:30, then wandered up to the testing centre for 12:45. Sat the exam, which crashed halfway through and had to be restarted on another machine, and was out again by 1:45.

The last part of the show was spent supporting Corey Hynes' ILL on Hyper-V. I think he was hoping that by having back-to-back ILLs at the end of the show that no-one would turn up for the last session and we'd get off early. No such luck. 15 or so rocked up. Both sessions went well and Corey's sessions were the only other ILL that had all sessions ranking in the overall and presenter scores in the top ten for ILLs.

Friday evening finished up with some of us having pizza back at the hotel and then sitting around the spa talking about all sorts of things. And I got rid of all the biscuits that I had taken over (still brought the Vegemite back with me).

 

So what did I get out of TechEd?

Another year of putting faces to names - priceless.

Renewing contact with people from last year - priceless.

Getting to present ILLs at TechEd North America (and getting excellent evals) - well worth the extra effort required.

A good (imho) sense of the direction of IT services and what technologies to focus on moving forwards.

Less time to spend talking with Product teams - maybe next time - if I get to go again.

And another certification ;-)

 

- pictures will be added when I have size adjusted them

 

 

 

 

 

Long day today on duty with a 7:30am start and a 6pm finish.

During that time I had my own Instructor Led Lab before supporting the repeat of Bob Reinsch's.

Will add some pictures later but nothing more to really report on how Tech Ed is going as between ILL and HOL duty I didn't get time to look.

Checked out the Study Hall and Cram4Exam session at the end of the day but no chance of me doing any study there myself.

Feet are really sore from so much walking and with virtually no sleep last night I decided to skip the Cluster-Funk party at Margaritaville to be in better shape for my repeat ILL and the Attendee party tomorrow.

Day 1 of TechEd and the keynote with Bob Muglia started at 8:30 with African drums. While it was high energy and well received by the crowd I got the sense that budget cuts had hit hard and hoped that Bob might have something interesting enough to make the ITPros not too jealous that the Developers had gotten Bill Gates for their Keynote. His speech is available here as mentioned in Redmond Report eNewsletter. Admittedly, I stayed only for the first half hour which made a fairly weak attempt (in my opinion) to say that IT Pros were heroes (as distinct from Bill's message last week that Developers were the foundation and future of MS), and then went on to talk about Dynamic IT, a beta of Identity Lifecycle Manager 2 followed by interoperability and distributed apps. It was (imho) a thinly veiled "I believe that you should all be more like Developers" talk and missed the mark by a long way in giving IT Pros something useful regarding the direction Microsoft is taking (except that they love Developers).

Straight after the keynote had finished I helped out in Bob Reinsch's Instructor Led Lab on malware (there is a repeat tomorrow) and then with a quick break for lunch it was in the HoLs for the rest of the afternoon, finishing later than I should have.

I did a quick round of the vendor stalls during the Partner Expo reception, but it was pretty much only T-shirts on offer with the odd pen and other trinkets. I'll see if there is more at the MS Product booths tomorrow and the rest of the week. What did strike me though was the HUGE number of vendors that were offering Sharepoint solutions, including BCP, offline access, mobile access, partner and extranet access (without provisioning AD accounts for external parties). I reckon fully 25% of the stands were Sharepoint related, possibly more. I didn't just pick up T-shirts either but spent time talking to a lot of the vendors. The Sharepoint ones are pretty much all interested in forming partnerships with resellers and enablers. Virtualisation was there but in no great numbers and the usual suspects (HP, Dell, EMC, Quest etc) were all there as well. Focus is off the hardware and platform and in to the data and how to make it available.

From the Partner Expo Reception we left (thanks Bob Lawler for the car ride) for the All-Star Community Pit Stop party at Destiny nightclub that was being run by TechNet Plus and MS Learning. It was a great event with lots of giveaways halfway through (managed to snag a cap) and catch up with Trika for the first time this year.

I decided to walk back to the hotel (really just wanted to see how far it really was) and it took about 75 minutes - so quite a way. With an early start and my ILL tomorrow (and the lab machines weren't working when I checked late this afternoon) I figured I couldn't really justify staying out too late this evening, even though we were all having a blast.

 

Oh - and the afternoon rainstorm in Orlando? Got through the roof today and leaked on to some of the machines in the HoLs as well as there being a tornado warning around 5pm. Nothing like Adelaide weather!

Even though the conference isn't due to start until tomorrow, the Hands on Labs were open today and lots of people coming through registering and visiting the HoLs (not much else to do apart from site-seeing). Met some more MCTs for the first time (Thomas Lee and Rosie Appelbaum among them) and finished the day with 5 1/2 hours in the labs before heading out with John Miller to the GLO lounge where Party with the Pros was taking place. Got there just as a raffle was taking place with lots of prizes being given away. Picked up a T-shirt just for being from Australia, and a Powershell pocket reference guide - which I gave to John as I felt sorry for him missing out on anything other than drink vouchers. First Instructor Led Lab (ILL) tomorrow (supporting Bob Reinsch), Partner Expo will be open and another party in the evening, so another full day (as usual).

Took a picture of Wonderworks on my walk back from the GLO to the hotel. It is one weird looking building. Yes - it is built to look upside down.

Today was an early start (in the hotel lobby by 7:15am) and all day at the convention centre meeting other MCTs and going through what was required for the week, then going through some of the labs. Apparantly last week the convention centre still looked empty even when all the dev folk were there (well, most of the time). Things shoud ramp up for ITPro precon tomorrow and then more-so for the rest of the week. The show floor area is 2.2 million square feet.

looking back across the product areas to the HOLs

                 Hands on Labs environment

    area for meals (well, part of it)

 

Bought some Jabra C820 noise cancelling HeadPhones and they arrived a couple of days before I left, and I was glad they did. They did a good job of really keeping the noise of the airplane down.
Still couldn't get to sleep, but at least I didn't get the awful headache from the engine noise.

Arrived in Orlando at just after 6pm local time then took a taxi to the Renaissance Hotel and managed to catch up with some of the other MCTs before they headed out to dinner at Sam Seltzer's Steakhouse - Altamonte Springs. Already knew Bob Lawler and Richard Civil from last year but could now put faces to names of Stephen Charles Rea ("rev") and Callahan ("CA").

(left to right - Bob, rev, CA and Richard - and yes, those two steaks in front of CA are hers - at last a woman who knows how to eat like a human instead of a rabbit!)

and in follow-up news - this restaurant has now been closed! "Nation's Restaurant News" article here.

Bob headed home and the rest of us tried to find Destiny nightclub where there was a party in progress. I was pretty tired though so shared a cab back to the
hotel with two more MCTs - John Miller and Amber Mitchell.

 

 

 

I'm off to TechEd in Orlando again as a TLG, this time also presenting one of the Instructor Led Labs.

Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze in some time to keep a reasonable up to date account of what is happening.

Flying out 7AM Saturday morning and arriving in Orlando just before 6PM (assuming everything goes according to schedule).