TechEd New Zealand Day 1

Day 1 of TechEd New Zealand is done.  We had a smooth registration of 1800 people - thanks to the 600 people who can in on Sunday afternoon to register, lessening the load of registration this morning.  The non-IT keynote by Dr Joe MacInnis was really good and I had lots of positive comments.

There were so many people at Sky City milling around after the keynote.  Lots and lots of people, just amazing.  There continued to be lots and lots of people in the sessions.  We had enough space that no sessions had people standing outside.  Of that I was happy.

After the keynote I spent most of the day talking to Speakers - following up their questions, and talking to Attendees - and following up their questions.  I have to help out the speakers, I recruited most of them for the event :-)

Somehow we forgot to include a pen in the registration bag.  Oops, sorry.  I hope this doesn't reduce the number of the paper evals that people complete.  We really need evals to improve the event.

The hands-on labs proved popular outside of the times when the big event topics were running in sessions.  SQL Server 2005 labs were popular outside of times when SQL Server 2005 sessions were running and Visual Studio 2005 labs were popular outside of times when Visual Studio 2005 sessions were running.

This year so far I haven't heard of anyone accidentally missing lunch because they went to lunch time sessions... yet.

More fun tomorrow.