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TechEd Day 1: Getting the ball rolling, getting over Jetlag

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After taking the red eye from Seattle at 12:40, I arrived at 8:30 am Seattle time in Orlando. I had met another Microsoftie who was a consultant from Minnesota. He gave me the short lowdown on the TechEd event and then kindly gave me a ride to my hotel. He was very pro at travel, as it is what he does much of the time. Once I arrived at my hotel, I discovered that my room wasn’t ready yet but I had to get to the conference to man a booth. I arrived, slightly tardy, to the conference and then was approached by a customer who was having issues with a faxable document system that he worked on. I did some work on understanding his problem, which is rather complex, and then took a picture of our whiteboarding session and will give it to the right people once I get home to Seattle/Redmond. After a brief discussion with him, I encountered another customer who was curious as to why we don’t have the UAC information in the requirements sections of APIs. Certain APIs that require elevated privileges should be highlighted, he quipped. After that, Eliot notified me that the application I created for his usability study did not scale very well to the 40 categories that he will be using for this study and that there is an issue in generating newlines. I used remote desktop to access my work machine, produce a fix, and deployed the updated patch to the machines in our usability lab before getting some coffee and relaxing. After this, I reviewed my slides for the presentation I am supposed to be giving tomorrow. If you’re interested, you can check out my slides here.

At this point, I was exhausted and jetlagged so I went back to the hotel room and crashed hard. I slept for around four hours before heading back out. I went to the TechEd Jam session at Groove, a fancy club in the hotel-esque strip of mini-stores and clubs in between hotels. The Jam session was mixed. There were a few people who were pretty decent at making music, while there were a few who definitely did not know what was going on. After listening to the cacophony for a about an hour, I left with a friend I made on the busride over to a small pub next door. It was pouring rain outside and I ended up getting soaked en route. We had a drink then returned to the hotel.

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