TechEd Update

This is the first chance that I've gotten to actually blog. My laptop battery was completely drained this morning, and I haven't had a chance to park myself near a power outlet until now...

First off, Boston: Tell me why people live here? The traffic on a good day is like the worst construction traffic in Ohio. Stop and go for miles on end. For instance, this morning, it took my shuttle bus an hour to travel from the hotel to the conference (a 10-mile trip). It definitely explains why public transportation, like subways, is an important idea here (and why we just don't need it in Toledo, OH).

Anyways, last night's keynote was pretty so-so. Chloe from 24 (Mary Lynn Rajskub - a Detroit native) was the highlight IMHO. Then there was also a bunch of stuff about people being the reason behind software, or something like that... ;-) All that I could think about, though, as 20,000 people were crammed into the conference hall, was that there were 4x as many people there than were in the town that I grew up in.

Today (Monday), I attended an Infopath 2007 session (takeaway: there's a neat import tool that can generate Infopath forms from a Word document), Richard Campbell's Querying presentation (takeaway: I cover the right amount of information in my SQL Server 2005 T-SQL Enhancements talk), and the live taping of .NET Rocks! (takeaway: VSTS for Data Professionals is the first VSTS SKU that I see value in).

After DNR, I talked with Richard for a minute, and also shook Carl's hand, but I have the feeling that he either didn't recognize me (and didn't read my badge), or still thinks that I'm a little obsessed: He was kind of stand-off'ish, like he wanted to get away. ;-)

At the moment, I'm in Hans-Peter Haberlandner and Wolfgang Portugaller's session on storing complex object graphs in SQL Server. These are the folks from Austria that I met in San Francisco last November as part of the Connected Systems Developer Competition. I spoke to them briefly before the talk, and so far, they're doing pretty good (for German being their native language).

More later when I get a chance.

Oh, I've set up a Flickr tag for my photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/81259708@N00/sets/72157594163762723/