Day Two Wrap up

Today was a pretty light day compared to what I have planned to attend tomorrow.  I’m already starting to think about cutting a few of the items out of my schedule tomorrow just for sanity sake.

I thought I’d mention a little of what it’s like to be at PDC as an attendee.  First off, there is SO much stuff to listen to and take in that it’s literally hard not to look like a deer caught in the headlights.  Sessions are hard to choose since so much stuff is interesting you want to see it all (and I eventually will when the DVD is shipped with the session media on it). 

There is food everywhere.  Throughout the conference area they have tables and tables of food.  Chips, fruits, cookies, candy bars, power bars, etc.  They also have the lunch and breakfast provided, which is okay.  The breakfast selection is much better than the lunch selection if you ask me.  Once I thought that this food would be much better utilized if they had sent a quarter of it down South to help the efforts there.

Wirless is a little spotty in most of the sessions as there are hundreds of people connecting to the stations to blog and such.  There are many wired connections that work pretty well though in the common areas.  I highly recommend a firewall because my Black Ice install has notified me a lot about attempted attacks.  Most are just port probes which Black Ice easily stops.  Oh, and some people setting up peer-to-peer connections named with the same SID as the wireless network at the conference center.

The expo hall is like a gold mine of swag.  Tons of t-shirts and giveaways.  Of course, I usually don’t win things very often so not much to report there.  I did get a USB flexible light from Business Objects (even though I can’t stand Crystal Reports) for free which is nice (I didn’t win it, they were giving them out).  I think next conference I go to I will just bring half the shirts I need and wear the swag shirts the rest of the time.  Cuts down on luggage space on the way out.  I realy would have liked it if they had put the t-shirts in the little shrink wrap packages for portability though.

Meeting people is very easy and most people here are very easy to engage into conversation about the new stuff being presented.  I’ve meet people from Isreal, the US and Canada, but there are easily thousands of people from outside of the country here.  I’ve talked with several people from Microsoft, including Gretchen of the Jobs blog fame and a gentleman from the Tablet PC team.

I’m bummed about not going to Universal Studio tonight, but I think I probably made the correct decision in that.  I’m really freaking tired.  But of course, not tired enough to not blog….sigh…what’s wrong with me?

Pardon me if any of my spelling and grammer are off….I’m about to fall asleep.  I’m shutting down now for the night.