Tech.Ed : Day 1 : The Rest Of The Day

Wednesday at Tech.Ed was hectic. Following the keynote, I was scheduled to work in an area called the TechNet Lounge, which had no lounge  (Thanks to Scott Savage for this observation)

So I sat in the lounge and spoke to many of the delegates. When sessions were on, I walked around the Exhibit area a few times meeting some of the folks who were exhibiting. I'll do a summary of what I saw later.

At the end of the day, we had a get together for our usergoup leaders and MVPs (some would say we ran a Readify team meeting, but I digress). We took our community leaders through the launch plans for the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2005 as well as SQL 2005 and beta release of BizTalk Server 2006. I'm sure we will get lots of feedback over the next few days on our plans

The evening event was an 'Ask The Experts' dinner, which I missed as I was invited to a dinner with our special journalist guests at Tech.Ed, such as Alex Zaharov-Reutt, Dan Warne, Angus Kidman, Rodney Gedda, Andrew Parson (what happenned to your blog dude?), Fleur Doidge (ditto),  Renai LeMay (ibid) and a bunch of others who I didnt get to chat to. It was nice to catch up some folks who I had met in the past, or who had interviewed me before, or just putting a face to a by-line. We had a rather passionate debate with Fleur and Renai as to whether bloggers are journalists. Renai was for the affirmative, Fleur for the negative and I was slightly amused by the debate. Me a journalist? Not likely. Journalists are the folks who break news, uncover scandles, bring down the oppressors, fight for the underdog, etc etc etc. I'm just a geek with a keyboard and access to the web.

At the end of the night, we all agreed to disagree and we headed back to the hotel. This was where I first heard the rumours that someone is planning to kidnap my shirt and make a run for it at the upcoming party tonight. Shock Horror.

Day 2 begins. I'm running late. More updates to follow.

Technorati Tag : TechEdAU2005 TechEdAU

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