TechEd Europe: Work-Party-Sleep imBalance

Establishing a sustainable work-party-sleep balance during TechEd 2005 Europe in Amsterdam proved more difficult than I imagined.

Friday was little different from previous days: I worked at the convention center for twelve hours attending sessions, working the VSTS booth, talking to customers...

10:55AM

[In this photo, Brian Randell (right), Ashwin Karuhatty (left) and I marvel as hundreds of eager conference delegates rush the stage after a session on Team Foundation Source Control for free copies of Richard Hundhausen's book and the VPC image of the Beta2 version of Visual Studio 2005 Team System--download. Somebody later referred to this miraculous moment as the "Mogadishu food drop".]

 

12:25PM

[After taking this photo, I successfully got MSDN back on track, organized an ad hoc community that leveraged the collective engineering expertise of several nearby developers and IT Pros to add proper banking to the hitherto flat track (much to the initial chagrin of my skeptical fellow employees). I then executed on my plan to shatter the track record with my silver TechNet Audi.]

 

4:10PM

[I took this photo between back-to-back sessions on Indigo (by Clemens Vasters, right) and Security (by Jeff Temple and Richard Hundhausen, left and center)]

On Friday night, I "partied" with co-workers for a few hours...

8:10PM

[TechEd Speaker's Party at the Heineken Experience. Left to Right: Brian Randell, Randy Miller, Ashwin Karuhatty, Jeff Temple, Richard Hundausen, Betsy Aoki, Benjamin Mitchell (being bashful), and Ted Neward. Present but not photographed, myself and Matt Nunn.]

Early Saturday morning, I went down town with customers for five hours more...

3:35AM

[Lidka, another happy Microsoft customer from Poland who I had the pleasure of meeting and dancing with at the Escape nightclub in Amsterdam's lively Rembrandt Square. IMO, it's a lame club but Lidka and I had a blast. Lidka's plane was scheduled to depart 5 hours later and mine an hour after that...]

Finally, that same Saturday morning, I slept for two hours...

7:00AM...apparently, I slept through or awakened for long enough to dismiss my wake up call.

10:07AM...awakened 8 minutes before the scheduled departure of my flight home to Seattle. Doh!

I suppose there are worse places in the world to get stranded than Amsterdam...

Here's the view from my hotel room looking east down the Stadthoudskade and looking north to Leidseplein Square. For the complete photostream of all Amsterdam photos that I and other conference attendees have uploaded to Flickr, see TechEd2005.