PDC 2008, Day 1

Wow, today’s been a long day.  For whatever reason, I woke up at 4 AM and wasn’t able to get back to sleep :(.  On the other hand, I did get this cool picture from outside my window:

When I got to the convention center I discovered that they were right – this place is absolutely immense.  You really can’t see it from this picture, but this is just one of the eating areas – there’s another on the opposite side of the “big room” that’s equally large:

I know I’m going to get my exercise just walking to and from the keynotes :). 

The other thing I didn’t realize was the amount of ancillary manpower associated with the conference – there was a veritable army of waiters there to clean up after all 6500 of us.  There are also staff people in front of just about every door in the convention center (and that’s a lot of doors) to help direct people.  

I’m also really impressed with the logistics – the wireless network works flawlessly throughout the convention center and bandwidth appears to be quite reasonable.  My hat’s off to the organizers they’ve done a great job so far.

Since there was nothing specifically related to Win7 going on today (the Win7 hoopla starts tomorrow), I mostly hung out at the various lounges and worked on my talk a bit – there was a typo in one of my slides I needed to fix, and I wanted to get some of the colors cleaned up in one of my images.  Fortunately the PDC organizers had a crack team of graphic designers who were able to fix up my slides and dramatically improve the look of the offending slide (the rest of the deck looked fine because the graphic designers had already gone over the deck once). 

Realistically the day was pretty boring.  I stopped in and watched most of the Windows Azure keynote, I’ve got to say that it looks pretty good – I like what Dave Cutler’s done, it looks like a very impressive piece of work.

Most of my day was spent chatting with attendees (and other Microsoft people).  I finally met Brandon Paddock, who I’ve known for a while on email and we chatted for a bit.  I also ran into the Channel 9 folks and again we chatted.  I also tried (unsuccessfully) to catch up with my email.

At about 6:30 I finally gave up and headed back to the hotel.  At the hotel, I ran into some folks from DevDiv who were having drinks with Anders, so I kibitzed on their conversation a bit.

Then I cam back to my hotel room to rehearse my talk and wait for Valorie’s nightly call. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow – I can’t wait for the Win7 keynote :). 

One final picture – this one’s for Daniel (who loves taking pictures of architectural elements):

PS: I’ve put these and a number of other photos up on Flickr with the pdc2008 tag.

ETA: One unexpected side bonus of being at the PDC is running into people I've not seen for years.  I ran into a bunch of co-workers I've not seen for a really long time including Dave Snipp (who worked on NT 3.1), David Treadwell and Dave D'Souza.  That was just cool - kinda like old times.