PDC 2008, Day Two

Wow, it’s midnight on day two.  What a day.

I started the day at the Win7 keynote.  It was amazing how the product was received by our customers – I’m really gratified that people seemed to like what they saw.  You know you’re in a group of geeks when the biggest applause line of the demo was “you can boot off of a VHD”.

I was in the way back of the auditorium (speakers were asked to hang out in the back to let the guests have the best seats) so I ended up taking pictures of the monitors – sorry about the crappy quality:

Steven and Julie

Steven and Julie discuss 7.

And Windows 7 with the new taskbar:

Windows 7

After the keynote I ran into Crispin Cowan and we ended up chatting through lunch all the way to his talk.  I sat through most of his talk and then wandered off (he overflowed his room, which is cool).

I ended up in the speakers lounge to run over my slides and commentary again.   While I was up there I realized I had a great view of the conference floor:

The view from the speakers lounge

I also took a picture of the breakfast area – it brings a new level of perspective on just how large this place really is:

Lunch seating for 3500

It was a few minutes after I took this picture that I realized that my cell phone needed to be charged.  So I pulled out my USB cable and prepared to download the drivers for the phone (even though the phone has a USB-B jack for charging, it needs to have a Windows driver installed before it will charge from a PC).  After downloading the driver, I started the install and experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The driver refused to install on Windows 7.  I don’t know why, I’m running Windows 7 on my main machine at work and the driver works just fine (that’s why I didn’t worry about the whole charging thing).  So here I was with a cell phone that’s just about out of juice.

And my demo depends on the fact that I can make cell phone calls during the talk.  If the phone’s out of juice on Tuesday, I’ve got a real problem.

Fortunately there was a Verizon store about 10 miles away that had a charger for my phone, so after an hour or so to drive the 10 miles to the store (and back) I got a charger.  I’ve got to say that I was pretty terrified for a while there…

After the excitement of the afternoon I went back to the hotel and showered and changed from my show duds to the PDC party at Universal Studios.  That was a total blast, they’d done up the place with all sorts of scary stuff:

Universal Studios done up for Halloween

I love taking night photos – even though I only had a micro-tripod, the view of downtown LA was so neat that I wanted to try to get a picture.  It’s ok (the tripod was balanced on a garbage can on a elevated walkway which was shuddering a bit, but I still like it):

Los Angeles at night from Universal Studios

One last nighttime photo, this time from the Jurassic Park ride:

Jurassic Park the ride

The mist at the bottom of the photo is actually the ride splashing down – this is a four and a half second exposure, so all you see is the remnants of the boat’s passing. 

While I was at Universal I chatted with a whole lot of folks, including Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Scott’s boss Simon, Dave Snipp (ex MSFT) and several other people.  It was pretty fun.

I then came back to my room, uploaded these (and a few other) photos and wrote this.  And now it’s bedtime :).

 

Edit: s/Stephen/Steven/ - sorry about that :).