Tablet Day
Tablet Sessions
Yes, I did many tablet related things at TechEd. There were really only 3 tablet related developer sessions for the entire TechEd and the scheduling gods were not smiling on the tablet team. They had two back to back sessions – 8:30 am and 10:15 am on Thursday and then one final one at 2:45 on Friday. Egads. I attended the Thursday talks and learned a ton. David Hale did the first session on basics and Arin Goldberg did the 10:15 session which was more advanced. David is going around the country to user groups who request the Tablet Team talks at their meetings.
In fact there is SO much going on around the country with the TabletPC Developer Tour and other events. THe best place to keep track of it all is the new & improved MSDN Developer Center for Tablet PC @ msdn.microsoft.com/tabletpc.
BCL Tips & Tricks
After lunch I headed to the cabanas and hung out in the BCL Tips & Tricks that Kit George was going. He did it quiz style and had everyone stumped over why you might have some problems comparing file names as a test. Boy did we guess and guess and guess.
Web Cert Test
I didn’t stay for long since I had my next certification test scheduled for 3pm and having just passed the windows test by a hair, I thought I better do at least some prep for this test with the free practice exam. (see this post for more on that). While I was doing the practice test, I managed to finally get my hands on one of the Haagen Dasz bars – hahahahahahah! Of course, this turned out to be a really bad thing. YOu know the sugar high and then the drop? The drop happend while I was taking the real exam and practically nodding off. I checked at least half the questions for review as I was so unfocused. But somehow, though I absolutely expected that I had failed, I passed by a good margin.
Hangin in the Cabanas, the party and meeting Renee
I went back up to the cabanas and spent the rest of the afternoon parked there with Kate and Marcie and a slew of people. Marcie had the best joke of TechEd which stemmed from my mention of the equal # of Brian speakers and female speakers at TechEd (from my DevSource interview). So Marcie would always attempt to ensure parity. One time she just stood in the cabanas and called “Brian“ and immediately she got two Brian’s to come over. Then she had to send away the excess non-Brian males. Then Kate and I went so she could drop her stuff off at her room and we then took a bike cab over to my hotel so I could do the same and then got on a bus to Sea World.
Kate and I went to see the Shamu & friends show. I was just completely amazed by the relationship that the whales must have with their trainers and how much fun the whales were very clearly having with what they were doing. This was far from some horrible animals in captivity forced to do stupid pet tricks thing. After that show, we bumped into Stan Schultes and Steele Price and went down to watch the whales in the plexiglass walled tanks. They came up the the glass to visit with us spectators. It just blew us all away.
A little later we ran into a woman I had kept seeing throughout TechEd and with her overalls and long braid, I just kept thinking she reminded me of myself. So I took the opportunity and introduced myself and she hung out with us the rest of the night. This is a very cool chick from Juneau, Alaska named Renee Rieser and of course I spent the rest of TechEd looking for Don Kiely (who lives in Alaska and yes, I know it’s a huge state, but still…) to introduce them.
We had some caricatures done. I think mine was all nose … ah well. Renee has it, as we had ours done together, but someone took a picture. Steele’s caricature was awesome. You can see it here if you follow his link to his gallery from TechEd.
I think Kate and I are going to have to strong arm Renee into blogging. Heh.
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