It has been a crazy couple weeks, and I haven't had much time to think, no less blog. But today I'm headed off to my first trip off the North American continent. Eight hours stuck in a long aluminum tube over the Atlantic Ocean doesn't really appeal to me, but it looks like the flight is pretty empty, so it looks like I will not have to do my Jedi meditation routine to fit my 2X sized body into a spot designed for medium sized people.
I'll be staying at the Hotel Gaudi, if any of my readers will be at TechEd. I am able to attend TechEd Europe because XPathmania won the Visual Studio Extensibility Contest. Dave Donaldson had also won, but he can not make it because he is suffering with kidney stones. Melissa isn't going to TechEd Europe with me, as she is headed to the SQL PASS conference in Seattle, the week after TechEd, and she can't take that much time off from her new job. Because I'm so use to working the TechEd USA events, thru the MVP program, I volunteered to work TechEd Europe 2006, even though I already had the conference and trip paid for thru the contest. So, I'll be working the Architecture Ask The Experts area (where the Patterns & Practices team usually is) on Tuesday and Thursday. If you need to find me, you will guarantee to find me there during those days, but I usually hang around the Ask The Experts area anyway. I've found that the ATE is usually where all the fun is, and if I have any questions about a session, I can usually find the speaker there, and ask them directly, rather than trying to do it right after their talk.
So far I've been invited to 2 parties (isn't that why we go to conferences, the parties?), but both are Monday night, and I'm not arriving in Barcelona until early Monday morning. I'll try to hit both parties (MVP and VSIP), and try to catch a nap back at the hotel before all the fun begins. I'll be taking pictures and doing my best to blog the fun, so the folks back home can get a little view into TechEd Europe. One of the first differences I've noticed already is that there is no bus transportation between the hotels and the conferences center, which is a little unnerving, since I don't speak Spanish, and I have to take the local Metro (aka subway) to get between the hotel and conference center. Normally, I'd try to stay very close to the center, and avoid the metro, but since I wasn't paying for the hotel, I really didn't have much of a choice. It should be an adventure. Oh, and another thing I noticed, TechEd does have a shuttle that will run between the airport and the conference center on Sunday and Monday, which seems weird considering they don't have one between the hotels. Wouldn't you normally want to got from the airport to the hotel, first, check in, and then go to the conference center to check in? There must be a reason, but I'll have to inquire.