TechEd 2012 Orlando Day 8

After the late night and failing to really pack when I did get back to the room, I got a later start to the day, but after packing and checking out of the hotel, I was back at Perkin’s in crossroads at 8:30. During breakfast I checked twitter and saw that the construction walls had come down in Storybook circus, so that was my initial target for the day. Leaving  crossroads and being a cheep skate, I headed into WDW via the Downtown Disney hotel boulevard, and headed via the back road (Golden Oaks, Fort Wilderness) to the Magic Kingdom area, which brings you out on the road that goes past the Polynesian, and then you head back towards world drive but just before you get to the dual carriageway you can do a U-Turn and are heading into the parking lot without going through the booths, so how was I supposed to pay……

Parking at this time (10am) was in Simba and after the tram and ferry I was back in the Magic Kingdom and headed back to the Circus area.
Some of the walls were down, the play area was open but didn’t have the water flowing.

The 2nd Dumbo spinner was in sight but again was not operating.

Feeling a little to old for Dumbo and the great goofini, I headed to The mad tea party, not to ride, but to finally find the plaque placed there in honour of Randy Pausch, you know Randy, if not then have a hunt on line for “The Last Lecture” a wondefull tail of someone who dying from cancer decided that that was the time to show how he had achived his childhood dreams if not exactly how he had planned them.

But now as the queues had started to get longer in the park, I made a decision I would not ride any ride today but experience a different day in the park, so spent some time wandering tomorrowland looking for pins and chatting to cast members and push.

After a while I headed over to the Sorcerers of the magic kingdom training location behind Ye Old Christmas shop, and after a short bit of training I was wandering around Liberty Square and Frontierland fighting the villians of the game, well mainly waiting in short queues to fight the villains. It is a fun little game and the windows are well hidden bar the queues of people waiting to play.
As it was now midday and I did plan on heading back to airport around 1pm so that I could catch the England match before my flight, The sorcerers game had suggested that if I wanted to continue I would next need to visit Main street and as that is on the way out I started to head that way, through the cut-through from Frontierland to Adventureland, at which point I noticed the Tiki room and that it had been updated last year (after my last visit) back to the classic version. So breaking the a day without rides, I got in the line

The new / old version is very similar to the Disneyland version, but is a nice way to spend a few minutes especially in the heat of the summer, but after the corny songs and jokes it was time to head to Main Street, I found the first window and after waiting for the 2 kids to play, I tried to enter the portal but was denied, I tried again and again was denied, both times with a video of Merlin explaining that I was in the wrong place, a helpful teenager pointed out that I had the wrong window but as that right one had a small queue, I called it a day and headed toward the exit via the Confectionary, where I picked up some fudge to bring home and a caramel apple to eat on the way.

The trip back was uneventful, It’s not the quickest route, but I headed down Osceola parkway and boggy creek road as there is a petrol station just 5 miles from the airport so with the full tank of gas the car was returned to Avis and I was in the terminal. A quick trip to the bathroom to change from theme park outfit of shorts and T-shirt to flight clothes of clean jeans and a baggy shirt.

I tried to use the auto-checkin desks for American airlines as they were handling my flight down to Miami, but it was only allowing me 1 piece of luggage, and I had (with the various shopping) ended up with 2 as I had upgraded the flight home to World traveller plus and had been told that that was my limit. So I got in the queue the woman at the desk was also certain that I could only take 1 bag unless I paid $60 for the 2nd one which was only a small backpack. I held firm and produced my itinerary from the paper work which stated 2 bags. That seemed to help, so always have all the paperwork you can. And I was finally checked in.
I headed to Chilli’s for lunch and as I thought that they would show the match and thinking I would have missed the first half was surprised to see it was only just started. I later found out that the rain had delayed the previous match and it all was delayed. Match over and with nice food in my belly and win against Sweden, I headed through security, spoke to my wife to let her know I was on my way and then got to the gate to find that the flight was delayed.

Weather in Miami had meant that the plane had not yet left to come to Orlando, but even with the gate crew knowing nothing, there is free wifi in the departure gates and if you can find a column maybe even free power, so a quick check on the web and I could find that AA was expecting us to be only about 1.5 hours delayed, as the flight was just about to leave Miami.

So 1 hour later than planned I was on the plan heading down to Miami, now this is a very quick flight 45mins of so in the air, but another plane was in our gate when we landed so as AA are cheap and didn’t want to spend money on having ground crew open another gate we waited for 45 mins for the plane to finally move, so now instead of having 4 hours to find a some dinner and relax before the flight to Heathrow I now had 40mins, which was spent walking very briskly from the AA gate to the BA one, just stopping briefly to grab some Coke and water for the flight.

The BA Flight was fine and bar lack of sleep, though I did get a few minutes of dozing, we landed on time and as I am registered with IRIS I had no issues with queues at immigration, and I was waiting for my bags, which didn’t arrive in the 1st wave and as there was a delay before the next set and needing the loo, I headed towards the baggage information desk just to confirm if they had made that mad dash the previous night, to be told “we don’t know” as AA don’t update the information at Miami. How can they not know if bags were on or not a flight?

Well you may guess where this is heading and yes after all the other bags had come out I headed back to state that there was no sign of my luggage. The Women at baggage services was very helpful and took all my details stating that they hoped that my bags just missed the flight so in that case they will arrive tomorrow morning and the courier firm they used will call me to arrange delivery at a time convenient to me including the next day which was a Sunday.

Postscript.

Well next day didn’t work out quite how BA described, the courier did call and expected me to be home in 10 mins, which was difficult as we had gone out for a birthday lunch in a pub 40mins away. But after a few calls and me almost losing my temper with them, the actual courier offered to deliver the bags on his way home. So at 7pm on Sunday I was reunited with my luggage.

TechEd 2012 Orlando Day 7

The final day of the conference started like the previous ones, and at 8:30 I found myself in a session on using Windows 8 in a Virtual desktop implementation. This was not what I was expecting and so after about 10 mins I walked out and went to find something else, that else was a session on writing Management packs for SCOM. The day continued with a geek’s guide to Windows Server 2012, a great look from a non-Microsoft employee on the best features coming soon.

After Lunch was a session on Kanban, which is an interesting management technique from Japan, it is similar to lean which is being implemented at work, but seems to concentrate on limited flow of pieces of work, but showing that by limiting how much people are working on you get more items actually flowing through a department.

A short break with some more football was followed by 1 last session on Windows 8, and then it was time for the last session. For me that was a session on the new version of App-V and how that can be automated using PowerShell, with each command being less that the size of a tweet (140 characters).

And with that the conference was over, which is a strange sensation as it does just close, parts of the show floor were blocked off and the people just seem to wander away.  So I joined them and went to walk back to see that the rains had come back, so I headed to the bus stops and grabbed the bus to the Rosen Plaza, which is next door to the Rosen Inn. The journey took longer that my walk as it had to also visit a couple of other hotels further up I-Drive. Back at the hotel I sorted myself out for the after show party, which this year was at Islands of Adventure.

After a while I headed back to the bus stop with the rain still falling lightly and waiting there was a shuttle bus and within a few minutes we were off. The trip was fine until just before we entered Universal when the number of busses that Microsoft were sending was causing gridlock and it took 20 mins to get from the entrance sign to actually parked in the bus station. But once off the bus, you could see that this was going to be a different night, as there were people handing out Universal poncho’s to everyone getting off the busses. I had been careful to not bring a bag today, so was quickly through the security check and heading down to City Walk and heading left to Islands.

Once into the park, there were carts giving out drinks both Beer and soft drinks, I grabbed a coke zero as drinking before the hard rides of IoA could be a bad idea. My first target for this evening was to finally meet with another attendee that I had been talking to online before the conference and we had planned to trade some pins, I had a London Olympic one and he had a Nashville one. We had exchanged telephone numbers and quick found each other easily. He was there with his Son and as we agreed that the first stop was going to be Harry Potter and the forbidden journey, so headed there together, through Seuss landing and the lost continent and arrived at Wizarding world by the main entrance to Hogwarts.

Now I must admit I have never read a single harry potter book, or even watched any of the movies. I may have seen the odd clip but that would be the limit of my exposure before arriving, But from the first moment you see Hogsmead, WOW just WOW. The details of the village are great and it looks like a small English village in the snow and only the guests look out of place. We wandered through the village and got to the entrance to the main ride. It was still showing a 30 min wait, but as more and more attendees were pilling in the park I thought it could get longer, we quickly checked the trail seats as I am on the tall size (6ft6) and my colleague was wide so wanted to be sure we could fit before queuing.

The queue was interesting and held the time well, the estimates were correct as it was about 30 mins and we started to queue in the conservatory area. I loved the moving/talking pictures and not knowing who these people were did not make much difference.
Then we got to the ride, and we have a new best ride on the planet, OK so not knowing the stories meant I didn’t understand who all the characters were, but the actual vehicle motion and the transitions between film sections and animatronics were brilliant. Just as a physical ride it is a good rollercoaster, but add in the dark ride elements and it takes it into a different league. I don’t even think that I have the vocabulary to do this ride justice, so I would just suggested that you ride it, unless like my wife you suffer from motion sickness as this is a full scale rollercoaster disguised as a dark ride.
After the ride in the store I said goodbye to my new friend and headed off on my own, now the night had falled whilst on the ride and hogsmead now had that low lighting you get in small villages and towns, a quick ride on the “flight of the hippogriff” was followed by food. Now as Microsoft had hired the whole of the park, the eateries were all free serving. I headed to the Three Broomsticks and had Shepherd’s pie followed by Strawberry Peanut butter ice cream, which is a very weird flavour but does work in some strange way. This was washed down by a frozen Butterbeer, very nice and sweet and I loved the foam on top.

As I was leaving the Three broomsticks, I bumped into a South African Jeane who I had been chatting to over the football during the past week and we decided to hang around together, mainly it seemed because I knew the park, well I had been once before in 2005. We rode the dragon challenge, which is a great ride, but sad that the 2nd track was not running as the intertwining is so much part of the ride when I last rode it as Fire and Ice. That done and still looking for high speed action, we headed to marvel island, past Jurassic park.
As we got into the Marvel section, we saw that the walk around characters were also out this evening

First stop in the island was Spiderman, until an hour or so ago, my favourite ride in all of Orlando. Even now it is still a great ride but pales when you compare it to Forbidden journey, the queue was not too long, but one of the differences with this being a private party was that the area that is normally left to collect the 3D glasses was now where empty bottles were being stacked and the cast member was having to hand them out as you boarded the ride.

After Spiderman was the hulk, bit more a queue here and the whole final part of the queue was also having bottles placed on the side, I assume that Universal allow for the extra cleaning bill when they hire out a theme park and allow the consumption of free alchol, but even with it following freely I didn’t really notice anyone who was totally drunk. The Hulk is a beast of a roller coaster and I did worry at one point as my friend was no longer wearing glasses at the end but he had them in his hand and had to grab them during the ride as they were going to fly off, so a warning, mine seemed fine but I do wear them tight.

After the ride, we grabbed some of these free drinks and headed back to Harry Potter for another go on Forbidden journey, as the rest of the rides held little interest at 10:30 at night. The ride was a great as the first time and indeed I could spend more time looking at how it operated knowing the basic story of the ride. After the ride my friend decided that calling south Africa (6 hours ahead)  was a good idea to sort out what he was going to get from the gift shop, so with that I left him there and after a quick pop into the store in Toon Lagoon for a Betty Boop top for my wife, I headed out of the park, passed the band playing on the main stage.

Leaving the park I popped into Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville for a T-Shirt for me and then it was the bus back to the hotel