My body was getting more used to the time zone as it only
woke me at 5:30am this morning, and after the morning routine I headed over to
the OCCC, the full main hall was open today and the sheer scale of the event
was apparent, and as I could see the crowds of people by registration I was so
glad that I had done that yesterday. I head straight to the breakfast section,
feeding 16,000 people in an hour or so is an organisational master class, we
are directed to 1 of 2 sides and slowly placed into 1 of 20 or so queues to
buffet tables all having the same handful of items, with a completely separate
section for people with dietary issues.
First up after breakfast was the Keynote, and with nothing
else really open at that point, just about everyone tries to attend.
After the keynote and with little interest in the Foundation
sessions, I headed to the hands on Labs, these 100+ computers are all setup to
access any of a few 100 Hands on Labs, where you get to play with various
technologies and can either follow the instructions to the letter or just use
them as a guide and play around with the technology and try to make it more
like a personal real world example. As it got close to midday, I headed back to
the food area for a quick lunch, before heading to the Alumni lounge which had
setup a couple of TV screens with the England match. As I got there it was
about 20mins in, still 0-0 and no sound, after a few minutes and with a what
can then do attitude and long arms, I reached across the bar and turned the
sound on so we could actually hear the commentary. After the match I spent the
afternoon in sessions on Windows Deployment.
Monday evening was the welcome expo reception where the
various vendors try to get you interested in being called about their products
by providing free food and drink, and give-aways. Now I get enough of these
calls during my normal working week and after 1 bottle of beer I had had enough
and walked back to the hotel, getting straight in the car and driving to the
Premier Outlet mall at Vineland
This was not a shopping trip but I did have a look around
the Disney Character warehouse, and picked up a sleeve for my phone with a
subtle mickey embossed on it, but from any distance it is just a black sleeve,
just a way to hide a Disney obsession in plain sight. After a bit of window shopping,
I headed to the Outback I had seen as I drove into the mall. There was a long
queue, but the advantage of being a solo was that I could just grab a seat at
the bar and order there. Dinner was a Blooming burger, with sweet potato fries
and broccoli, with a never ending coke, whilst watching the Red Sox lose to the
Marlins in the baseball, even getting it moved to a new screen when the put the
Ice hockey Stanley cup finals on the main screen, but at least the bar crew
changed a screen for me, more than they did in ESPN.
After the meal, I headed back to the hotel had half of one
of the cheesecakes then got an early night as tomorrow was going to be a long
day.
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