Larry Osterman's WebLog : PDC2008

PDC 2008, Day 4 (and finale)

LarryOsterman — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:13:24 GMT

Ok, the PDC’s finally over and I’ve had a chance to decompress a bit. So here’s my day 4 report, only a few days late :).

I got up at 6:15, finished packing and schlepped my stuff to the convention center for my tech check at 7:40.

At the tech check, I learned that (a) I wasn’t going to be able to use presenter view in PowerPoint (which means I wouldn’t have access to my notes), and I wasn’t going to be able to see my presentation while doing my demos :(. All of these are minor annoyances, not fatal, but still annoying.

I then went to the speakers lounge to chill for a couple of hours while I waited for my talk – this was my first time talking to such a big convention so I was a bit nervous.

At about 11:30 I headed out to the room (151, with a capacity of 1000 people). I hooked up my kit to the stage and waited until noon for my presentation to begin:

I think the talk went quite well – the demos worked perfectly and I didn’t make too many mistakes (I missed one of my talking points :().

I knew I wasn’t going to fill the room since I was speaking (a) on the last day of the convention and (b) opposite lunch and (c) a fairly geeky topic but I was still a smidge disappointed that only 53 people showed up :(.

Here’s the view from the podium after my talk:

After the talk, I chatted with some folks in the Win7 lounge and basically hung out until 3ish when I got together with my cousin Stacy (who I haven’t seen in a long time). We wandered over to his restaurant and I met his wife Mindy and mother Selma. We then went to his house where I met his kids and we hung out and chatted until it was time to go to the airport for the return flight.

For those of you who were wondering what a PDC presenter brings to the PDC, here’s what was in my backpack:

Left to right, from top to bottom there was:

My backpack

Lego Boeing 787 (I didn’t take that to the PDC). Two cases for my 2 sets of Altec Lansing T515 bluetooth speakers Laptop 1 (my primary laptop) Laptop 2 (my demo laptop).

Power supplies for the laptops, a Jabra BT620SD bluetooth headphones, a Plantronics Voyager 510 Bluetooth headset, the 2 Altec Lansing T515 speakers, a Creative Labs talk microphone.

Headphones for my portable media player, 2 notepads for notes from the conference, my Creative Zen Vision:M portable media player, 2 bluetooth USB dongles, a USB hub, a box of business cards, my PDC badge from the last PDC I attended (1991), and a Jabra USB headset.

Most of the kit was there for redundancy – in case something got lost or broke, I wanted to make sure I had a backup for everything. Some of the kit was just there to be props during my talk.

And I’m glad I did – as I was returning from the conference, one of the T515 devices (the one I own) disappeared between the hotel when I packed it and my house. I have no idea what happened to it.

PDC 2008, Day 3

LarryOsterman — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:11:38 GMT

I got finished late yesterday, so sorry this post is coming so late.

Yesterday was yet another blast. I got up, had a “real” breakfast in the hotel buffet (I’m not sure it was actually better than the breakfast at the PDC though :(). Then I headed over to the conference center.

I spent most of the morning hanging out in the speakers lounge catching up on email, then I headed down to the floor to talk to attendees in the Win7 Lounge. It was a great deal of fun, I was astonished at the interest in the sensor platform – the sensor guys were giving out development kits and one guy literally spent the entire 3 hours I was there running back and forth between the sensor booth and their storage closet getting more kits.

I was also really surprised at the excitement around the touch machines. I honestly didn’t think that touch was that big a deal, but it was clear that there’s a real excitement about the platform.

I also got a chance to chat with Raymond Chen while we were hanging out, which was fun. I then tried to see his talk, but his first room overflowed and then the overflow room overflowed. So I left to let a paying customer use my chair.

I ended up spending most of my afternoon wandering around chatting with people and generally keeping busy and then came the “Ask The Experts”.

“Ask The Experts” is the part of the conference where attendees can come in and ask the Microsoft developers any questions they want.

The attendees arrive:

The Desktop team answers questions:

I was at a table with Frank Biger of the Windows Telemetry team, Crispin Cowan of the UAC team, a couple of folks from the internationalization team. We fielded a couple of great questions and then the director of development for WEX stopped by and hung out with us for a while. I’m not sure that the people asking questions realized that the guy answering their questions was the guy who ran the entire development organization in WEX :).

After the A-T-E, I went back to my hotel room, called my cousin Stacy (we’re getting together this afternoon) and chatted with Valorie.

I then did the final rehearsal of my PDC talk and went to bed.

This morning, I had my tech check (at 7:40 AM :() and now I’m in the speakers lounge chilling until about 11:30 when I’m going to go set up for my 12:00PM talk.

PDC 2008, Day Two

LarryOsterman — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:28:00 GMT

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 discuss 7.

And Windows 7 with the new taskbar:

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:

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

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:

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):

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

PDC 2008, Day 1

LarryOsterman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:02:00 GMT

Wow, today’s been a long day. For whatever reason, I woke up at 4 AM and wasn’t able to get back to sleep :(. On the other hand, I did get this cool picture from outside my window:

When I got to the convention center I discovered that they were right – this place is absolutely immense. You really can’t see it from this picture, but this is just one of the eating areas – there’s another on the opposite side of the “big room” that’s equally large:

I know I’m going to get my exercise just walking to and from the keynotes :).

The other thing I didn’t realize was the amount of ancillary manpower associated with the conference – there was a veritable army of waiters there to clean up after all 6500 of us. There are also staff people in front of just about every door in the convention center (and that’s a lot of doors) to help direct people.

I’m also really impressed with the logistics – the wireless network works flawlessly throughout the convention center and bandwidth appears to be quite reasonable. My hat’s off to the organizers they’ve done a great job so far.

Since there was nothing specifically related to Win7 going on today (the Win7 hoopla starts tomorrow), I mostly hung out at the various lounges and worked on my talk a bit – there was a typo in one of my slides I needed to fix, and I wanted to get some of the colors cleaned up in one of my images. Fortunately the PDC organizers had a crack team of graphic designers who were able to fix up my slides and dramatically improve the look of the offending slide (the rest of the deck looked fine because the graphic designers had already gone over the deck once).

Realistically the day was pretty boring. I stopped in and watched most of the Windows Azure keynote, I’ve got to say that it looks pretty good – I like what Dave Cutler’s done, it looks like a very impressive piece of work.

Most of my day was spent chatting with attendees (and other Microsoft people). I finally met Brandon Paddock, who I’ve known for a while on email and we chatted for a bit. I also ran into the Channel 9 folks and again we chatted. I also tried (unsuccessfully) to catch up with my email.

At about 6:30 I finally gave up and headed back to the hotel. At the hotel, I ran into some folks from DevDiv who were having drinks with Anders, so I kibitzed on their conversation a bit.

Then I cam back to my hotel room to rehearse my talk and wait for Valorie’s nightly call. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow – I can’t wait for the Win7 keynote :).

One final picture – this one’s for Daniel (who loves taking pictures of architectural elements):

PS: I’ve put these and a number of other photos up on Flickr with the pdc2008 tag.

ETA: One unexpected side bonus of being at the PDC is running into people I've not seen for years. I ran into a bunch of co-workers I've not seen for a really long time including Dave Snipp (who worked on NT 3.1), David Treadwell and Dave D'Souza. That was just cool - kinda like old times.

I'm in LA!

LarryOsterman — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:32:27 GMT

I just got into LA and checked into my hotel for the PDC. The flight was uneventful, while I was flying down, there was a most amazing sunset (I was in an isle seat so the picture’s kinda blurry – I didn’t have anything to stabilize the shot and it’s a somewhat long exposure):

Once I got here, I found it was too late to register, that means that I’m going to have to brave the lines tomorrow morning – yech.

I’m in the Bonaventure hotel which is quite nice, however the hotel room is annoyingly short of plugs – there are only 2 plugs available in the bedroom, and I’m using both of them for my laptops (I brought two down, one for day-to-day use and the other for the demo during my presentation – my day-to-day laptop acts as a backup for the demo laptop if it fails) – my camera battery is currently charging in the bathroom.

I’m going to do daily posts of my overall PDC experiences, preferably with pictures as well.