TechEd isn't technically over, but it is for me. I'm on a flight home in about four hours. Frankly, I am very excited to be going home. It's been almost a year since my last public presentation, and the only work travel I've done in the last 12 months was that Gartner EA conference last June, the Thomas Erl SOA workshop back in September and TechEd 07. I am simply out of practice being gone from home this long.
It doesn't look like I'll be going dark another 12 months before my next public presentation. People must have noticed me stick my head up to do TechEd, I've been asked about presenting at seven conferences that all happen in the next six months. I'll do a few - I hope to gravitate to the ones close to campus and don't require me to be gone very long - but my problem with presenting right now is that I'm still talking theory. I left evangelism because I wanted to build something. We're still getting started on that "build something" thing, so I don't have anything to show, just stuff we're thinking about building. Hopefully, by conference season next year, I'll actually have something to show.
My session yesterday went ok - I think it could have been better, but the audience seemed to get a lot out of it. It was a larger crowd Monday, but only one customer came up afterwards to discuss the talk with me. Yesterday, I had a half a dozen or so. I'd post slides for you dear reader, but I didn't do any. However, I think on of the sessions I will be doing in the next few months is basically a breakout version of this talk, so I'll need slides for that.
The attendee party was almost a bust due to rainstorm. When I got there around 8pm, the word was that all the rides but Spiderman were closed. So I rode Spiderman with a bunch of UK blokes I ended up hanging out with, and by the time we got out the rain had passed and almost everything was open again. Unfortunately, the one thing that didn't reopen was Hulk, which I was really looking to ride again. I got to ride it two years ago at TechEd 2005 as part of a special trip the TechEd core team took. But I did get to ride Spiderman, Dueling Dragons, Jurassic Park and Ripsaw Falls (I got drenched) which is pretty much all the big rides but Hulk.
I did take a little time out yesterday before the expo closed to go on a Swag Hunt, mostly to get little trinkets for my kids. I picked up my Sourcegear Evil Mastermind shirt on Monday (the only piece of swag I actually wanted). Mostly, it was the usual assortment of little flashlights, yo-yo's, and the like. I do want to give a shout out to the /n software folks, who were giving away a custom painted Xbox 360 with the Powershell logo. That was cool. Seemed almost every booth had some type of hi-tech gadget giveaway, but that was the coolest by far. They also gave me a copy of their new NetCmdlets product, which Dale has apparently been playing with. The question is, which will Dale be more jealous of: my copy of NetCmdlets or the cool PowerShell sticker I got for my laptop?