I made it to Beijing yesterday with no problem. There was a car waiting for me at the airport, and one of the speaker managers met me at my hotel shortly after I arrived. They even provide a loner dopod SmartPhone for use while I’m here though I’m not sure who I would call. I went to the attendee dinner last night and on to a party for local partners. I spoke to a few people, including a gentleman from Digital China who reads my blog. It’s nice to be recognized at all, much less as an International Man of Architecture.

After dinner, I worked for an hour or so with the translator for my Metropolis session, Quanzhan. Quanzhan is from China, but he’s now a program manager in the Windows Server division at corp – his office is just on the other side of campus. He’s here doing presentations of his own as well as helping out as a translator. I’ve met at least one other Chinese person here who works in Redmond – I’m guessing presenting TechEd China provides a great way for these folks to visit home and also give back to the community they are from in some way.

Delivering these presentations via a translator will be an interesting challenge. I’ve never worked thru a translator before. Each session has it’s own unique challenge – Data in SOA is very technical while Metropolis is pretty abstract. I ended up cutting 20 slides from today’s Metropolis talk in order to ensure I have enough time to hit the important points. Presenting this way requires a truly conservative approach to word choice – even though my session is 75 minutes long, in reality I have closer to 30 as everything I say has to be spoken twice. I’m grateful that Quanzhan and I spent the time last night going thru the presentation even though we were both exhausted. I guess we’ll see how well the session goes today, but I think we’ll do well.

I’m sitting in the Kuala Lumpur airport – my flight to Beijing leaves in about half an hour. I didn’t get a chance to blog all day yesterday, so here’s a quick recap:

• I’ve run into a bunch of people who I first met at TechEd Malaysia 2002. In particular, Adrian and Rathi who both wanted to see pictures of Patrick. The big bummer of only spending two days here is that I didn’t get to do much more that the conference.
• After the sessions on Wednesday, I hung out with a bunch of the other speakers at dinner. Several of the RD’s who spoke at TechEd US also came to our Architect Road Rally and had a great time. Always nice to be told you threw a great party.
• Thursday started  with Gurpreet’s session on Architecture Vision & Direction. I didn’t think this session did as well as the EA talk the day before. Part of that comes from the fact the EA talk set a high bar, but some of it comes from the fact that the V&D talk wasn’t as polished. In contrast, I did much better with my Metropolis Thursday than the SOA Data talk on Wednesday. Maybe I just need one talk to get back in the groove – I usually think I do better in my second session.
• After our sessions, lunch, and hanging around in the cabana with some other attendees, Aaron (the local Architect Evangelist) drove Gurp and I around Putrajaya. Pat often points out when he presents Metropolis that you can’t bulldoze Boston just because the roads aren’t straight. However, you can build a new city about a half an hour away and move into it when it’s finished. That’s Putrajaya – the new administrative center of Malaysia.  It was stunning – huge and ultra modern. But it was also strange as it is completely underutilized, so far anyway. We also did a little shopping and I was able to find a few things for the family back home.
• Last night we had a regional architect dinner, where we got to hang out with a bunch of the local architects in the region. Lots of good discussion.

Next stop – China!