My presentations at TechEd New Zealand went well. At TechEd US, I was more comfortable doing the Data in SOA talk and it got a slightly higher eval score. Of course, that was the talk that I was expecting to do and that I had spent some time writing new content for. Metropolis was a last minute add since Pat couldn’t go. At TechEd NZ, I was more comfortable doing the Metropolis talk. Pat spent significant time working on Data in SOA for TechEd Europe and I just picked up his updates en masse. It’s a great talk, but I wasn’t as comfortable as I had been doing my version of the talk.

After my presentations, I attended an architect dinner with local architects. I had some fascinating discussions with some of the attendees, saw a presentation on EDRA (i.e. the project formerly known as “Shadowfax”) and participated in a great panel discussion.

Yesterday, we flew to Sydney, met up with my mom, and took the train to Canberra for TechEd Australia. The train was nice because Patrick could get up and run around as much as he wanted, plus we got a great look at the country side – we saw several kangaroos. Canberra is very cold – though the sun is out now – and walking to find a place for dinner last night was quite chilly. The cab driver who picked us up at the train station was a hoot. We asked her what had been here before the capital moved here and she replied “What should be here now, a sheep paddock”. I wish I had gotten her name so she could give us a ride back when head back to Sydney. The hotel is underwhelming (the perils of late registration) but the event hall is pretty cool. I spent a morning with a Meta analyst this morning, lunch with the local field architect and my Metropolis talk is about two hours.

We arrived this morning at 5am after a relatively uneventful flight to Auckland. Our flight from Seattle to LA was late, so we had to make a mad dash to the international terminal. It didn’t help that the guy at the Qantas desk was to busy flirting w/ a co-worker to remember to hand me back my passport. <sigh> But I got it back and all went well on the 12 hour flight. Patrick was so good! Slept most of the way there and was an angel when he was awake. Jules and I even got a few winks.

I just finished presenting Metropolis as part of TechEd NZ’s Student Day. Sort of wierd to present Metropolis to students – the rest of the agenda was either dev focused or “cool” tech like personal media centers and Xbox games. Seemed to get a good reaction, tho. Talked to a few people afterwards who liked it. There was one guy who tried to set me up on the topic of structure data standardization by asking my opinion of standardizing word document formats. He was unaware that we have published Word’s XML format. On top of that, I’m not sure how having a standardized doc format helps in SOA. Documents are unstructured data – one of the key points of Metropolis is the value of standardized structured data formats. Knowning where the paragraph breaks are doesn’t help you understand a contract.

It’s almost 5:30pm here, but my body thinks it’s 10:30pm yesterday, so I’m off to dinner w/ Jules and Patrick. The weekend is for sightseeing so look for me back here on Monday.

I’m off for New Zealand today. I’m presenting at TechEd New Zealand and TechEd Australia next week. They’ve got it set up nice – present in Auckland Friday and Monday, fly to Australia Tuesday, then present in Canberra Wenesday and Thursday. I’m presenting Metropolis and Data in SOA – the same talks I did at TechEd US. After that, I’m off for a week in Sydney with family. Jules & Patrick are coming with, and my mom is meeting up with us in Australia. So things may be pretty slow around here, especially that second week.

In prepration for this trip, I cleaned out my inbox for the first time in, well, ever. Granted, most of it was simply moved to local archive folders, but I did actually throw out everything in my deleted items folders. Typcially, I run bouncing up against my 200 MB mailbox quota. As of yesterday afternoon, I was at 26 MB. I haven’t had my inbox that empty in five years. Of course, two weeks of unread and unanswered email will fill that up real quick.

Arvindra and Clemens both blogged “The Nerd, the Suit and the Fortune Teller”, a hilarious piece of theater performed at TechEd Amsterdam a few weeks ago. Clemens plays the nerd, Rafal Lukawiecki the suit and Pat Helland the fortune teller. We’ve got the video up on the web, you can access it from Pat’s site. Between this and Mr. CIO Guy, sounds like TechEd Amsterdam was a blast. Mental note: next year, make it to Europe for TechEd!

I finally updated my Architecture Strategy and Evangelist Blogs OPML file. For single updates, DasBlog’s web interface is fine, but for doing a slew of updates it blows. I guess that’s why my blogrolls are so out of date. What I really want is an InfoPath form so I can do all the updates locally and then upload the new file at once. InfoPath’s integration with SharePoint rocks, I wonder what it would take to get that kind of integration on an arbitrary web site? Or, alternatively, how to run your blog on SharePoint? I screwed around with SharePoint as a “personal content management system” a while back, but the difficulty in customizing it (as well as a lack of time on my part) doomed that.