by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/06/08 09:30 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/06/08/426700.aspx
Sorry this is so late, I meant to post it last night, while it still was day two!
Yesterday was another awesome day.
I was Stephen Forte's GrokTalk while they were filming it (hate to break it you, Stephen -- you were only the first because there were technical problems with the guy who was supposed to be first. You were technically the second! <grin>). I then saw Kim's GrokTalk later. She turned quite red, but actually it was a great talk, I am going to do some things for my own demos after watching the ones she was doing in her 10 minutes, so she can really claim that her GrokTalk made a difference! :-)
In Dr. International's Clinic, I talked to a bunch of customers, including two who had been to my first talk. There were some additional questions about that COLLATE keyword. It is a very interesting topic, and there are some fascinating ins and outs to using it properly that I'll be exploring further in my Friday talk (DBA319). And of course in future blog posts!
I managed to finally run into Betsy Aoki, the muse (maybe the Goddess?) of GotDotNet, blogs.msdn.com, and blogs.technet.com. And then I accidentally ran into Gretchen on my way back to the Clinic (in a roundabout way that I used by way of the Speaker's Lounge and the INETA booth!) and ran into Teresa too (I had apparently just missed some interesting demo she had been doing in the INETA booth -- ah well, maybe next time).
I also some really awesome sessions, like Mark Russinovich's SEC425 (Understanding and Fighting Malware: Viruses, Spyware, and Rootkits) and even popped by Julie Lerman's BOF016 (Women Who Code), which I think brought out some very interesting perspectives. Mark's talk was an awesome summary of a topic that gets entirely too much press without good information. I do not think it was a session of level 400 complexity by any means -- it should be required viewing by the press who want to cover security issues (hopefully they tuned in vis the live webcast!). Thankfully the house was full enough to indicate that no one was scared off by the level -- it was a full house with over 1200 people looking on....
Then a few more interesting customer contacts, and a developer who was interested in Unicode migration strategies. I had several suggestions, including a few I will talk about in a future post. It is an interesting topic, one worthy of its own coverage and session, if you ask me. If you are at Tech Ed and are interested, pop by the Clinic and I would be happy to discuss it further!
And then came the unstructured evening (dinner was omitted fur to schedule pressures).
I got entirely too drunk last night having interesting technical conversations about the need to support Unicode not only for language support but to help improve performance. We drew out the anatomy of many basic calls to SQL Server database applications with pretzels, napkins, whatever was handy in the bar, and when I showed how many essentially useless conversions that at best hurt performance and at worst corrupt data, they started wondering whether they should do some benchmarking in even their simple applications that may never leave the USA.
Then people wanted to know what it was like to work at Microsoft, how they could apply, and so on. I told them to look at the links from my site and a few others about jobs and especially to go through the site at microsoft.com directly. Everyone had a great time, and there were several cool stories told.
I probably would not have gotten so drunk if I had eaten dinner -- I was supposed to go but I did not want to miss that BoF of Julie's! I'll try to eat soon though. At least some Limonata intake kept me from having a hangover. :-)
All in all, a great day. And I am looking forward to an even better one today!
# Mike Dimmick on 8 Jun 2005 1:33 PM:
# Suzanne E McCarthy on 8 Jun 2005 10:16 PM:
# Michael S. Kaplan on 8 Jun 2005 11:37 PM: