by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/06/09 02:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/06/09/427136.aspx
Ok, yesterday was the day to top all days. Truly. I will remember this one for a while!
Let's see what happened yesterday....
I saw Teresa early on and she mentioned she would be at the Influencer Appreciation Party (more on this later). I also ran into many others I know now, including Gretchen (now in MS-sanctioned clothes, other than the sandals!), Betsy, Julie, Adi, Chris, Michele, and many others. And I finally got to meet Kate Gregory! She is yet another awesome person who I have now met in person. :-)
I saw some truly awesome sessions like WEB323 (Overview of ASP.Net 2.0 Part 1), which whetted my appetite for the talk that Michele is doing later today.
Something very funny happened today -- I was not on booth duty until 1:00pm, but I went by there a few times and every time I did there was someone with a question for me. So I just said there was a strange disturbance in the force, sat down, and answered the question(s). It was awesome -- keyboards, SQL Server, more SQL Server, MUI, more SQL Server.
And then I was in the booth and Wes Miller came by and we talked for a bit (I remembered him from when he was a serf). i admitted to how I thought Mark's talk the day before was awesome but that I felt kind of weird going up to him..... so of course the stinker brought him by a little while later! But he is very nice and I told him how good I thought his talk was (he mentioned that he had suggested it be a 300-level talk anyway -- but it was a must-see, as I said earlier!). Wes even mentioned as few non-Unicode bugs that they had to fix in the past, so maybe we have some celebrity converts to the cause of writing Unicode apps and tools and drivers....
Then Michele came to work in the booth too, and her and I talked about Amsterdam, and about exchanging some expertise -- which is really good idea, since I know the fractional value diddly/squat about ASP.NET localization, and it is clear there is a lot there. I will bring my whole collection of knowledge about the BCL stuff about which I know. I also let her know about the following she has (which she refuses to take seriously -- she fails to see that people are amazed by how confident she is and how she is not afraid that people won't take her seriously -- many women are in that boat and it is a wonderful example that competence wins everyone over!
Then an Addison-Wesley AE came by -- Joan Murray (not the religious poet!). She is awesome and we had a great conversation about why I am not writing a book right now and I swear she had me tempted to think about writing another one (either the SQL Internationalization one I was halfway to writing before or other ideas I mentioned to her). We'll see what happens, I am not sure when I would have time to write as book!
So I went back to the hotel, changed into my NSA T-shirt, and then I was at TechEd again to see Julie's Bleeding Edge talk. I had a few not-too-insightful comments, and others had some truly interesting ones. There was one woman who was talking about how frustrating it was to work on areas that had no good docs, and I can totally identify with that one. I hope to talk to her tomorrow or Friday, I have a few additional tips for her -- I would never want someone to be afraid to be an innovator! I'll probably blog about the issue, too....
Okay, so then I scooted over to the Influencer Appreciation Party, at Metropolis and Matrix. I started in Metropolis but I did not see too many people (and the music was quiet). So I had a few shots with some people I had met ealier and then headed over to Matrix. I saw Teresa there and several others, had a few more drinks, went back to Metropolis where I saw Julie, Kate, Josh, and Gretchen (those who I told how much I had to drink were surprised!). Then I went back to Matrix, saw Teresa on the dance floor and went to tell her something. Next thing you know we were dancing! I was still in the scooter but we danced to Tainted Love with her dancing around me and both of us being weird and fun. Then we danced more and I started moving in the scooter; it was awesome! She said people were taking pictures, I hope they were. If you took pictures of it then let me know, I want copies!
I then got to meet Olga Londer in person in Matrix and we talked for a bit. Another awesome MSFTie who will be in Amsteram, she is a track leader for a conference in Barcelona in November that I might try and speak at. I commented about an interesting point to people then, about how people kept running into the scooter while it was parked, yet they always apologized. I mean, it did not hurt me at all. They will find huge bruises on their legs tomorrow. Yet they apologize to me. What is up with that?
Then I ran into Achim and Scott and we talked for a bit about some techie stuff (licensing questions about Windows, mostly), and then some of them were heading to dinner, but I begged off (on my way to being quite drunk, I was not quite ready to sober up just yet!).
All mentioin in passing that all night I was able to navigate the crowds and hit no one, on the dancefloor or otherwise. I danced some more with Teresa, and then saw April and Becky dancing and was almost tempted to try to expand my dancing card and decided against it; not everyone would probably be interested in this particulr diversion, and I was starting to wonder if I would just look stupid in the morning when I thought about the dancing thing.
Anyway, at this point, I spent the next few hours going between the two bars and running into people and drinking. By the time the evening was winding down, I had actually had nine drinks (Captain and Sevens) and three shots (Kamikazes), and then I had one more with Gretchen before I finally said goodnight to the ones still there and headed back to the hotel.
I note in passing that there is no law against scooting while under the influence. But I made it back without incident, checked some mail, wrote this blog entry, and had some Limonata (need to avoid that hangover tomorrow!).
I do not want to minimize the awesome conversations I had today, they were awesome. But the party was fun too, and I do not remember having this much fun since nearly two years ago at my sister's wedding when someone danced with me all night (and I was able to stand!). Hard to top that, but doing the best I could, it was still a lot of fun and I will treasure the time. Teresa, I owe you one....
Anyway, I have a technical post to write so I will wrap this one up. Tomorrow will be another day!
# Michael S. Kaplan on 9 Jun 2005 8:12 AM:
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