The Moth

Just came back from a very different MEDC for me this year.

I've been to Vegas a few times before and this is the only time that I didn't venture beyond the Venetian! I pretty much spent all my time at the conference or in my room, with the occasional trip to restaurants (in the Venetian) for breakfast/lunch/dinner. I only had drinks (extremely generous portions of Stoli on the rocks) on Wednesday night at the Venetian's TAO where the conference party was held. Some of us went to some other place in the Venetian after that but I don't recall the name. This resulted in a bad hangover on Thursday morning which soon converted itself to a nasty cold that I brought back with me today. I bet half the attendees came back with a cold because the temperatures in that hotel are sub zero. The other bad news was that since Monday my laptop monitor malfunctioned. It did this last September and it only took the Toshiba technician 10 minutes to reconnect the cable internally but I wasn't going to risk that myself with all the sessions I was doing! I ended up delivering my breakouts by looking at the monitor on the stand rather than my own laptop monitor (external projection still worked, thank God!).

On a more positive note, my breakouts were well received and I enjoyed watching them feature in the Top 10 list monitor in the speaker room :-). This was a special achievement for anyone at MEDC this year since Doug Boling decided to have 4 of his talks dominate the top 5... someone suggested, and I agree, that next year we should only pay him if he gets scores above 8.5 (which is what he did this year!). Thank you to everyone who attended my sessions, thank you to all of you for voting and special thanks to those of you that put up with my bad jokes :-)

On a further positive note, I came back with more cool swag than from any other conference ever: hardware. Some bits I got because I was a speaker, others as a (former) MVP, and others by prior arrangement with Microsoft colleagues in Redmond whom I met in Vegas. Below is the top 5 swag items I have just unpacked:
- Sweet Presenter Mouse
- NETMF Freescale i.MXS Development Kit
- JawBone noise cancelling Bluetooth headset
- Cool laptop web camera
- Windows CE eBox-2300SX Development Kit

Now I'll go find some creative way to keep my eyes open while my body adjusts itself to normal time again...