As you know from my previous entries, I am in Orlando attending TechEd, at the IT Pro week. In the weekend between the Dev and Pro conferences Microsoft turned over the Orange County Convention Center to the Florida User Groups. Spearheaded by the ONETUG group, this event was made possible through the cooperation of many user groups. I attended the SQL Saturday sessions that were held on both Saturday and Sunday, and they even let me hog the stage for an hour on Saturday and give my presentation on Full Text Searching in SQL Server 2005 and 2008.
I had a blast, and met a lot of great people. I have to admit I was surprised at how many folks were there just for the Inbetween conference and not TechEd. Out of the 45 folks who were in my session, all but 2 said they were local folks there for just the Inbetween conference.
As you can tell from the title of this post, I did indeed win something. Bear with me, as it’s a great story. At the Saturday night party they were giving away 3 XBoxes, two of which were randomly drawn for. Well the young lady who won one of them did not wish to keep it for whatever reason, and asked if she could draw another name, which she did.
Well the guy who won that night had his name drawn during Sunday’s giveaway of 7 XBoxes. He came up and told the story, and said he wanted to do the same thing, even though no one would have said a word had he decided to keep it. Well he drew and it was my name he pulled out of the box! I wish I could remember his name so I could say thanks again.
I’ve always wanted an XBox, but could never quite justify the expenditure. Now I have a new toy, and my kids are very excited over the prospect of playing some games with daddy. I think this will be a great gizmo for some daddy/kids together time.
Let me get serious for one moment, and give a big thanks to all the groups who came together at the last minute, and to Joe Healy, Florida Developer Evangelist, for giving the user groups the chance to show what they can do. It seems almost fashionable to bash Microsoft these days, but how many other companies would bear the expense of something as costly as the convention center and give it away to the user community?
Thanks to all for a great time, I hope the Inbetween conference becomes a regular feature at all future TechEd.
Arcane Code 