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OK, who at Microsoft thought it was a good idea to do the keynote at night and have thousands of us all try and catch a bus to our hotel?

You would expect them to load up a bus, then let it roll, and bring in another. Instead we fill a bus, let it sit, and wait. For what I’m not sure.

Great planing. Maybe next year, assuming they do the keynotes on Sunday, the can start them earlier and have some other things like hands on labs so that not everyone leaves at once. Plus, the energy level of the crowd was so low. You could tell people just wanted to get back to their hotels for the night.

They also might want to have someone review the funny parts of the keynote to make sure they are actually funny. Maybe if I watched 24, it would have been more entertaining. They had the actress who played Chloe (?) there to go along with a 24 spoof called 4 with each episode covering a 4 minute time period with IT issues. It was cute, but not as funny as it could have been.

After a great dinner at Legal Sea Foods (rainbow trout), I hopped the bus to head over for the keynote. As I expected the food tables had some snack/dessert items, so I grabbed a few things for later and headed into the seating area.

The keynote hasn’t started yet, but the little coconut-filled chocolate cookies are quite tasty. I also have my first official swag. Every seat has a small keychain with a flashlight and compass. I really could have used the compass yesterday.

You would expect that the split between restaurants serving Coke and Pepsi products would be fairly consistent. Instead, it seems like cities tend to lean one way or the other more so than I would expect. So far every restaurant I’ve been to in Boston serves Pepsi (yuck!) Even the convention center is a Pepsi venue. The first thing I noticed when I showed up for registration at TechEd was a cooler filled with Pepsi products. I believe it was the same last year in Orlando. Guess I’ll be hitting the bottled water pretty hard then. Just as well. Probably wouldn’t be good for me to have a free supply of Diet Coke for a week.

Grabbed a paper and headed over to Dunkin Donuts for breakfast. Haven’t been to one in years, but it was the closest bagel I could find. Finished the paper and walked back to the hotel to catch the bus (route 4) to the convention center. Didn’t take long to get there, but we’ll see how traffic is tomorrow on a workday.

Registration was quick as there was hardly anyone there that early. I grabbed my 2006 edition of the TechEd bag and found a place to sit down and check it out. First thoughts are mostly positive. The material seems pretty sturdy, and I like the messenger bag style. Now for the negatives. First, no water bottle holder. Second, the clasps for the flap are metal clips. Sturdy, but noisy as you walk with the bag.

I walked around the convention center for a bit. You can walk out over the main floor on enclosed walkways; gives you a nice view of the preparations. All the Microsoft venues look ready, but the vendor area still has a way to go before it’ll be ready.

Stopped by the store and found some clearance items available. Picked up a couple Microsoft long sleeve shirts for $15 each.

I rode back to the hotel and dropped off the bag and grabbed my Boston maps. Spent the next few hours walking around. Visited Boston Common and the Public Garden, all the while enjoying today’s beautiful weather. Walked by the New State House, then headed down Beacon, then Charles, and over to the Esplanade. There was a walk/run going on, so the area by the band shell was packed. Watched the sailboats for a while, then made my way to Copley Place and Trinity Church, and finally back to the hotel to wash up for a lite lunch at M.J. O’Connor’s.

Whew…. It’s only 2:40. Going to need a nap before dinner and the keynote tonight.

Here’s the first of my daily wrap-ups of my TechEd 2006 experience. Actually, there isn’t much TechEd content today since it hasn’t technically started yet. Today was primarily about getting here.

I mentioned some of this in previous posts, but I left St. Louis this morning on Southwest, heading to Baltimore (BWI). We arrived at BWI right on time. I checked my watch and determined that I had enough time to grab lunch before catching my flight to Providence (PVD). I ate a leisurely lunch, checked the watch and saw I still had plenty of time, so I checked out he magazines at the gift store and headed over to the flight info display. Wait a minute… my flight shows a status of boarding! That’s when I realize I never set my watch forward an hour for the eastern time zone. As it turned out, passengers were still coming off the inbound flight, so things were running late. Did give me a bit of a scare though.

The flight to PVD was uneventful other than our late arrival. From there I caught the shuttle to Kennedy Plaza to pick up my Bonanza bus to Boston South Station. After getting off the bus, I had to walk all over the place to eventually find my way down to the subway. I picked up a visitor’s pass in case I decide to travel anywhere ($35, ouch!) around town this week. Then muddle my way down the red line and green line to wind up at the Arlington Station. Oops, turns out I never wrote down directions to the hotel. Quick call to the hotel and I’m ready to go.

Or so I thought. They said head down Arlington and turn left on Stuart. Easy enough, except if you turn left it is very easy to go down Columbus and not Stuart. Didn’t see anything down that way, turned around and figured I headed the wrong way. Walk quite a ways down that way and figure something is really wrong. Finally, I managed to figure out what was where on the map, and eventually found the hotel. Mind you, it is drizzling the whole time.

Check-in at the Radisson is painless, and the room is quite nice. My room is on the 17th floor and I have an impressive view. I can even see the bay if I squint. After freshening up, headed over to the Rock Bottom Brewery for some tasty mac & cheese (spicy!) while I catch up on some reading. Checking the paper reveals an AMC Loews theater right around the corner by the Commons. So I walked over and saw the remake of The Omen. It is very faithful remake of the original, down to some of the music itself. The original Omen is one of my favorite films, so I was glad to see they didn’t mess with it too much. The actual experience in the theater was less than stellar though due to several people in the theater (most right behind me) who felt that had to comment periodically during the film and talk back to the screen. Maybe I’m just getting old, but if you want to talk back to the film, then stay home and wait until it is out on DVD.

I should probably get to bed. Tomorrow is Day 1, with registration and the keynote. I’m not doing of the pre-conference sessions, so it looks like I’ll just walk around town, maybe over to the Commons, and just take it easy.

SWAG Tally: 0 (last year they gave IT Pros an IT Hero pack, so I started off with swag before the event started; not this year it seems)