TechEd 2006 Day 0

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)