TechEd Day 2

TechEd Day 2 (they count Sunday as Day 1) was a pretty good start to the week although there have been a few issues.

Ballmer’s keynote ran over by quite a bit, causing some people to miss the beginning of their sessions or had sessions cut short. They only have one entrance to the room so it is very slow for people to get in and out. Not sure if they did this because of the RFID demo they are doing (there are readers at the entrance and everyone was given a RFID tag they could choose to carry with them for the demo) or what.

Samantha Bee from the Daily Show is here doing fake IT news bits during the keynote. Not as funny as the Daily Show, but pretty good. Later in the day I had someone from Sweden ask me who she was.

I went to three sessions yesterday, skipping the last timeslot to get some work done since none of the topics did much for me. The best session yesterday was MGT380 Practical Group Policy: Application and Usage (Part 1) with Mark Williams, no contest. I’m looking forward to part 2. It was worth going just to find out that the policy “Always use local ADM files for Group Policy Editor” is NOT supported on Windows XP. Even Mark said he thought it was until recently. I swear it used to work, but had been frustrated because it hasn’t for some time. Now I know to quit trying to make it work. Hope they fix this soon.

Vendor swag is pretty good so far. Yesterday picked up at t-shirts from Imanami, Symantec, Vmware, EMC, TrendMicro/IMLogic, Microsoft Webcasts, and a couple others I can’t think of. Also picked up a combination stapler/tape/post-it dispenser From the Exchange Cabana, a stress ball from Microsoft, a foam oversized golf ball from Avocent, a little race car from Intel, a toy head from someone I can’t think of right now, and probably a couple other things.