Microsoft Convergence 2007 - Day 2

As you may recall from yesterday’s post, a late night of drinking and partying lead up to one decision come this morning: Do I really want to attend the 8:30am keynote or not? The answer was no, I didn’t… I was not only too tired but I had some work that needed to be done anyway. Luckily for me the keynote speaker was Joel Barker (a motivational speaker of some sort) and not a real tech speaker. A good tech speaker I’ll go out of my way to hear… but I wouldn’t walk across the street to spit on a motivational speaker, let alone get up early after a late night to hear one ramble on about shit for an hour and half. With that decided, I settled down at the desk in my hotel room around 8am to do some work before I had to get ready for my 10:30am session on BI (business intelligence) options in GP (Great Plains) 10.0.

After my 10:30am session and a second day of rather lackluster lunch food, I had two more sessions to attend on general Microsoft BI products and MS SQL Server 2005 SRS (SQL Reporting Services). While both of these sessions were informative overall they were definitely a little boring at times which made me regret my late night last night even more. Fortunately I just had to make it through these two sessions and then I’d be out for the day so I could catch a little nap before we started the festivities for the evening, i.e. more drinking on a vendor’s dime. By 4pm I was back at my hotel with some time to kill before I was to meet up with my fellow Cincinnati attendees for dinner in the Gaslamp District again, so a decided to take a quick nap for a bit. I was soon roused from my slumber by a call from Kevin (my GP partner) who needed me to download some drivers for his laptop that had died on him. After going through the process of finding the right drivers, downloading them, and dropping them on a USB flash drive for delivery I was no longer tired and just decided to browse the web for a bit before my 6:30pm dinner date.

I met up with my friends down at a little Italian restaurant in the Gaslamp district who’s name I’ve forgotten already but who’s food I will remember fondly. The lobster ravioli there was fantastic although there wasn’t enough of it (only six ravioli for $28!?!)… luckily the bread was tasty as well. After dinner several members of our little group went back to their respective hotel rooms since they were still tired from the night before (I know… pansy-ass bastards!) so it just left four of us going to the Rock-N-Rave party at The Shout House. The bar was only a short walk from the restaurant luckily but alas we still arrived too late get a seat so we ended up spending the night standing around drinking as it truly was “standing room only” in there it was so crowded with wall-to-wall geeks. Drinks were drunk, songs were sung, and fun was had by all! The night ended with me stumbling eight blocks back to my hotel around 1am after which I promptly collapsed on my bed and passed out. Fun times!

Tomorrow I fly home to Cincinnati unfortunately but this was a great trip. I learned a lot at the conference and still managed to have more than my share of drinks and fun. I can’t wait to attend next year’s conference in Orlando, Florida!