I’m sitting in a town hall session (all NDA so no details) in the first of my MVP Summit session of the year.
It was a nightmare flight over, but it’s worth it. Yesterday was a chill out day. I hung out in Starbucks, in some bars and in the Cheesecake Factory. I went into the Bellevue Microsoft Store and it was pretty … like Vista. Oops! I tried a Dell slate pc. Damn it was slow. It took 2 seconds for the start menu to appear. And typing was dodgy character recognition that was both slow and inaccurate.
I walked into the Apple store that was two doors down and asked for a new iPad. 5 minutes later walked out with an activated tablet PC that works quite nicely. Sure, I don’t have flash but I do have Madden 11 🙂
I’ve installed Evernote for note taking and I’ve got Kindle running. Movie players are installed and battery life is fantastic.
Bellevue is a pleasant urban environment near Redmond. Local hotels are filled with MVPs. Lots of us were out and about, bumping into each other and networking. That continued this morning at breakfast at the hotels and on the buses to Redmond.
Redmond is basically a city made up of Microsoft buildings. For you Irish people, think a huge Sandyford with Microsoft buildings only, 6 lane highways, MS buses and taxis darting all over, and trees everywhere.
Into session rooms, and we meet the program folks who we talk to online all year long. Some are leads we deal with directly, some are program folks who help us, some are folks who network with us to get feedback. Things kick off and that’s where the NDA kicks in 🙂