Speaker Idol is kind of like Pop/American Idol except its for technical presentation speakers. The final was held today and my friend, the "queen of deployment" Rhonda Layfield won it. Her prize is a paid for trip to TechEd EMEA next year and a slot as a session speaker.
It was interesting. Each speaker gets 5 minutes to talk about a subject of their choice. Their judged on the quality, speaking style, presentation skills, accuracy and the slide deck. The judges are very picky and the final judges included Mark Russinovich and Steve Riley. Rhonda won with a session on Network Monitor 3.x. Other presentations included Powershell performance improvement, MS Desktop Optimisation Pack for Software Assurance *phew* and a dodgy session on "hacking" Win7 to get something called Superbar. The sessions were recorded so they could be put online. I’m left wondering if the Win7 session will be online – it did talk about downloading dodgy tools and the judges were not impressed.
Muggins here was askedon Sunday if I’d participate. I got together a session on Monday morning on Hyper-V and rehearsed. I never got called in despite hearing I was in. As an apology, I got a voucher which was spent on a Geek-Shirt and a guaranteed slot next year in Berlin if I’m a delegate.
Afterwards I went wandering around the stands in the exhibitors hall. It was cool to look at the HP storage blades (a blade that only hosts disks). Right now they take up to 6 * SFF 146GB drives. In January or thereabouts, they increase to 300GB drives. There’s also some new G6 stuff on the way. I’ve got an invite into an NDA room to see the stuff in action tomorrow.
I caught up with TS guru Alex Yushchenko. He was unfortunately able to confirm that the thin terminals that are currently available don’t support XPS drivers => no TS 2008 Easy Print. We need to wait for updates from MS for XPe. That’s rather unfortunate. I love how EasyPrint works and performs: zero configuration and LAN-like printing over latent links.