Shut Up, Laura

Okay, perhaps not all of us. Nathan Muggli is apparently in heaven because he likes to sleep at sweltering temperatures.  Someone like me who routinely turns the air-conditioning down to "Meat Locker" under most circumstances?  Well..there's a reason I'm posting this at 4:30am local time.

Anyway...DEC review for Day 2:

Gil Kirkpatrick issued a challenge on Day 1 for people to attend sessions "outside of their comfort zone", for AD geeks like me to get exposure to ADFS, ILM, and other Identity-related technologies.  I'd say I've done a good job of that this year: attended a number of ADFS sessions and the ADFS Birds of a Feather session after-hours today.

Session I: Deploying Domain Services & AD Roadmap, from 2 of the DS Program Managers. While it was somewhat repetitive content for me from last year's pre-conference session (which I became intimately familiar with since I helped to write/deliver it), I'll never turn down an opportunity to sit and listen to smart people talk about AD...you always come away with something you didn't know before.

Session II: On my best man's recommendation during his ADFS talk yesterday, I went to Pamela Dingle's CardSpace preso.  Now, I'll be honest, I was afraid that if asked to describe CardSpace in 10 words or less by the end, my answer might still be "That thing that Pamela and Stuart are always talking about", but I think I finally had a gestalt "a-ha" moment about what's actually going on with it, conceptually. So, mission accomplished, Gil.  (And besides, it garnered the Joe Kaplan quote for the quote book cited previously.)

Session III found me engaging full-on heckling mode for Nathan Muggli's RODC performance.  :-)  In seriousness, it was a useful adjunct to Jorge's RODC session yesterday and chock full of useful nuggets.

Session IV...well, not so much with a session as sitting in the Irish bar with Rob Deluca, Nathan and others...which is where half of the useful conversations happen at a place like DEC anyway.  :-)

The evening's festivities were frankly awesome - The Oxford Group booked this hair-metal cover band at this crummy dive bar a few miles from the hotel. After an initial mis-cue (my own fault for forgetting my ID in the hotel room), it was a night of happily dancing and yelling to some of my favourite music at ridiculous volumes.

Tomorrow?  (Okay, it's almost 5am, I guess I should just say "Today".)  I'll go see Alain Lissoir's spiel, and rumour has it that one half of the joe and Dean show is delivering an encore as the last session of the week.  And supposedly there's a spoof movie marquee poster that's going to be making the rounds that Pamela, JoeK, Sean Deuby and I (among a few others) that will be getting introduced, which will make for the funny.

Seriously, I have one complaint for the whole event, and it's the ridiculous lack of climate control in the hotel rooms. I think I'm going to go home and sleep for 12 hours straight tomorrow night.

Update on Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 09:06AM by Laura E. Hunter

Edited to add: ah yes, forgot to give props to one Brad Turner, my dancing-partner-in-crime at said Oxford event.  There are probably those who could've done a better impression of Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads (in my case I'm almost certain of it), but not many who would've had more fun in the attempt.  :-)