The weekend officially started on Friday night at the speakers get together. I got to meet some new, cool people and see some friends again.
One of the more interesting things that happened on Friday was I made a bet with Joe Healy from Microsoft. Joe is a Georgia grad and of course a fan of the UGA football team. I'm a Florida fan. The bet is if Georgia wins the football game this fall I have to go to Tampa on my dime and take Joe out drinking. If Florida wins he has to come to Orlando on his dime and take me out drinking. Should make for an interesting game... Go Gators...
Met Rodney Landrum, author of Pro SQL Server Reporting. He also writes for SQL magazine. This was made apparent by the tattoo of the SQL magazine logo on his left arm. I think Joe will have a pic on his site soon. We also played the SQL Alphabet game. Basically each person says a word starting with each letter of the alphabet that is relevant to SQL Server. (e.g. A = Avg, B = Bit, etc). It's funny how much you forgot when under pressure to come up with something.
Spent some more time with Shawn Weisfeld. He's the (current) president of the orlando .net users group. He's leaving in June to accept a new position with his company. We'll miss you sage!
All in all, Friday night was a blast. It's always fun talking smack with everyone.
Saturday morning was a mad rush to get everything setup. Andy and I arrived around 7:30 AM and got right to work with Brian, Shawn and the other volunteers. People started showing up around 8:00 AM. The bulk of them got there between 8:30 AM and 9:00 AM. When it was all said and done the morning breakfast and rush went really well. The first sessions got started a little late but I don't think anyone really cared.
My session started at 2:45 PM so I spent most of the day helping other speakers get setup and ready to go. Spent some more time with Joe and Andy. Joe likes to give me crap about my iPhone. Says it's an MVP killer. I guess I'm out. I loves my iPhone. Andy spent most of the day taking notes about things that went right and wrong. We're always trying to figure out how to make these events go as smoothly as possible.
I even got "twitted" by Mark Polino (that means he said something about me on twitter). At some point I'll have to give twitter a try.
About 20 minutes before my session started I started my "routine". Ok, It's not really a routine at all. I just watch a video by "the whitest kids u know". This allows me to start my session in a good mood. I made the session interactive which seems to keep the attention of the audience a lot better than a lecture. It seems the attendees picked up on it because I scored relatively high on my evals.
I didn't have the privilege of being the youngest speaker this time around. That award went to Devin Knight, The younger brother of Brian Knight. I'm sure at some point there will be a book by Knight and Knight... He did a pretty good job for his first time speaking. He's a fellow UF fan so he's good in my book.
The day was wrapped up at 7 Bridges. About 30 of the attendees and speakers showed up to hang out. I played a game of pool with Devin and introduced him to my pre-session videos... I got to hang out with Tim Mitchell from Dallas for a while as well. He joined in on another game of SQL Alphabet with Rodney and I while I played pool.
Of course I spent most of my time this weekend with Andy. We had a lot of good talks about various things that we'll be spending some time on in the future. Mentoring, books, etc. You'll hear some good things in the future from us.
All in all it was a great weekend on many levels. I'm looking forward to the next event coming up on June 7th and 8th in Orlando.
posted @ Sunday, May 04, 2008 10:59 PM