Category: Travel

I arrived back in Calgary Thursday night, just before midnight, and man does it feel great to be back home! The MVP Summit was a lot of fun – and I definitely learned a few new things – but it’s always exhausting. This time around Microsoft paid for our hotel room, but we paid for our flights. That’s a change from the past 10 years of MVP Summits, where the Windows Mobile team would cover the travel costs of their MVPs. It’s a sacrifice to take time off work – vacation time for most – to come to the MVP Summit, so eliminating the financial burden was always appreciated by the MVPs. It seems though that the MVPs from other product groups who didn’t get their flights covered whined brought the issue up and the MVP leadership decided to make things “fair” for everyone and banned the product teams from subsidizing any MVP travel expenses. A flight for me to Seattle is pretty cheap – under $400 – but it’s still $400 that I’d rather spend on something else if I had the choice.

Flights for MVPs from outside North America are much more expensive – one MVP from Australia I know didn’t attend the Summit because his flight would have cost around $3000 AUD ($2300 USD). That’s a lot of cash – the kind you’d spend going on a real vacation, not flying up to a Microsoft event. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of MVPs from Europe and Asia that did attend, but I know in speaking with some of them they were wondering if spending the money was really worth it. I predict the 2008 MVP Summit (already announced as happening in April 2008) will have less of an international presence, which is unfortunate because product teams only receiving input from North American MVPs are missing out greatly on the wealth of knowledge that international MVPs have.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing of the whole Summit was the horrible Internet access at the Grand Hyatt Seattle, the hotel many of the MVPs were staying at. The hotel itself was beautiful – I’d stay there again in a heartbeat – but they simply didn’t have the infrastructure to handle the number of people who wanted to go online. It’s a classic scenario that is mirrored in the way your local ISP (cable or DSL) works: when they’re rolling out their networking hardware, and laying digital pipe, ISPs adopt a model where they only put in enough hardware to handle what they estimate to be the average percentage of users in the neighbourhood that will be online at any one time. Hotels are the same way: if there are 500 rooms in a hotel, they build their network (DNS server, DHCP server, authentication server, total bandwidth pipe) to handle perhaps 20% of that number (100 people) – meaning that when person #101 tries to get online, the system can’t handle them. That’s exactly what happened for the three days I was staying at the Grand Hyatt.

The first night I got connected after about 30 minutes of trying (mostly fighting to get authenticated, their server kept timing out) and when I finally did get on, Outlook 2007 could not send email. I hadn’t changed any of my SMTP settings, so it should have worked, but it did not. I ended up having to use a public-facing IP address, outside their hardware firewall, before I could send email. Even pulling RSS feeds failed. Strangely enough, the Windows Mail client could send email, just not Outlook 2007. The next night was another 60 minute struggle to get online, and another tech support call, and the third night was the worst of all: it took me two hours to get online, with yet another tech support call, and I had no choice because I needed to check my flight times.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that I was paying $50 per 1 MB of roaming data (auggh!) on my phone so using my Pocket PC wasn’t much of an option.

Just like the title says. I’m all packed and leaving shortly for the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle. I’ll be gone until Thursday night, and connectivity is always a question mark at these events – even in the hotels that offer high-speed access because they rarely have systems equipped to handle 400+ geeky MVP guests who all use lots of bandwidth. If I’m slow to respond to email, that’s why. Off I go!

Las Vegas is, in every way, a trap. The strip and everything on it has been designed to confused, defeat, and ultimately break down everyone so they give up on life and plop themselves into a chair in front of a slot machine. Last night I saw the Bill Gates keynote live, which was pretty cool, but it was also running at the same time as Digital Experience, a special press-only event that I wanted to attend. So, along with Stephen Hughes (and another guy who’s name I’m afraid to say I just can’t remember) we leave the keynote a bit early to get to the Digital Experience event. We were at the Venetian, and the event we were trying to get to was at Cesars Palace. Long story short, it took us around 90 minutes to get there, and we walked. We got lost, turned around, given bad directions, lacked good information from the event planners, and arrived around 9pm hungry, tired, and irritated. I only had a chance to speak with a few vendors, which really ticked me off – this was the ONE event I was really looking forward to because it was so great last year. This year it was much bigger, which made it harder to get through everything…I met a few people and made some good contacts with Sharpcast, Kensington, iGo, HTC, and others. There’s a similar event tonight, dubbed ShowStoppers, that I hope will be just as good – because I’m going to arrive on time and work the room like a PR master!

Day two in Vegas was a busy one – here’s my write-up of the conference I was at, and here’s a video clip of what we did for dinner…time to go to sleep for me! The day starts at 7am tomorrow…

Off I go! When waiting in line at security I realized that I had forgotten to leave my Swiss Army Knife USB flash drive at home – I had data on the Flash drive that I wanted to keep, but I knew I couldn’t take the knife with me. So I broke the USB drive portion off the knife, and handed the security guard the knife and asked him to throw it in the garbage. He looked a bit puzzled, and had to go ask his supervisor for instructions. Amusingly enough, the knife is what I received from the last Vista Lab – so maybe I’ll get another one this year. 😉 I initially thought the knife/flash drive combo was a silly idea, but I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve used the pocket knife portion.

I arrived in Vegas a bit later than normal (WestJet was slow tonight, but they’re fun to fly with) and the flight was rocky – when the plane was landing the rear end felt like it was fish-tailing. The airport was dead – hardly anyone was there. The Orleans, the hotel I’m booked into, is so far off the strip that none of the shuttles go there. A $45 town car ride later, I arrived (good thing Thoughts Media is paying for this). A few pictures of the outside…

The hotel is surprisingly large and the room is clean and spacious – and it’s only $100 a night! I guess there are some good deals to be had in Vegas if you’re not convinced you need to stay right on the strip. Tomorrow the Vista Lab starts, and it should be interesting!

Ashley and I made it back from Hawaii, and we had an amazing time! Hawaii is a beautiful place, and a bit different from what I was expecting. Traveling on a cruise ship was likely a bit different than we expected, but overall a nice way to travel. The journey home was a bit long and frustrating – a five hour wait at the Honolulu airport, followed by a six hour red-eye flight to Seattle, then a five hour wait at the Seattle airport – but we’re glad to be home. We went there with two bags, and came back with four, so we have a lot of souvenirs for friends and family, along with Christmas gifts, and a whole lot of food and goodies. As per usual, we didn’t buy much for ourselves: Ashley got some new jewelry, I found a line of clothing I really liked and bought a few shirts. The real reward of travel for us is the experience, and for me specifically, the photography. I purchased my Nikon D200 with this trip in mind, and the camera performed amazingly well. There’s nothing quite like aiming the camera at a surfer catching a wave, and capturing four photos per second – I love that I never have to wait for this camera! I have an ungodly number of photos to go through – I was capturing in RAW+JPEG for 95% of the trip, so that slows things down tremendously (and is one of the reasons I find RAW so frustrating to work with). Most of my work will be culling though – I have 6288 photos in total, so if you figure that roughly half of those are RAW files, I have around 3100 images to go through. I suspect I’ll end up with around 800 to 1000 images in the end, perhaps less once I start to compare images of tropical scenery and flowers – odds are I shot much of the same thing, only in different places. The Canon Powershot SD800 served me well as a video camera and secondary photo unit when I didn’t have time (or the desire) to un-sling the big D200. I also had a chance to test out some new gear, including a very hardcore Kata camera bag, a new hard drive enclosure with a CompactFlash slot, and my Zune got a real road-test. More to follow later, though I suspect it will be at least a week before I’ll have my photos finished. Here’s a shot below of the sun deck on the cruise ship. This is one of the only times we were up there – we didn’t even go in the pool.

I have so much email waiting for me I’m scared to open Outlook, but tomorrow I’ll dive in and try to get brought back up to speed. I’m so amazingly thankful I can rely on the awesome team of volunteers I have, which allowed me to go on this vacation. Those guys truly made this trip possible.

After fumbling out of bed this morning at 3 AM, Ashley and I arrived at the airport via taxi cab at 4:30 AM. We made it through the long US Customs line (we were near the front), though the tightened security (all shoes come off now), and finally, onto the plane – where we proceeded to nearly freeze to death for 20 minutes as they kept the door open. It took off, and we noticed a strange thing – our ears kept popping and popping…but it didn’t quit like it normally would. Lo and behold, ten minutes into the flight, the pilot comes on the intercom and tells us that there’s a problem with the internal pressure system, and because of the altitude they have to rise to for the flight, they had no choice but to turn around and fly back to Calgary. We landed, hoping it would be a quick fix and we could stay on the plane – no such luck. We went back into the airport, and eventually they fixed the same plane, moved it to a different gate (just to psyche us out I think) and off we went – leaving at 9:30 AM or so. Much to our frustration though, our connecting flight into Honolulu was slated to leave Seattle at 8:40 AM, so we missed the flight. What sucks even worse? The next flight wasn’t departing until 5:30 PM. And today being Thanksgiving in the US of A, none of the local shopping malls or stores are open – so no visit to Fry’s Electronics for this geek. We wandered around the airport, got a 30 minute massage each, did some shopping/browsing (we’ll pick up some stuff on the way back when we ALSO have a five hour layover…). We also had to cancel our Cirque du Soleil tickets for tonight, because the new flight gets us in too late to catch the show. Double suck! Thankfully a kindly worded explanation to the ticket lady resulted in us getting a full refund (despite the stern warnings on the bottom of our receipt). It’s 4:48 PM Seattle time, and we’re just about ready to board the flight to Honolulu – let’s hope it’s uneventful and we get there on the first try!

This post will go live at 4 AM, which is the same time Ashley and I will be getting into a cab and heading to the airport. I’ll be essentially brain-dead at that time, and Ashley will be tired but excited. Why? December 1st is our fifth wedding anniversary, and we decided a seven-day cruise in Hawaii would be a great way to celebrate it. I couldn’t have picked a better woman to marry, and I feel blessed every day that she’s my wife. We’ll be back on December the 5th, so if you’ve emailed me or posted a comment on this blog that’s in moderation…well, everything will pretty much grind to a halt. I expect to relax, spend time with my wife, see as much of beautiful Hawaii as possible, and take approximately 4596 photos (or so). Did I mention that it’s snowing in Calgary and about -10 Celsius? I’m not leaving a moment too soon…see you later!