New Orleans: Day 1.

As most of you are aware sine I won the little blogger competition that Lifehacker ran last year they invited me to tag along for the culmination of their World of Servers gig at TechEd North America. That meant I’ve spent the better part of a day travelling from Australia to New Orleans and whilst I won’t bore you with the details of the rather uneventful journey (save for me being “that guy” who was late for his flight because he simply didn’t hear the boarding announcement) I thought I’d give a little comparison to the last time I was here, nearly 3 years ago now.

For starters the flight over was much better than the last time I went, all because instead of flying Delta I was on Qantas. My wife and I lucked out somewhat last time as we managed to score a whole row of seats to ourselves on the way up (not on the way back) but flying solo this time around I was pretty impressed by the little marginal differences between Qantas and Delta that made the experience a little more tolerable. I’ve also become a bit better at sleeping on planes than I was back then (I think that was my first truly long haul flight, actually) and I managed to sleep through most of it.

Not that it helped my jet lag at all, as the headache I’m currently enduring will attest to.

New Orleans seems like a great place, all of the locals I’ve talked to so far have been really easy going. I didn’t get to see much of it as we got in at around 6pm and we’re going to be heading out to the venue at 6:40am tomorrow but there’s an odd dichotomy going on in the buildings, much like that I saw back in Montreal. I figure that’s mostly due to the destruction that hurricane Katrina wrought here all those years ago but thankfully it looks like quite a few of the older buildings survived.

Tomorrow we’ll have the opening TechEd keynote and then we’ll be off to our first round of sessions. I’ve predominately aligned myself with the enterprise/cloud space and whilst I haven’t been able to fill every session with something along that idea there’s been more than enough on offer for each time slot to keep me occupied. I’ve already had a couple clashes which has led to some tough choices about which ones I actually want to attend. That was made somewhat worse when Angus Kidman (the man behind much of Lifehacker Australia’s tech news) said that the TBD sessions would all be Windows Blue related. I’ll probably have to have a look at reworking it once I get a little downtime, probably during the keynote.

So if you’re coming here for your daily dose of tech/gaming/whatever related news I’m going to disappoint you for a little while but I’ll be doing wrap up posts every day over on Lifehacker Australia which I’ll be sure to retweet on my Twitter account. Mostly I’ll just be posting about the various exploits I find myself in whilst I’m over here in New Orleans and, time willing, sharing a few photographs that I manage to snap.