System Center Guide

Not much going on today. I got to San Diego around 10AM this morning. Caught a cab to the hotel, and after realizing that my room wasn’t ready yet, I headed over to the convention center to register and check into the speaker’s lounge. I had lunch with Paul Thomsen (MS), Greg Ramsey (Dell) and Jason Nelson (EMC) at a nice Mexican restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter. After taken a little mid-day siesta, I returned to the convention center and attended the Speaker’s Meeting. This is basically, just the ins and outs of presenting at MMS. Nothing big.

 Next, I quickly popped into Warren Byle’s session on Conquering the Summit, only to realize that I had left my phone in the speaker’s meeting room and had to chase it down. That sucked.

Anyhow, by that time is was close to time for the expo to open so I hung around for it, took some great photos that I’ll post tomorrow and had to bail on the expo a bit early. Why? Well, apparently I packed everything except for dress socks. So, I had to walk about 8 blocks to the downtown mall here and buy some new socks. But, along the journey I stumbled upon not one, but THREE Irish pubs within walking distance. So, after stopping in Hennessey’s for a pint (sucked) , I headed down to Dublin Square where about 6 guys from Dell and another 6 or 7 EMC and others came out to have a pint.

We hung out, discussing Vista, Microsoft’s security posture, EMC’s transition to a Microsoft services provider and much more until finally they were shutting down about 1AM this morning.

So, needless to say, this has been a long day and tomorrow will only be worse. But, I’m glad to be here and reminded of the great friendships that MMS helps to create.

Don’t forget to watch my Twitter throughout the day. That’s where I’ll post everything throughout the day, with an evening summary on McAlynn.com.

Take care!