TechEd 2005 ... everything and anything that happened

The past couple of days have been tiring, fun, information overload, hectic - all in one... and what does that give you? TechEd Asia 2005!

Firstly, I must thank my very very nice Mentor, Superior, Head, Coordinator, Friend - Lai Hoong Fai for being so kind to offer his Student Ambassadors passes to one of the most anticipated Technology events of the year - TechEd 2005.

The event lasted 3 + 1 days, that one day being the extra day Joseph (the other Student Ambassador) and I lend out our hands to assist the organizer with the event set-up. I won't go through all 4 days in detail but I will pick out, filter some of the interesting features of the day.

Day 1 (Setup day)
10:30am - Suntec City, Singapore
Beautiful day, met up with the lady in-charged of the event, Esther and was later met with Joseph. We were told that we will be in-charged of the Registration Counter.

TUNGGU DAN LIHAT
So registration counter it was and we were introduced to this lady by the name of Daena (I hope I got the spelling correct) who then gave us our first job - TUNGGU dan LIHAT - direct translation - WAIT and SEE, and that was all we did for the first hour or so until we found that to be a little too boring so we approached Daena.

PAPER PLAYING
A couple of minutes later, Daena came over to where we were. It was then that the fun began. Our next job involved papers. All we had to do was to fold the event schedule and have these schedules placed into individual event booklets - all 1200+ of them! For hours - if I recall correctly, we took almost 8 hours (with the help of the staff members) to have it all packed.

The game of GRAMMAR
You see, when you've got a repetitive job infront of you, once you've got it done the first time, after a couple of runs, your hands would naturally know what to do. You can literally close your eyes, perform the folding and placing the folded schedule into a docket! It was then that my mind began to wonder. A question came to me. It was, "when do we use have and when do we use had?". I posed that question to Joseph. The answer? Dunno. My answer? Dunno. So the whole day we pretended to be English Scholars / Professors disecting the English language and finding out the cause and effect for the use of certain words - the verdict? As long as it sounds right. :)

Day 2
The actual day has finally arrived. We were requested to be at the Convention hall by 7am to assist with the registrations. At 8:30, the crowd was coming in, by 9, it was a tsunami of human beings! Joseph and I were busy punching on teeny-weeny keys on those labeling machines for the creation of tags while the rest of the staff members were attending to the attendees. Mmmm... attending to the attendees... interesting.

1pm: Tsunami was over it was calm seas ahead. Daena informed Joseph and I that we were free to go.

The first TRACK
To be really honest, there were almost 150 different tracks. Some were running concurrently, some ran back to back - I have lost track of what I have attended and I haven't.

I just remember that we leaped into one, sat there (oh yes, had buffet lunch prior to that - part of TechEd) and within minutes, we were falling asleep - as a rule of thumb, we must always blame others for the sleepyness.

1. We were too tired after handling the tsunami
2. The speaker was quite monotonous
3. We had very little sleep
4. The air-cond was too cold

Anymore? Probably :)

Day 3
Arrived at Suntec, met up with Joseph and it looked like he had caught a flu. Poor dude was sneezing with boogers coming out all the time (okay lar, the booger is something I added). We went through the day with nothing spectacular to report about.

In the evening, I received a text message from Joseph saying that he had caught a flu which led to a fever. As such, he returned to Johor that very night. Hope you get well soon dude.

Here I go again, the blaming list...
1. It was too cold
2. Someone might have sneezed into his face

Day 4
Me, muah, alone in Suntec City. Unlike most of the TechEd's I've attended, this year's was a little different. Instead of having HOLs (Hands-on Labs) throughout the 3 days, only the last day did they setup the HOLs. I went through a HOL, a number of tracks, in one of the tracks, there was a preview on Vista. My take on Vista? LOVELY INTERFACE, GREAT SEARCH FEATURES, I CANNOT WAIT!

Enough of that CAPITALIZinG... now where was I? The HOL's, Tracks and Vista.

The rest of the day went on as usual until the time came for TechEd 2005 to officially end. The day ended just like any other day would but today I brought an extra thing with me - KNOWLEDGE, something which cannot be seen or felt but is just in there. Something that is so precious that even money does not compare.

Before I start sounding like a philosopher and start boring you, I shall end this post with the words "Next destination TechEd 2006!"