I’m finally in Florida!! My first day here and I haven’t got lost yet. The flight was a piece of cake, car rental smooth – I’m driving a Chevy Malibu just like Lori Medlocks. I checked into my room, it’s acceptable. There’s a fountain outside my room and the pool’s not to far away. The fountain is just like my sound machine at home so it will help me go to sleep.
The weather is nice; it’s not real hot or muggy. It’s actually lightening and thundering as I write this. Its overcast and I don’t have much hope of working on my tan this week at all!
Anyways, I got checked in and hung my clothes up and immediately took off for Downtown Disney. I made up my mind that I was eating at the Rainforest Café tonight and that’s exactly what I did. I had stead and shrimp and boy was it good! I got to sit out on the deck and watch the ferry boats. No my weight watcher friends and family, I did not have a volcano!! Did I mention that I really hadn’t eaten at all today because I knew that’s’ where I wanted to go? I ate the whole dinner plate!
After I finished eating, I went into the store and found a cute shirt for Zach and stretched him a penny. We’ve been doing that for him for a while as souvenirs. Then I went and walked around a few more shops, but didn’t really find anything exciting. I was getting ready to go and saw the Pleasure Island area and had to walk over there and check it out. If I would have had someone to go with, I might have went into one of the clubs – I think there’s like 8 of them, all different kinds of music. But since I didn’t, I just walked around for a while and then came back to my hotel.
This hotel doesn’t have high speed internet access unless you go to the lobby and no wireless connections. Unfortunately I forgot to bring a telephone cable, so I have to see if they have one in the lobby tomorrow. I’m writing this tonight, but won’t post until Sunday night.
Sunday is Universal Studios, I can’t wait! Gotta get some sleep though so I can get up nice and early. I miss everyone lots! Goodnight!
Sunday evening and boy am I bushed. I got up this morning and took off for Universal Studio’s first thing. I got there fairly early and headed for the Hulk. Very loopy, but it sure was a blast to ride. I think my favorite rides today were Spiderman and Revenge of the Mummies. It was actually sunny and warm this morning. It poured for a little while today, but it didn’t bother me a bit. It was a warm rain, the kind we never get in Nevada. I just kept walking and went from Back to the Future to ET. Back to the Future was entirely too bumpy, ET was cute but didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I made sure I got some cute pennies for Zach, I’m sure he’ll like them.
I finally got tired about 5:00 pm, and was heading down to the convention center and thought I would call Brad and make sure he got in okay. It was just lucky that I caught him at the baggage claim area and since I was already done with the park, I went to the airport and picked him up. Les called as I got back to my room to cleanup, and since I’m the only one with a car, I told him I’d take him down to the OCC to get registered. Microsoft didn’t let me down, they had the ice cream out just like they did last year. I can tell it’s going to be a fun week. After Les was finished I asked them where they wanted to go for dinner… you’re not going to believe it – yep, Rainforest Café. It was just as good as last night!
I’m ready to snooze though so I think I’ll post this tomorrow. Tech Ed 2005 here we come!
Monday –
Monday was great for the first day. Steve Ballmer gave his keynote speech which was definitely a sales pitch, but I guess that’s part of the reason why we are here. I worked on my MIIS RFP and found a bunch of the smaller companies were that have Identity Management solutions were bought by bigger companies. I checked with Oracle and they didn’t have anyone here to answer questions about Oblix IDM which sucked. I thought the whole identity management stuff would be what’s popular this year and the only thing I’m seeing is either .Net or mobile solutions.
My first class was how MS deployed and maintains their Active Directory. Kind of interesting to know that they have a 10 gb ad database. That’s just amazing to me! They mentioned some good tools, RepAdmin for replication and Ultrasound and Sonar. I’ll have to check them out later.
Then I went to a class on group policy best practices. That one had a bunch of tools and utilities that I need to check into – rediruser.exe or redircmp.exe which points out which default container newly created users and computers go to if you don’t specify a container. Also there are some common scenarios for group policy that you can download, and another utility called gpmonitor which is part of the gpmc. The speaker said you should never try to run dcgpofix as that puts your domain back to all the default policies and can very much screw up your directory. He made the suggestion instead that you should backup and restore your gpo’s prior to making changes… There was one link that stood out WWW.GroupPolicyWiki.com that he suggested in regards to the whole debate on gpo best practices. If you’re confused, no worries, I think most of us were but it was a good class
The last class of the day was MIIS roadmap. With Server 2003 R2, Microsoft is actually building in some of the MIIS components within this release. The speaker gave us another link WWW.IdentityBlog.com that he felt was important.
After all of that, I met with Les, Deb and Brad and we all went down to the exposition center and walked around looking for freebies. The food was pretty nasty but it did fill the void. The desserts were good, but you guys knew I was going to say that!
Fun day, looking forward to tomorrow!