It's 5am here in Las Vegas and for one reason or another I can't get any sleep. I'd like to say it was through amazing excitment of what lays ahead today but it's a much more annoying reason than that!
Last night I went to the Venetian to register so to avoid the rush this morning. The Sandbox labs were open for you to have a look around. Had a first play with Vista, and also got to use one of the Origami machines. They look nice and may be popular, but the ones I used were very hot in temperature, and the battery life on initial versions sounds like it will be 2.5 hours. Of course this only gets worse with time as well. I did end up talking to two people there though about whether to get one of those or a proper tablet PC, and they were singing the praises of a tablet no end. Definitely something to consider.
Got a massive pack of CDs and stuff to try including IE7, Vista, VS 2005 standard edition (yet another free copy!). Going to try and install Vista on a VM Ware image although not sure whether my laptop will be able to cope with that.
After all the registration and lab stuff met up with Tim, Ben and Dave. We chatted about why Microsoft were running this conference and the kind of people who were going to attend etc. Was nice to speak to some English people again.
It turns out that Dave set up a wiki to try to allow people to arrange geek dinners and things. Microsoft wouldn't promote it though, instead going with some third party solution called Event Point. Needless to say it's a lot harder to use than a wiki, and so hardly anybody has put their details in. Very annoying that MS wouldn't link to Jims wiki as well, especially as this event is about 'A 72 hour conversation', and wikis are great for organising all that kind of stuff.