tech•ed backstage

This year we are lucky enough to be using the GCCEC for two large Microsoft events, that are a week apart; the Australian Partner Conference (APC) and tech•ed and as you can guess this gives us a huge amount of efficiency on how we run the event with benefits in shared infrastructure and environments. We’ll have a huge breakdown later in this blogs life talking about how we utilise this shared environment and assign the costs, but that’s not for this post.

Its no secret we’ve been spending a lot of time checking out the venue to ensure we’re getting adequate access to wireless and network facilities. On our last site visit we had the venue network engineers working with codify to figure out ‘black spots’ in the network and work towards a root cause. We were lucky enough to have a loner machine from Nick to test out the profile, the results of which you will see later, but the size factor of the machines make them really easy to cart around the venue, and I generally averaged about 330 Mbps on the network – of course that’s really easy to do when you’re the only person connected….

While the codify guys started getting down to business, we were tasked with another very important job;

Tasting the tech•ed and APC delegate menus….

Some days you have to work very hard, and I guess this was one of those days; leaving the codify guys to continue working on the network, we dragged the jomablue guys down for opinions on the menu. Now I’m not going to go into detail on all the items served but there was an amazing range that was presented to us, such as:

• Beef with Ginger and green peppercorns
• Ocean Trout
• Beef and mushroom Risotto
• Fruit Shots
• Seafood Paella
• Lamb Korma
• Lamb Cutlets

Now bear in mind that this was for both events so we can’t guarantee you’ll see any of them (unless you are going to both..) oh.. there was bunch of wines as well, but best leave you to enjoy that for the event itself. Some shots below…

The team led by “Fletch” at GCCEC did an awesome job of exciting us about what the delegates are going to experience food wise.

Those photos above don’t really do it justice and after we ate till we couldn’t eat no more, we rolled/staggered our way back to find the codify guys still working hard, apparently testing what appeared to be some strange speed results from a couple of the wireless access points.

So as you can see we’re working VERY HARD to give you the best level of service possible for tech•ed and APC…. well at least some of us are

- jorke