I’m sitting at gate 60, terminal 6 waiting for to board flight Continental CO16 heading for Newark / EWR in about an hour.

This week has been crazy. Yes, really crazy. The program was so packed that I think I need at least a week to recover from both the jetlag and to digest all the information that has been crammed into my brain. In this post I’ll try to summarize my experiences from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008.

In this post I’ll try to wrap up the events of the week:

Saturday

• See earlier blog post.
• OSL – EWR
• Missed my connecting flight to LAX
• Had to stay over at the Sheraton Hotel near the Newark airport.

Sunday

• Arrived in LA at about noon (local Pacific time).
• Ate lunch at a small pasta joint close to the hotel.
• Went for a walkabout downtown LA – *not* a good experience.
• Went down to the LA Convention Center and registered myself for the conference.
• Had a 10 minutes talk with a bell boy/guy at the Rennesaince Hotel up in Hollywood about girls, girls, women & girls. He was from El Salvador and the best part of the whole thing was his name; Magnum Scarface .
• Ate dinner with  Olav Tollefsen (Microsoft Norway), Mads Lillelund (Computerworld Norway) & Ella … (Statens Vegvesen) up in Hollywood.

Monday

• Jetlagged – up at about 0500AM. Went down to LACC at about 0700. The first guy I run into is Dan Rigsby – what a coincidence! Ate breakfast together with Dan, Jeff Barnes and some Swedish guys. One of them is one of the Øredev organizers. TODO: Send him a mail and fix Øredev discounts for NNUG members.
• Got a pretty good seat at the keynote. Ray Ozzie first on. Windows Azure revealed (Ref. my blog post from Monday).
• First session: A Lap around Azure Services (TODO: link to http://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/ / Channel9 entry).
• Second session: [Some services session together with Dan?]
• Hung out in the Expo area and got to meet a lot of the Connected Systems Division guys – mainly people from the WCF/WF & Dublin teams.
• Showed off my WCF Test Client hack to the PM on the team that owns the product. Had a great discussion on the WCF related tools and what that can be done to make them even more attractive to use.
• Partner Expo Party – met up with some of the BEKK guys.
• Went to bed reasonably early (10PM something).

Tuesday

• Down at the LACC at about 0715AM. Ate breakfast together with some Swedish guys.
• Again, good seating in the keynote hall.
• Live blogged about the keynote – it was the best of the three (or actually, the two keynotes on Tuesday was better than the ones on Monday and Wednesday).
• Attendee party at Universal Studios. Met up with Olav Tollefsen (Microsoft Norway) and hated the Halloween atmosphere over there. When the 10th idiot with a chainless chainsaw tried to scare me, I wanted to punch him down. We ate at a Mexican food joint – where we met three of the guys from DIPS Norway.
• Olav and I went to see the Bill & Ted goes to [Something] Show – it was so-so. The special effects and the female actors were probably the best parts of it.
• After the show was finished, I met Dan Rigsby and a lot of US DE and MVP guys. They asked if I wanted to go with them to this after-party, but the jetlag and beer kicked in and I went back to the hotel and passed out.
• Got filmed by twice by two Developer Evangelists (Jeff Barns being one of them). Earned myself two Starbucks card ($10 on each of them).

Wednesday

• Ate breakfast with two English guys – one of them was Rob Miles / University of Hull, Microsoft MVP doing XNA & .NET Micro Framework (and related technologies). I’m definitely going to recommend the organizers of Norwegian Developers Conference 2009 to bring in Rob for a session.
• Boring keynote – a self bragging Rick Rashid from MSR telling how good he and his team was. It was really disappointing so I left a bit earlier (I was later told that they had saved the best to the end; Some cool game and a programming language for children that looked promising).
• When I was about the leave I noticed Chris Sells sitting against the wall with his laptop. Went over to him and introduced myself. Chris asked if I was from Norway – and I told him I was from the Oslo area. Chris eyes lit up when I told him that, cause he had actually thought about finding a Norwegian guy to help him out on a little stunt that he had planned for his session later that day (Oslo: Models & Repository – he did it together with Martin Gudgin). I told him that he had met the right guy and I agreed to meet him in hall 151 a bit before the session would start (at 0300PM).
• Took a cab down to the Together@PDC event to meet some of the Norwegian guys; Tor Einar Solli, Knut-Olav Traa, Peter Lillevold and Arjan Einbu. The party was at the Figueroa Hotel and when I got there my name wasn’t on the list – but by flashing a large smile and some of my Norwegian mojo, I managed to get in.
• I got there a bit earlier than the others and the party area wasn’t exactly packed with people. Grabbed a beer from the bar and introduced myself to a group of people that already was present when I got there.
• It turned out that the ten first guys I talked to were from South Africa so I was beginning to think that I had crashed a .ZA party. Luckily, that was not the case (no offense .ZA guys).
• After a while Dan showed up from nowhere. Nowhere being defined as the other side of the pool area. Turned out he had attended a party that was about to

Thursday

• When I woke up at 0705AM (without having turned on the alarm clock) I think I was still drunk – or at least very hung over. Took a quick shower and grabbed a shuttle bus to the convention center.

Hopefully we’ll be leaving in about half an hour.

Argh.

Signing out – lunch.

The flight from EWR was only half an hour delayed – nothing compared to yesterday’s “delay & stay-over at the Sheraton” marathon (no pun intended). The food served on board is *not impressive; we got a tray with warm Egg & Cheese biscuit, a small muffin, a non-fat Yogurt (A product that really should be called “Yogurt” – no fat – and wheat starch added, yuck!) and a small tray of fruit. I also managed to spill 2/3 of my glass of Coke, luckily my blanked caught most of it.

I managed to download some music before I boarded the plane, so now I’m listening to Stéphane Pompougnac, Thievery Corp. and Bonobo – way better than the crappy sound on the Onboard Entertainment System (or at least, with the supplied headsets that really sucks).

We’re currently flying over Missouri and I’m impressed by the never-ending sight of rectangular farm lands.

The picture is taken out the window from my seat 11F (same as yesterdays flight – right next to the right engine and noisy as hell…)

Downed a bottle of Nesquik chocolate milk and am now finishing a Odwalla Super Protein drink. My flight for LAX leaves at 0815AM and go to gate will probably start in about 30 minutes.

I’ve brought a camera and my new computer got a SD card reader but I haven’t taken any photos yet – that will have to change!

I got a set of vouchers for a hotel room, dinner & breakfast and was initially sent to the Holiday Inn North with a shuttle bus. But the bus driver stopped at the Sheraton hotel instead – and here I am, half a Pizza Hut pizza & a Pepsi later.

My throat hurts after all the hours breathing the dry recycled air onboard – I really hope it is better tomorrow morning…

My internal clock says that the time is 0040AM – but the clock on my computer begs to differ; it’s 0640PM here in Newark/New York (Eastern Time). I’m dead tired but I have decided to try to stay up at least a couple of more hours to start adapting to the even harsher time difference in LA; –9 hours (compared to Norway).

24 hours wireless access costs $9.99 – but it is really crappy; it is capped at 25 kB/sec I had hoped that I could fill up the hard drive with some music & movies during the night but that will have to wait.

The weather is really crappy outside so I have no intention of leaving the hotel – I Twittered with my colleague André which is in New York right now with a couple of other colleagues of mine (They’ve been to the OOPSLA conference and are on their way home). He asked me to join them for some drinks later – but I’m afraid I’m all worn out :-/

Stay tuned for on-topic stuff from PDC – I’m signing out…

PS: Some bonus self-shaming; I’ve worn my boxer shorts inside-out the whole day – hilarious