I’m not that kind of sick, any hangover would be long gone by now. But the lack of sleep has caught up with me. I’ve got exactly 5 days to get over it before my next trip, which will hopefully be much more tame.
So last week was the MVP Summit (#mvp10 for those of you on Twitter). While I can’t really go into what was covered at the sessions because it is all covered under NDA.
What I can tell you is that we had some great sessions (and some not so great sessions) and gave the product groups some great feedback (hopefully they think that the feedback was great as well).
We also partied, and did we ever party. Over the four days the highest number of parties that I heard one person attending is 12. Now I don’t care who you are, that’s a lot of events to make it to in one week, especially when you remember that we were in session from 9-6 each day, and you have to sleep at some point.
I took a decent number of photo’s which I’ve uploaded to FaceBook so feel free to start tagging the people in the pictures. These pictures are mostly of the two nights we went to sing karaoke. The first place was local to our hotels in Bellevue called The Spot off Main. It was a nice little place, but most of the other customers were a little to “Karaoke is serious business” for our tastes, so we made damn sure that they were having less fun then us. It was mostly just MVPs that went this night, but we were greeted with a special treat
The second place was Bush Garden in downtown Seattle. If you’ve made it to the SQL PASS summit before (or followed the hash tags on Twitter) then you know that this is our Karaoke bar of choice when we are up there. The place is loud, rowdy and the locals are awesome. The DJ actually remembered us from our last trip there in November, not bad for someone who saw us twice, three months ago.
For those that can remember I think that most had a great time. For those that can’t remember (I’ve got someone specific in mind here who I won’t name in public) you had a great time as well, until your co-worker pored you into a taxi and sent you home.
For those Microsoft employees who got home at 5am and got in BIG trouble, bring your other half with you next time. Then they will understand just how one can get sucked into the vortex which is the SQL MVPs. Either she’ll come with you every time because its so much fun, let you go with us by yourself (so long as we promise not to let you get in to much trouble), or she’ll make you find a new job at Microsoft and never speak with us again. We would prefer one of the first two options, the third is a little drastic. After all I don’t recall anyone actually getting arrested for going to karaoke.
Now that I’ve swung way off course, back to the actual Summit.
The food this year was pretty good. Microsoft had to move the SQL MVPs from the MSC (Microsoft Conference Center) to The Mixer which is a set of conference rooms above what is basically a strip mall in the middle of the Microsoft Campus. There are all sorts of shops and restaurants in The Mixer. While the provided food was good, the food available at the burger shop in The Mixer was better, so a bunch of us decided to pay for lunch, I think it cost like $5 for the burger and fries. As always the soda was free for the taking so the restaurant didn’t even offer to sell you drinks. They did have some excellent milk shakes which we had a couple of over the week.
The biggest chance for this MVP Summit was that we were in staying in Bellevue and not in Seattle. The upside to this was that the bus ride from the hotel to the campus was only about 15 minutes, the down side was that it was much harder to get from the airport to the hotels. Normally when going to downtown Seattle you can either take the trolley and light rail (which just opened) for a few bucks each way, or you can take the Gray Line bus (my usual choice) for about $18 round trip. When going to Bellevue neither of these options are available. You can take the shuttle van for $18 each way, or a taxi for about $50 each way, or the regular bus which takes hours. And of course the worst part of being in Bellevue, the cab ride from Bush Garden to the hotels is about $35.
Anyway, that pretty much concludes my wrap up of the MVP Summit 2010. I hope that I’m an MVP again next year so that I have the chance to go next year.
Denny
