Made it here. A long plane ride from IAD (Washington Dulles) to LAX, but thankfully for the technology of noice-cancelling headphones, I was able to get some sleep on the plane. For those of you who have travelled with me before, you know that I never used to sleep on airplanes. I can honestly say that I know now it was the noise and the constant hum of the engines--somehow I think it just reverberated in my brain and wouldn't let me sleep. I love technology that serves a useful purpose!

Anyhow, after getting a refresher on downtown LA I hopped the bus to the Convention Center to pick up my registration goodies. (More on that later). Interestingly, as much as Windows Vista has a presence here with banners and such, Office 12 IS the beef of this conference (hurrah!). Here's a picture of one of the banners for Office:

Office 12 promo banner (BI flavor)

After grabbing the booty, I headed back to the hotel--it's been a long day. Another nicety: free wireless access through the whole hotel. That, along with free wired or wireless access at the conference center, outta keep me quite connected (assuming the network at the conference doesn't suffer similar issues to those from 2 years ago [fingers crossed!] ).

So, what's good in the welcome kit?
* laptop bag
* t-shirt
* channel-9 foam toy (*sigh*)
* numerous adverts and demo product CDs (including telerik)
* WinFX (Vista) .NET class library poster
* 4 magazines (MSDN, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Code) -- home flight reading!
* something called the "Smart Client Applications - Spring 2005 Selection"
[looks to have a few demo/free tools that Microsoft had out on their site before]

Oh, well...enough for now. I should start planning my sessions.

Until later...
_bruce