What have I been doing in preparation for Tech.Ed?

Tablet PC
I've secured my work's only tablet pc to use for note-taking during the event. It wasn't hard really, I knew that we'd bought one for the CEO sometime ago and that they were constantly having issues with it. It was eventually given up on and put in a draw so that it couldn't cause our support guys anymore fuss. Damn shame waste of a few thousand bucks I thought so I asked the right people the right questions and now I have it in my hot little hands. It's an HP Compaq TC1100 and is nice and small and we chucked an extra 1GB of RAM in it to give it a healthy total of 1.5GB. I've rebuilt it from bare bones with all the latest drivers and service packs and it seems good and stable now. I've resisted putting Office 2007 on it for now but we'll see how long that lasts. I do however have OneNote 2003, VS2005, SQL2005 & Oracle XE on it.

Smartphone
My excellent i-mate SP5 (which I picked up earlier in the year at the MEDC event) suffered a joystick problem a couple of weeks ago so I sent it off for repair. I got it back today and all is well again. I was starting to go a bit batty not having my calendar and contacts available at a whim.

My Agenda
I've organised my sessions:

• Keynote
• CON301 - (.NET 3.0) Introduction to the .NET Framework 3.0
• WEB205 - Programming Virtual Earth
• ARC203 - Architecting Identity - The identity metasystem and Windows CardSpace
• CLI204 - Scaling out Media Center Performance in Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
• DEV306 - Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server: Step-by-Step Migration and Adoption Planning
  Ask the Experts Evening
• DAT307 - Next Generation Data Access in .NET Applications with ADO.NET vNext
• ARC208 - Architecture Panel: Web vNext
• ARC209 - Architecture Decisions: Datasets or Objects?
• ARC211 - Software As a Service: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• WEB310 - ASP.NET: Creating High-Performance, Enterprise-Scale Web Applications Using Visual Studio 2005 Team System
• WEB211 - Developing Data-Driven Web Applications with .NET Language Integrated Query
• Tech.Ed 2006 Closing Party
• WEB312 - ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks
• WEB313 - ASP.NET: Building and Deploying Web Applications with Visual Studio 2005
• ARC217 - How to Get Your Grandmother Building Missile Defense Systems
• WEB316 - How to develop an Aussie Mashup using Microsoft Atlas
• Closing Locknote

Mainly ARC and WEB sessions there, with a couple of fun ones thrown in for good measure.

Meego T-shirt
I've organised my Tech.Ed Meego t-shirt so I can wear my meego likeness for all to see:

Geek T-shirts
I've bought a couple of geek t-shirts from CafePress so I can blend into the crowds:

I'm also hoping to score a DevGarten t-shirt from Davey Lemphers (you reading this man, put one aside for me, sz L :-)

Weather
According to weather.com.au we're set for some great weather next week in Sydney. So shorts and thongs are on the suitcase list now. I'm going to be staying over on the Friday night too so I can spend a whole day in Sydney on Saturday so here's hoping the weather stays good for then.

What have others been doing in preparation?