I just flew into New Orleans on Sunday, a day before the conference begins. Day 0, if you will. During lunch, I met up with Matt Candler, CEO of 4.0 Schools, who I met through an introduction by fellow Excellian Matt Makai. We discussed the sights and sounds of the Big Easy, the importance of education and how software can be used to improve the educational system.
Panoramic shot of New Orleans from Loews Hotel
There was plenty of time to pick up my badge and backpack, after which I checked out the long line to get heavily discounted Microsoft Surface tablets.
Yep, Microsoft is practically giving these things away for 60-80% off. The Microsoft Store at TechEd is selling the 64GB Surface RT with touch cover bundle for $99 and a 128GB Surface Pro for $399. But these low prices come at a… umm… price.
The retail store is open until 6pm on Sunday, but attendees have been standing in line for a couple of hours for their new toy. In fact, my colleague got in line around lunch and finally walked away with his brand-spanking-new Surface RT around 3:30pm!
I opted to wait for another day to avoid the long lines. Microsoft reassured attendees that they won’t be running out of Surface tablets today. The downside to going on a weekday is that, I would be unable to attend any sessions if I’m standing in line for an hour.
Fortunately, I’ve already planned out my whole week, using the Channel9 mobile app, which I used to identify sessions I’d like to attend. The topics range from ASP.NET, MVC, C#, and Single Page Applications, to Windows8, DirectX and Kinect.
I’m going to meet up with my colleague Ranjan Biswas, to grab some dinner, then talk about the sessions we plan to attend. Incidentally, Excella co-founder Burton White is from New Orleans and has been extremely helpful with plenty of suggestions on where to go and what to see. I’ll be updating this blog throughout the week, so stay tuned for more information!
This is one of a series of posts about TechEd. You can see the index page at:
http://WakeupAndCode.com/teched-2013/
Enjoy!
Shahed 🙂
I hope my recommendations were good!
They were definitely great! There wasn’t enough time to check out everything, but we got out first taste of New Orleans, and look forward to the next visit! 🙂