I also had problems with my shower - the drain would not stay open, and the shower valve was broken and only put partial water up to the shower head. The design of the hotel was cool as a big 22 floor atrium. This did make every single noise from the restaurant on the ground floor echo up to every single room.
Though we took the Microsoft shuttle bus to/from the conference, we soon discovered it was within 15 minutes walking distance. The weather was really cool (cold actually) until the last day when it warmed up over 20 Celcius – so much for Hotlanta.
The Georgia World Congress Center was huge and Tech-Ed used all of it. I was 3 very large buildings, which meant a lot of walking between sessions. There were at least 30 minute breaks between sessions, and it could take 20 minutes to walk from one end of a building to the far end of another building… which happened often in my schedule.
The food was good and plentiful. Every day there was a full buffet breakfast and full buffet lunch. Between sessions spread throughout the buildings there were fully stocked pop and juice coolers, and no end of snacks - candy, popcorn, danishes, ice cream, cookies, hot pretzels, and more that I did not even find.
One thing that was lacking was power – with 10,000 geeks with laptops, smart phones, and tablets in use it became hard to find a place to charge up between (or in) sessions. Even the Alumni Lounge could have had more power bars placed throughout.
The entire event was heavily staffed, so it was surprising that the bathrooms were disgusting. Admittedly, the male-female ratio was 20:1 and this created a lot of lineups. At no time, even between breaks, did I see bathrooms get cleaned, mopped, or restocked and this resulted in very wet floors, very wet counters, and garbage everywhere.
I had skipped the Jam Session at House of Blues last year at Tech-Ed, and this year I wasn’t planning on attending either. Having been to conference sessions to 8pm I had missed the free food at the community gathering, and it was time to catch the shuttle back to the hotel. It made sense to go to Jam Sessions at Tabernacle in the hope of some food. I was disappointed in this respect, only bar food (nuts, chips) was to be found. However, some of the performances by other Tech-Ed attendees was worth going for: Tush, The Thrill Is Gone, Evil Ways, and Sweet Papa John.
The wrap-up party on Thursday night was held almost next door do the conference center at the Georgia Aquarium and World of Coca-Cola. We had some food, there were a couple of bands that we didn’t see as we went through the aquarium tours which surprisingly included beluga whale sex. From there we toured the Coke museum, appropriate as Atlanta was where Coca-Cola started out 125 years ago. There were so many things to see, plus taste-testing of Coke pop from around the world, and a 20 minute store lineup, that by the time we were done the party was over. On the way back on Friday my traveling curse (thanks Alana for coining the phrase) struck again. The flight from Atlanta to Dallas was canceled, and we ended up having to take a different flight later in the day through Toronto back to Vancouver. This threw off the duty-free plans - rather than buy on the last leg, we would have had to buy on the first leg (and in Atlanta that was in a different terminal from where we were departing from). Dustin went for it, but the end result was that he had to check a bag in Toronto to hold the alcohol as it can’t be brought carry-on. When entering Canada, to go to a connecting flight you have to go back through security checks. Thankfully I skipped duty-free.
My bags would not fit in the overhead (or under seat) on the little Jazz plane to Toronto and my media screen did not work. The bags definitely fit in the Boeing 777-200 from Toronto to Vancouver, and we took advantage of a food credit that America Airlines threw into our booking. Even cooler, the seats had power so I could charge my laptop and phone.
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