SharePoint Connections - Orlando - Day 0: Elvis has landed

We have arrived, and the world is still standing. Wow, I have to say the Hyatt Grand Cypress is simply fabulous. It’s been a long day with getting up around 6am (Calgary time) and we checked in around 12am (Florida time). So that’s about 20 hours or 1 complete download of Windows Vista. I’m, in a word, beat.

The day started off okay. We had to take an exhausting flight from Calgary to Toronto, then hop on down to Florida. Okay. The Calgary flight wasn’t so bad other than the fact we had none other than Cruela DeVille on board. Seriously. This chick had bleached white hair with some black “highlights” in various places. Either she was a bad reject from a Disney casting call, or really wanted to form the first punk band with an all 50+ crew. In any case, I couldn’t snap a pic of her without her beating me within an inch of my life so you’ll just have to use your imagination on this but trust me, she was the real deal.

We pulled into Toronto and had to hop over to Terminal 2 to board for the States. Terminator 2 is more like it as it was desolate of any real form of life. That is until we got through customs and saw what was waiting for us.

200 screaming kids, teens, and burnt out surfers all heading home for the holidays.

Oh god.

My brain started to melt and if I wasn’t in an airport, I was going to scream bloody blue murder and kill everyone of the little buggers on the spot (especially the 10 year old who kept insisting on “skating” by with her stupid roller runners). Not only that, we hunted desperately for some semblance of reality called the internet. Yeah, we found it. A lonely terminal that you had to slip a credit card into and use their keyboard and monitor. With no chair in sight.

What the hell is wrong with Toronto?

I’m originally from the greater T.O. area and moved out to Cowtown a lot more years ago than I want to admit. At least in Calgary we could get WiFi through Telus (for a price). In Toronto, nothing. Not even a blip. A vast wasteland of emptyness. This is superior western technology? Someone needs to right some wrong in Terminal 2.

Like I said the room and hotel is fantastic as we mow down on some late night cheesecake and pepsi however there is one complaint. The internet connection blows Grand Cypress chunks. Not only did I have to pay $30 bucks for 5 days worth of connctivity, but my Flickr upload tool doesn’t seem to work, RSS Bandit is choking on a few simple tasks, and I fear I’m not going to be able to upload this posting using BlogJet. It’s a direct connection in the room, but there’s some wonky proxy setup which is just screwing with everything here. At least they’ll have a connection down in the conference for us, but I need to get some work done in my room so I’m just going to be grumbling all week about it.

I’m uploading all the pics from the trip to my Flickr site and tagging the conference pics with “devconnections” so feel free to do the same and let me know. Maybe we should get a public pool going.

Anyways, pushing the 20+ hour mark means it’s bedtime for bonzo so we’ll be back in the morning with pics of all the little Disneyites and that process we call conference registration.

You can keep up to date on the goings on at the DevConnections blog here (and of course tune in to my blog, same bat time same bat RSS channel).