RoadTrip: Wellington

RoadTrip: Wellington 15 Feb 2008 12:53

Our last stop for the North Island was in sunny Wellington; Our collective home town and the biggest stop on the Road Trip at 250 people. We were all very much looking forward to this event, not only because it gave us a mid week stop back at home, but also because presenting to some usual faces is always a great boost as a presenter.

On the way back from Palmy North

We had a great venue lined up, the Paramount Theatre, definitly a novelty for us geek presenters who are more accustomed to a hotel setting :) Unfortunately on arriving at 12:30 for our 1:30 start we found that the crew there had forgotten just about everything - no tables, no projector, no projector cables and in this day and age who would believe it... NO POWER!

Thankfully we have become accustomed to such oversights after our "venue mixup" in Auckland, so we raided a few tables that were being used as pot plant holders; We sent Darryl and Mauricio down to the store to buy a 20m projector cable; We got lucky and found a projector up in the projection booth of the theatre (Who would have thought eh?) and luckily we had a long enough extention cord that we could run it from the lone power point that was burid deep backstage. Hey, it wouldnt be a Road Trip without such excitement eh? :) Anyway the show must go on, and on it did, with about 10 minutes to spare we had everything up and running and rearing to go.

All ready to go!

Kirk Jackson, Xero dev and the leader of the Wellington User Group joined us on stage for one of the best sessions of the trip. Kirk in particular sent the audience into hysterics in describing a "progressive Wellington" ... "the San Francisco of the South Pacific" :) Oh and he showed us some very useful tricks with Visual Studio as well ;)

Once again the spatial support in SQL Server 2008 seems to be one of the hottest topics, with our spatial querying demo being mentioned as one of the highlights in the feedback forms.

Darryl has some more info and pictures from the event on his blog as well, so check them out.

One thing worth noting for those who have attended the Road Trip so far or those who will be joining us soon, is that we will be posting all of the material from the Road Trip as a community resource following the events (and a week of so for us to get our feet back on the ground), so if you were particularly keen on some of the things we incorporated in the website then stay tuned..

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