submitted directly from the conference floor via wireless ethernet.. 🙂 that’s the power of wireless i guess..
we entered barcelona after a refreshing flight with sensational view over the alps around 10. after checking into the hotel we went to the conference center where we were greeted by bunches of geeks sitting on the floor, huddled over their notebooks or their newly acquired geek toys (aka compaq ipac).

we were handed a monstrous conference backpack in bright yellow. the backpacks were just too offensive for our visual cortexes so we had to dispose them soon afterwards. we queued to get a hot new compaq ipac with a wireless ethernet card. soon afterwards we were successfully checking into the abstrakt portal. does this rule or what. somewhat relieved and with our ipacs we headed back to the hotel to chill out and play with the ipacs.

although they have a high coolness factor and it was great fun playing around with them we concluded that using the analog conference schedule still beats the online version by a lot in regard to usability. besides, the paper version does not forget your notes after a reset. after hunger sent us out to fetch some food (we found some selection of tapas) we headed back to the conference for a special student welcome dinner. microsoft must have taken a page from other conferences since we were greeted by nice hostesses. what a contrast to all these shy geeks.. unfortunately though there were not too many female geeks around, as had to be expected.
we were then driven to a restaurant and a large buffet was quickly consumed. we shared the table with 2 guys from cambridge who are working as microsoft consultants during summer break. they are currently implementing voice over ip application over gprs using the compaq ipac. to our great amusement they were avid slashdot regulars and the rest of the evening was thus spent in merry geek lore. topics ranged from umts to the singularity to debian installs. in short, a very refreshing discussion. we were then
advised as to what sessions out of the 264 we should attend. clearly there will be some hard choices to be made as some interesting sessions collide.
after we were handed a fancy schmancy jacket in brightest yellow (we kept it because it looked kinda neat for a change) we were dismissed and spent the rest of the evening catching up with various projects each of us had been silently advancing. barcelona is one heck of a nice city by night.
so many decent places to hang out.

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