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So DEC 2008 is now wrapped up.

My overall comments at the moment… boy am I tired…. Chicago to SE Michigan is not like driving down to the corner store… Couple that with staying out to about 1 AM at some small dive bar called the Double Door listening to an amazing 80’s tribute band called Hair Banger’s Ball. They were truly VERY good. If you are in the Illinois or Indiana areas… go see them if you like 80’s hair metal… Poison, Ratt, GnR, Danzig, Van Halen, Ozzie, as well as Pat Benatar and others. Awesome, best entertainment item of any DEC yet.

As expected, met a bunch of new friends, caught up with a bunch of old friends, had a lot of good conversations.

Dean and joe Show went well according to everyone I unofficially polled. However who is going to tell me it sucked even if it did? Don’t know why someone wouldn’t tell me it sucked or I sucked, but most people don’t seem willing to say what they really think about things… I can handle it people… If the roles are reversed I would certainly give my opinion. Dean put on another show on Wednesday morning at 8AM, thereby causing him to have to miss the cool tribute band the night before… He was not thrilled about that, let me tell you… No not at all… Dean’s presentation was continuing on the material we had from our show plus some other stuff that didn’t make the cut into our first deck. Everyone seemed please as punch that was there. I was there for it, my voice was mostly gone from helping the tribute band sing the songs but I was there to show support and keep Dean honest. 🙂  I am looking forward to seeing the surveys for the sessions. There was a lot of talk about why why why didn’t you present again with Dean – you were good! It isn’t that I thought I was bad and shouldn’t present with Dean, I honestly don’t think much about if I was good or not. It is mostly a comfort thing, Dean loves it up there in front of everyone, that isn’t my preferred means of communication by any stretch.  I can’t actually relax and enjoy myself when I know I have that to do as I keep going over it over and over in my mind and then completely don’t use anything I am thinking about when I actually do it. Putting me up on a stage with bright lights so I can’t see people in a room too big for people to feel comfortable talking back makes it even worse.

 

Overall conference comments. There were a lot of complaints I was hearing about the hotel – the Chicago Hilton. A lot of complaints on the heat not working well, people being cooked out of their rooms even though they set the thermostat to like 65. Dean had that issue too when I walked into his room on Saturday. I was like, yeah it is warm and opened the window… He said… “Oh”. I guess being from a very southern part of Florida it doesn’t come immediately to mind to open the window to cool a room down. Welcome to the midwest in winter… 🙂

My personal complaints were that the light switch at the door controlled the socket that everything you didn’t want turned off was connected to. Like for instance the network hub, the refrigerator, the electrical socket for my laptop, etc. Dumb Dumb Dumb. I also was not pleased with all of the nickel and diming that was going on and the outright robbery of $50 for a 14″ pizza, coke and coffee from room service…. That was all over the place including even at the bag check… that should be complimentary for conference attendees; they spent enough on the rest. I am surprised we weren’t charged to use the elevators as well.  My parking alone cost something like $45 a day, sheesh. I won’t get into Dean’s other room issues other than to say they were substantial and he is a Diamond Hilton member. There was also a problem with the size of the rooms, if you walked in and turned around, you saw it all. Roughly the room was the size of the bathroom at the Red Rock in Vegas and they took up a big portion of it with a big screen CRT TV. I didn’t even have room to pull out the suitcase holder thing and put my suitcase on it. Now the bathrooms of course were even more tiny, you had to be careful or else you could use the toilet and bath at the same time though maybe that would be good for efficiency sake. Oh something else is that the common area rooms just weren’t big enough with high enough ceilings… I know that sounds a bit weird or picky, but they are great for conferences like DEC where a lot of the value is in chatting with others. It just got too loud too fast (lower ceilings) and the rooms were too small to really get people to do the giant circle of friends chatting that I think really sets DEC apart from other conferences. Oh yeah another thing, the soda’s seemed to be tough to get a hold of. That was a trifle annoying.

I can’t for sure say that the slide deck from Dean and my presentation helped at all, but I hear the next DEC will be back in Vegas… CHEER. Vegas is truly prepared for that kind of event. I hear it can’t be Red Rock which disappoints me to a great extent but heard it may be Green Valley which is good too. I also wouldn’t mind Mandalay Bay as that is a nice place too. Red Rock is by far, BY FAR, my choice though. Here are some pics from our slide deck to show how we pointed out our concern for Chicago…

 

First picture, just your average day at the Red Rock Resort in Vegas and your average day in Chicago…

 

 

Our lovely Aussie friend Katherine choking a chicken in Vegas and a Chicken choking in Chicago with absolutely no help from Kat.

 

 

All of us after a nice meal in Vegas and all of us wondering if we will be eaten in Chicago…

 

 

And because people wanted to know who they could voice their concerns too and Dean and I are so helpful…

 

 

Hehe. Dean and I got a kick out of making the slides. I started coming up with those ideas whilst sitting next to the pool back at the Red Rock at DEC 2007. You can ask anyone who was near me as I was specifically taking pictures to use for the next slide deck…. I heard Gil wasn’t smiling too big when that last slide there went up. I hope he is smiling now, it is all in fun, you CANNOT do something like this that is so easy to make sarcastic fun of and NOT expect Dean and I to respond. You will get us every time… We are weak in that way, if we see a chance for Humour… by gosh we will take it…

 

The whole slide deck will go up in the near term for people to look at. Probably a PPS because you want to play it, not skip through the slides, we have lots of animation and fun in there. Also the scripts Dean showed off will be made available. 🙂

 

 

The MSFT folks, as always were great. I was severely disappointed not to see ~Eric and Dmitri (shame on MSFT for not sending them) but it was good to see the likes of Stuart Kwan (of the Ottawa Kwan Clan), Nathan Muggli, Robert Deluca, Brian Puhl, Moon (do I really need to use the last name? I mean how many Moons have you met in the DS group), and many of the others again. I will see them all again in a month at the MVP summit which is great. I have to point out very specially that Moon was great on this trip. I have to admit that on the last MVP Summit she rubbed us DS MVPs the wrong way in her PPT presentation. I won’t go into details but a lot of MVPs were not happy. Well I am happy to say she is very different in how she projects herself now. I would say the way I saw here the last few days is how she really is versus what we saw at the summit. I truly enjoyed talking to her about the issues we see in the OS. Also she was wearing some rockin green tennis shoes, I believe Converse Chuck Tailor All Stars but I didn’t look too close. I don’t know about you but I am sick to death of PC Business Casual attire. Why do we have a bunch of automatons running around? In part it is because we make them dress that way. People need to dress how they like and other people need to get over it. I mean I am not thrilled in seeing spandex on an 80 year old but hey, if that makes them happy… I can close my eyes. 🙂

 

Stuart came up with the traditional Wook challenge only Wook wasn’t around again so now it has become the Wook Memorial Challenge. The challenge was to get a picture of me (yes me, joe) for some reason and make a movie poster out of it with something to do with Active Directory. Stuart had 1000 people in the room to choose and he picked me, the person who least likes having his picture taken LOL. Well since Wook wasn’t there the challenge gauntlet was picked up by Pam Dingle, Sean Deuby, Laura Hunter , Joe Kaplan (yes the other Joe programmer), Adam Greene, Aaron Steele, and Chris Lowde. The result both amuses and scares me… It includes me as well as Dean, Princess, Stuart, and cameos by Guido Grillenmeier and Wook. Here is what they came up with…

 

 

Hmm lets see what else… Oh yes, nicknames were popular again this year… We have some new ones. You will recall the old ones

• Dean – Dean-3po
• Me – R2-Joe-2
• Gil – Gil’bacca  (emphasis on the second syllable)
• Jorge – Princess Horr-hay

And this year Dean gave up his Dean-3po so we could do

• Darren Mar-Elia (the GPO Guy) – 3-GPO

So then Dean was given

• Emperor Palpa-Dean

And then the new ones

• Stuart Kwan – Qui-Gon Kwan
• Nathan Muggli – Darth Muggli
• Pamela Dingle – Queen Ama-Dingle

We also gave a nickname to Eric (not Fleischman) but I can’t recall his last name… He didn’t remember that Princess had the nickname Princess so we named him Ewok so he would remember better next DEC.

 

The especially astute will likely work out that there is a pattern to the naming standard being used…

 

I am very sorry to say I didn’t really get a chance to see many presentations. A lot of it was busy talking to Microsoft and the attendees about things and meeting people in general. In particular Monday was dead for both Dean and I because we were too busy working on ours. Difficult to work on something like that across the internet; you want to see each others expressions etc. Tuesday I got to see Stuart’s keynote which was great though that is when the Wook challenge got thrown down. Also saw Nathan speak on RODCs in branch office scenarios. Both Dean and I picked up one or two things we hadn’t heard before but that isn’t surprising, Nathan has forgotten more about RODC than anyone else knows yet, that is part of being the PM for the product… Also attended the birds of a feather session for AD on Tuesday. That turned out well but didn’t start well, there was no organization other than theres a room, go in and talk. I spent most of the time at a table with Dean, Sean, Ulf, and Moon chatting about issues we saw that should be fixed like making all dialog boxes sizeable… I hate few things more than having 2 large monitors and a dialog box that comes up with a ton of info but is tiny because of my resolution and I can’t expand it to see all of the info. On Wednesday I only got to attend the Directory Services Chalk Talk which was a good conversation right up until we hit the every present age old Prune/Graft request and then all hell broke loose in the room and we didn’t move forward for 30 or so minutes…

One thing that came out of that discussion though was the ABSOLUTE WITHOUT A SINGLE DOUBT STATEMENT FROM MICROSOFT DIRECTORY SERVICES DEV TEAM THAT CLONING FORESTS IS AN EXTREMELY BAD IDEA – it isn’t just un-supported, it is actually dangerous. There was no hemming and hawing, there was no “it depends”, it was absolutely, positively, this is a bad thing… 

I keep telling people that is bad yet some people still recommend it and do it. Interestingly I most recently was fighting indirectly with MCS Canada over this because they wanted to do it for a company I know of. I was told by one of the higher up DS Services managers that this recommendation is documented somewhere, I just don’t know where. But let it be said that I saw the eyes popping out of the heads of all of the DS Team PM’s when cloning a forest was mentioned. If you get Dev to do that, you are not in a good place…

 

Ok this is far more than long enough for now. My thanks to my friends Christine, Stella, and Gil and the others from NETPRO for having me out to present. I did indeed have fun even though it was in Chicago and I very much enjoyed meeting everyone I got to meet and seeing people I have met before. I loved all of the stories of how people are using AdFind, AdMod, OldCCMP, and all of the other joeware utilities. I heard stories of my utilities working to make modifications to hundreds of thousands of users and saving the admins involved a ton of time, that makes me very happy.

 

Anyway, enough for now. When I am ready I will post some more.

 

    joe