Another TechEd

TechEd is Microsoft’s largest conference of the year. This year it’s in Orlando and has about 13,000 attendees. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday afternoon on “SQL Server Performance Benchmarking & Monitoring”. Doesn’t that sound like the most interesting thing you’ve ever heard of? One of the things that I do indeed enjoy about TechEd is that I get to catch up with a number of friends who I only seem to see at the big conferences.

There are times when I’m really excited about travel. It had better be, since it’s such a big part of my job. Lately, though, it’s all I can do to keep up the pace. I’m totally burnt out on travel. Every trip seems to leave me feeling more threadbare and drained.

Here’s an illustration of what I mean. Look at this picture in the upper right corner. Can you tell where in the world I’m at? Hell no, you can’t. No imagine seemingly endless days of that. Exhausting!

On the other hand, I did get to go to Montreal a couple weeks ago to meet up with my colleagues on the PASS board of directors. It’s always good to see these folks and catch up. Of course, visiting time didn’t last long because we had a lot of PASS business to conduct. But it was a nice visit, all things considered.