It’s the end of Day Two at TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles. I’m sitting here in my hotel room eating some dinner and catching up for the first time in a few days on some work and e-mails that I haven’t had the time to do since arriving at TechEd.

So far, it’s been a good two days. I’ve already taped two TechEd Online sessions (a panel, and a tech talk – both on clustering). The panel discussion, Planning a Windows Deployment for SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering, was just posted today and it came out well. It features Steven Ekren who is on the Windows Development team for clustering, Max Verun from the SQL Server development team, and myself. You can view the panel at: http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=6f3925e1-4b83-4f13-bb5f-4d69741916cb. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, and I hope you find it useful.

Speaker Idol is a lot of fun to judge; today was my first time sitting in this year’s competition (I did last year and was supposed to judge yesterday, but something came up). I’ll be judging the final two heats (tomorrow and Thursday) as well as the finals on Thursday night. Being a judge is also difficult. Everyone really is good, and the difference between the winner, runner up, and anyone else is usually pretty small. One or two things are usually the difference. Come the finals, it’ll be fun to see if the finalists incorporated any of our feedback, or just do what got them there. There is no right or wrong on that one. If you’re at TechEd, come by the Yellow TLC Theater at noon to see the final two rounds.

I’m also spending a lot of time in the DAT booth – more than I’m scheduled. Honestly, I really do enjoy interacting with everyone and answering questions. For those of you who have come by already, thanks! I hope you got as much out of it as I do talking with you. I’ll be there all week (although Friday AM I’ll be in the uprgade section, not the mission critical/HA one). Feel free to drop by. I will say this – it doesn’t matter how comfortable your shoes are. If you’re on your feet all day, you do feel it when you sit down and finally relax for a few minutes.

That’s the quick update. I hope to see more of you these next few days.