Well, the SharePoint APAC Conference is done and dusted, and both Pete and myself really enjoyed it. Well worth the money that the company paid. ;)

Mabster doing the Can-Can Last night's conference dinner was a real event. I expected to turn up to a series of trestle tables and a choice of beef or chicken, but instead they put on a real show. The ballroom at the Hilton was decked out with poker, blackjack and roulette tables, and we were each given $10,000 in fake money to play during dinner. They had a bunch of folks dressed up in a wild-west theme, including a series of can-can girls who managed to get me up on stage to dance with 'em at the start of the night. Pete snapped a photo or two on his phone. You can see one of 'em here, and the other over on Pete's blog.

We kicked off the evening playing roulette, which was heaps of fun but not exactly profitable. Whilst playing, I was surprised to hear my name called out over the microphone. I'd won a prize as part of the random draw! A pair of Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 headphones. Not bad at all!

We then blew the rest of our chips on the Hold 'em Poker table, which was a blast. Let's put it this way:

  • The two of us combined had fewer chips than any other single person on the table
  • I suck at the game
  • Pete had never played it before nor seen it played

You can imagine how long we lasted. The highlight of that game, and perhaps of the entire trip, was Pete's exalted outburst of "TWO PAIR!" when the river card revealed two pairs in the flop. That is to say, everyone had that same two pair. It was a deliberate joke, but I turned to water and nearly had an aneurysm from laughing.

Today's sessions were again of the high standard set by yesterday. We saw two great sessions by Mike Fitzmaurice about the search architecture of SharePoint 2007. Really gave us some great ideas about where to take our current implementation.

Back to work tomorrow. Post again later!