Ask the experts went great. Replicaiton, OLAP (virtual cubes), sp_ recompile, and Yukon ship dates (don't ask)

We went out for SQL Hera's birthday, but she was lame and went home early before we went to the nighclub.  Went to Punjabi night club and danced for 2 hours straight with Goksin and Sanjay. I am 6 tequila shots in, Malek is an evil man.

2 sessions tomorrow...

Day 1 of TechEd Malaysia went off without a hitch. SQL Hera, Kimberly Tripp, did a 7.5 hour precon while the rest of us took the morning off and visited the Batu Caves, amazing 1,000 foot long limestone stalagmite/tite cave that were used by Hindus as a temple. An amazing thing to think about is the natural cathedial that formed in the caves and the Hindus put in the statues. We had to walk up over 275 steps and jump over ravenous monkeys to get in.

There was also a Hindu god that had a cow with boobs. Pretty cool stuff.

After an authentic Malaysian lunch at a local dive we headed to the Chinese Buddhist temple. Quite an amazing place. I lit some incense and also washed my face with holy water for luck. I also received a fortune with Chinese fortune sticks.

After this fun it was back to the conference center. My first session (1 of 5) is tomorrow.

Been traveling in Asia for a 10 days without Internet but now in KL for TechEd 2004!

My office mate, Bob Plummer is keeping a blog of the protests:

http://www.columbiatribune.com/2004/Sep/20040902Feat001.asp

Yup, huge in Japan.

I have a Motorola MPX 200 SmartPhone. AT&T sucks-ass and will only sell the phone with the SmartPhone 2002, quite possibly about as good an experience as airplane food. The next version is out, but AT&T refuses to sell it until its MPX 200 inventory is all sold out.

I got one anyway on eBay figuring I can flash it to SmartPhone 2003 at TechED or the MDC. Wrong. AT&T told Motorola to stop flashing the phones so people won’t upgrade. Well someone got pissed off and put the software to flash the phone up on the internt and my buddy the Toy Boy Richard Campbell downloaded it and gave it to me before it went away.

I pluged in my phone to my laptop and ran the software. It flashed to SmartPhone 2003 without incident.

Now I have two illegal phones that I did not buy from AT&T Wireless.

There was a party for the Regional Directors and the Microsoft Developer Evangelists on Friday night and let me say that it was epic.

It was on a boat. This was no ordinary boat. After they fed us and opened the bar, a DJ and go-go dancers started to rev us. Clemens and I pulled up chairs and pretty much held court.

Then they announced there would be a belly dancer. They started to play Turkish music. Then building on the RD belly dancing traditions (me in Cairo and Clemens in Casablanca), Goksin Bakir decided to get up and dance. He was GOOD. Unfortunately they asked him to stop and the real belly dancer got up and started.

While that was all fun and games (and Clemens and I still holding court, but now about 8 or 9 beers later), the DJ decided to play some awesome Punjabi remixes and that got fellow RD Sanjay Shetty and I on the dance floor pretty hard core. (It has been almost a year since I learned to dance to Punjabi music in India.) We danced our brains out. SQL Hera also got down with Goksin, Michelle and I.

Richard Campbell did his weekly Toy Boy bit for .NET Rocks via Cell Phone on the boat as we passed Bill Gates house. I was too drunk and drooling over the belly dancer to participate.

Hours later (and buckets of sweat later too), the boat docked (and I headed to the airport for a redeye back to New York.)

See the team at TechEd in Kula Lumpur in a few weeks!

A report from the front lines at the meeting on campus this week.

First Kimberly Tripp, aka the SQL Goddess, is mad at Clemens and I that we have dubbed her the SQL Goddess and now via the power of Google, she is now known as the SQL Goddess. So I decided to start call her SQL Hera (with the Olympics and all). But I need you help. Google works with links so you all have to link to her and use the term SQL Hera in your blogs and such so Google will pick it on up. So here is the deal: SQL Hera, SQL Hera, SQL Hera, SQL Hera. Put it in your blog. Make a web page. Kimberly will love us all for it.

Who’s bed did you sleep in last night? That seems to be a common question at the meeting this week since we are all sharing rooms. Clemens and I are sharing a room but NOT a bed.

So today Jim Allchin made a major announcement saying that WinFS is being pulled from Longhorn. The real good news is that it will make Longhorn released in 2006 and MS will ship Avalon and Indigo for WinXP and 2003. This is pretty cool! But delaying WinFS is ok if it will make it right.