There are probably a slew of these being posted to various blogs, all linked from Techedbloggers, I assume, but I’ve got to throw mine up too.

As I take more photos, I’ll post more to the gallery.

Good session in general, though it disappoints me to no end that an MS MVP was pushing 2 3rd party tools to do security event collection with Microsoft Operations Manager. If MS was truly security minded, security event collection wouldn’t require individual admins to write regexs to identify and decode cryptic event details, there would be a team in Redmond that writes, tests and publishes everything you need to monitor security.

The 2 tools are MP Studio from Silect and Secure Vantage‘s Control Management Pack.

Of course, any evaluation of MOM requires that we be using it first, not something we’re doing now.

I’m sitting through an Exchange 2003 Clustering session now, not that I think Housing will ever need it, but there isn’t much else during this timeslot that I can imagine being needed.

The flight to Boston was smooth, my bag beat me here. They got on the 10:xx am flight and I got on the 11:45 flight. I’m always generous with connecting flights, you just never know coming out of CMI.

Got to Logan International, walked outside looking for the standard “Airport Shuttle” stand, got hit up by someone in a random shuttle for transportation. He had my hotel name on the side window of the van, so it looked good. After loading up a couple more, he was asking someone on the sidewalk where they were headed, got something not on the side of the van…Up walked a Transit Authority cop, took the drivers tag and told him “If I see you on airport property again, I’m having you arrested”. That didn’t sound good. But, he got me and the 3 other passengers to our hotels just fine. Hopefully his returning passengers didn’t get him arrested.

The Boston area isn’t striking me as a good place to hold a convention, there are no hotels near the convention center. The shuttle service is about as good as can be expected with the terrible traffic that comes from a Sunday afternoon Red Sox game.

Check-in at the convention center was smooth as silk and now the nerds are grazing and queuing, waiting for the Sunday night keynote that starts in 35 min….

I think I’ll go grab another water, some more healthy snack food and join in the waiting.