[MVP Summit 2011] - 3 Minutes & 23 hours
It is amazing how much can change in 3 minutes—this was the learning from the 1st day of MVP Summit 2011. I arrived in Seattle with Rudi Grobler for MVP Summit after 23 hours of travelling, which is frankly just ridiculous.
During that time, I did a lot of thinking and reading (thank god for my Kindle), but shortly after arriving in a VERY cold Seattle, I had my first 3-minute mind change. I walked out of the lovely SEATAC airport and saw snow! I got like a kid with snow, but within 3 minutes, the cold was just too much and the appeal of the snow wore off 😊
One of the things we did was head to the awesome Microsoft Store—this place is just fantastic. They have so much in there, but so little feels like a store. It really feels like a place to go and experiment and play with Microsoft tech: there are Kinect stations, Microsoft Surfaces, tablets & laptops running Windows 7, and a variety of Windows Phone 7 devices.
25022011482 by Robert MacLean, on Flickr
The 3-minute lesson here is from the store people—having super friendly and knowledgeable staff really means that it is so much better and easier to buy there. I hope that this fantastic learning in the consumer space is the start of something more at Microsoft.
Finally, we hit a place called The Parlor for some beer & pool and ran into a Microsoft Team (WinSE—suspect is second edition, since they had a service pack 1 disk "SE" = Sustained Engineering), just guessing, but I think it was their ship party.
25022011492 by Robert MacLean, on Flickr 
25022011493 by Robert MacLean, on Flickr
After some pool—where Rudi kicked my ass until another friend, Rein Hillman, arrived (which is when I fought back fantastically)—we left, and I had my final 3-minute lesson: walking with your hands in your pockets (because it is cold) means you need to use something else to stop your fall, and your face doesn’t work well.
26022011497 by Robert MacLean, on Flickr
Update: Thanks to Chris Johnson for telling me what SE meant.