Oh but Vegas is always a good time, and this was no exception.  Now that I’ve recovered from heavy partying by night and long floor walking by day I think I’ll update as to the happenings that went on.

First I got in on Sunday (with plans to leave Tue morning) only to find that the actual exhibition hall would not even be open until Tuesday @ 10am so needless to say that threw a bit of a monkey wrench in my plans.  Thankfully SWA doesn’t suck like most airlines and graciously (and free of charge) moved my flight to later Tuesday evening so that I could walk the exhibition floor.

Monday was a day where I had been hooked up with a free seminar pass and had chosen to go to the ‘Building a Enterprise Network Architecture’ which turned out to be a bunch of closed source consultants talking Micro$oft products and how awesome AT&T is.  So it wasn’t much help other than spying on what other people are having challenges with (M$ Server 2k8).

The exhibition hall yielded a welcoming surprise, for the first time that I can remember, Cisco was *NOT* the first booth.  Instead it was Foundry Networks!! Believing in open standards and disagreeing with proprietary protocols I was very very excited to see this.  Polycom got it right by bringing women from their Danish office to work their booth.

However the highlight to my visit was the incredibly amusing Micro$oft banners stating that Micro$oft was ‘Interoperability by Design’ *cough* yea… right… I guess if you say it.. it must be true?

-S