This particular PDC was considerably less interesting for me than last year. I have marched in more parades than I care to remember. They are too far along to announce much new and exciting, and too far from the end to really get excited about actually putting the product in customers' eager hands. It is also easier to teach people how to program an upcoming product than it is how to administer this product because a set of API's have been published. Showing them how to administer a product which has yet to deployed is a great deal harder because the sysadmin discipline is one often based on learning from experience.
Nobody can know the ship dates.
This year system administration stuff was covered in a track, but it wasn't as ascendent as last year. To accommodate, two tracks took place mostly in a theater hidden away a block or two from the main center. Too much trudging. I was hoping not to have to carry as many Lithium ions as usual on to the plane. The travel agent said that the planes I was traveling on supposedly had power on certain rows, and I believed it.