The last day of Tech Ed is always kind of sad. A lot of folks fly out early on Friday.
Greg and I got a RunAs interview with Kim Tripp and Paul Randal, two dear friends of mine. It was very hard to get serious enough to actually get through the interview, it was another big laugh fest.
With Speaker Idol over, our schedule wasn't quite as tight, but at noon we were still back at the Community Lounge one last time for two events - the last passport draw and a reprise of the 64 Bit Question.
Since it was the last day of the show, we offered to give away as much swag as people had left over... and they delivered. When we arrived at the Community Lounge the place was buried in swag. Greg and I spent a good half hour just doing inventory.
In the end we were able to collate a dozen bundles of prizes for the 64 Bit Question. Every contestant got a copy of Vista Ultimate, Office 2007 Professional and an MS Press Book. One contestant won an HTC Touch! Beyond that, there was dozen of t-shirts, extra conference bags, Microsoft mice, pens, notebooks... it was literally a large table covered in stuff.
When the 64 Bit Question was over, we ran over to the table and started throwing things to the audience. They helped themselves as well. In minutes, everything was gone.
And the conference, more or less, was over. At least for us. We started making our goodbyes.
Its astounding how many people it takes to run a conference of this size. Saying goodbye and thanking the folks we worked directly with took a couple of hours.
We got back to the hotel relatively early, but we weren't done yet - Greg and I had invitations to the Speakers Party!