Woohoo! I'm in the plus column! I came in second during poker last night, and won $55. That covered the $20 I lost at poker the night before. Also, I won $8.50 playing blackjack at the $5 table. Yay!

Phew. Sorry I haven't been posting much, but today was the big keynote demo practice day. It was, ah, entertaining.

I started with a one-hour session with Richard, speaker trainer to the stars. I got through my demo three times. The first two were flat, and I knew it. Richard told me that I had to be "faster, louder, funnier", and that did it. My third time through was awesome. I totally nailed it and it felt so good.

From there it was to the keynote room. Then it was waiting, waiting, and more waiting. And then waiting a bit more. There was lots of crew setup going on, and after a while they were ready for each of us to do a runthrough for cues. We didn't actually babble all our regular babble, we just went to places in the demo where we had to show audio, video, or swap between a wolfvision and the PC. We did that twice. Then we waited some more.

At around 5pm (I think) we were able to do a complete runthrough, back to back, in the order of the demos. The gremlins came out *laugh*. My app deployment didn't work because I botched the PC pre-setup before I went on stage. Seth's machine hung twice while trying to use intellisense. Mike ran long, and Ford didn't have devices under the wolfvision properly. To be honest, it was great we had so many things go wrong. It gave us a chance to try all our backup plans, and to get over the hump of being worried. After our issues, nothing can scare us anymore.

Now we're sitting in the back room waiting for Bill. He's supposed to show up soon, and we'll do a quick demo with him, and then we're done for the night. Casting call is tomorrow at 6:30 am. Yoinks.

I am not much of a gambler; I really don't need to throw cash away at slots or random blackjack tables. However, playing poker is kind of fun. I SUCK at it, but it's fun :)

I brought my Costco set of poker chips with me, and last night 5 of us played two games in James's room. I'm officially down $20 so far this trip. Oh well.

Part of the keynote demo involves taking a photo of a restaurant. Since I won't have a physical restaurant handy on-stage, I figure I can take a photo of a photo of a restaurant insetad. The PR folks at Mandalay Bay had a CD of high-res images of rm seafood waiting for me when I checked in, and yesterday I had the fun of going down the strip to the local CVS to get a few printed at 8x10. It actually works really well, and looks great in the demo!

As I've mentioned a couple of times, I'm automating the demo to test it for bad mojo. The automation is actually taking much longer than I thought: I spend most of my time trying to dig through the humongous automation object model to find the things I need to drive the UI. But when it works it's SWEEEEEEEEEEEET.

I'm about 60% done with the automation at this point, and to be honest even if I don't get it done it's already paid off. The first part of the demo is where all the tricky bits are that could be flakey. I've run those parts over 100 times so far just while testing the automation out.

Another neat thing I did was I pulled together enough automation to write a little app that gets Visual Studio ready for the demo. It launches VS, opens the right project, makes sure all the right windows are opened, and pre-loads a few dialogs to make sure they're in memory and zippy during the live presentation. I used it several times today and it's great!

We did our regular Thursday dry run today. Pretty standard stuff, we're getting into the hang of things and it's flowing well now. The interesting part today was that one of the show producer guys was there to talk cameras, video displays, and whatnot. He watched everyone demo and took notes on when we'd need a camera guy on-stage (Mike needs this for his demo), and when we'd be showing live devices. He also made us all run through our back-up plans.

Believe it or not there will be a complete rehersal schedule for us in Vegas. I believe Monday morning we show up at the keynote room to set up all our equipment and computers backstage, and then from 2pm forward we do rehearsals with the full crew to try camera switches and whatnot. We'll also have failures thrown in to try out our back-up plans. I believe we'll do our first practice with Bill at 8:30 on Monday night.

We're in the middle of dry run number 1,002 (Seth is going through his demo now). James, the marketing guy who basically owns ALL of MEDC, including the keynote, does little intros for us before we do our dry run so we can get used to having to walk in after Bill says something. But James makes it goofy :) He's always messing around getting our names wrong on purpose, trying to throw us off. When he introduced Seth, he pretended Bill had just finished telling everyone that he'd bought a banana importing business!