With Microsoft TechEd less than a month away I am getting a lot more mail and e-mail (mostly e-mail) from various vendors asking me to visit them. I have come to expect this and I know it will only get worse until about 2 weeks after the event when they will have figured out that if I wanted to talk to them I would have. Intermingled in the marketing e-mails are some that I acutally enjoy reading. So here are 2 of my favorites (so far):

Abstract: Credit Suisse Group is a leading global financial services company, providing clients with investment banking, private banking and asset management services worldwide. Like in most enterprises, Credit Suisse provided their developers with physical machines for development. Issues such as combination of authorization, physical delivery times and compliance-related workflows led to slow development timeframes. Their R&D group built an extremely extensible self-service virtual-machine provisioning system that enables software developers in a fraction of the time to easily, securely and rapidly provision on-demand disposable workstations, servers, and multi-tier environments. Credit Suisse will exponentially increase software developer productivity, drastically lower IT costs and ensure compliancy with continuously stringent regulatory requirements. The solution uses Windows Workflow Foundation , Windows Communication Foundation , and Virtual Server .

Speaker: Leslie Muller (Architect - Credit Suisse Global R&D)

Location: Thursday 6/15/2006 from 10:15-11:30 in Theatre 2

This one caught my eye because I have spent countless hours creating Virtual PC images to be ready for one demo or another. If I can use this same technique to cut that time down it might actually leave more time for things like blogging.

The other e-mail that I like is more along the lines of trivia:

In case anyone would like to throw an event the size of TechEd 2006, here is an idea of the quantity of food and drink that would be consumed.

-          1,250,000 pieces of "Mikes & Ikes " will be consumed over the course of a week at Tech Ed 2006

-           18,750 pounds of salad will be prepared and offered at meals

-          83,700 ice cream novelty/ fruit and yogurt bars have been ordered for this function

-          60,000 eggs will be eaten by attendees at breakfast (this is equal to 4,800 dozen cartons of eggs)

-          It will take 4 semis to transport the 150,000 bottles of water consumed on this show

-          The total amount of fruit ordered will fill 3/4 of full size tractor-trailer

-          1.6 million ounces of coffee will be poured and consumed (conservative estimate)

-          More than 50,000 pounds of carbohydrates will be consumed at Tech*Ed (Atkins who?)

-          1,500 table cloths will be used and re-set on a daily basis:   (7,500 for the week)

-          A minimum of 2,000 antacid tablets are likely to be consumed at this event