Delta Engine Blog

Today the MVP Summit actually started and I had to move from Seattle to Bellevue. Weather was pretty nice today, not really warm, but it was not raining, there was no fog and the sun was shining.

Looking outside my Seattle hotel window for the last time. Weather is pretty good tdoay.

I checked out from the Holiday Inn and took a cab to Bellevue to register for the MVP Summit and then go to my new hotel.

One last look at Seattle, good bye. I will only see Bellevue from now on and finally depart on Saturday at Seattle Airport.

Going to Bellevue means going over the big floating bridge, which is usually full of traffic. Luckily for me rush hour is over and the ride was pretty quick (otherwise it can take 30 minutes or more just to get over the bridge).

The sky was looking pretty cool out here.

The taxi driver kept talking about all kind of stuff (I better go not too much into details here, he was kinda crazy ^^). Here he was explaining to me how rich people are on average that live at this side of Bellevue.

After about 25 minutes I reached the Hyatt Hotel, where I won't be staying, but here the MVP Summit registration took place. I got my conference badge, a nice shirt, a bag and a drinking bottle. Free swag is always cool, but I heard some MVPs complaining about having too much MVP logos on the free swag sometimes ^^

I had some free time to visit some of the side sessions, but apart from a Codeplex talk there wasn't much interesting things going on. I read my emails, watched some VODs and played a little Fallout 3 on my netbook (which runs great by the way, many other games are not so good).

A quick look outside the window. Time to get to my new hotel and get some lunch ..

The weather outside was still great and I eat a baguette from Subway and ran around in Bellevue a bit.

Pretty nice area to live here, a little loud, but everything looks so new.

The buildings here and the whole downtown of Bellevue are quite new. Pretty amazing skyscrapers if you ask me:

Some shops in a fancy building.

This is still the same building ..

Okay, enough walking around. Time to go to my new hotel and meet my new roommate.

A quick view outside the window of my new room. The highway across the parking space looks really loud, but I did not hear it, neither at the day time nor at night, which was pretty cool.

And this is my new roommate Otto from Hungary. Pretty nice guy. Sorry for the bad picture.

After some relaxing and surfing via the incredible slow internet at the hotel it was time to go to the Hyatt hotel again for the MVP Summit keynote.

This is were I meet several other XNA MVPs. You can see Richard, Catalin, Andy (Z-Man) and George in this picture from back to front. I probably should have met with all the German MVPs too, but I stayed with the XNA guys all evening.

The keynote was about to start. Sorry, I cannot take any pictures from any content of this MVP Summit, everything is highly confidential and under NDA.

The keynote was kinda boring, not because of the content, but more because the speakers were a little slow and IMO there wasn't enough jokes and fun stuff sprinkeled in like in past years. After the keynotes and welcome speeches it was time to move over to the welcome area.

Lots of free beer, let the evening begin. There was also food, but I wasn't very hungry and only ate a small hamburger and some cake.

More XNA MVPs found us and the group became bigger.

Andy was telling stories as usual, but it was also great to meet up with the rest of the guys again and exchange stories and what happened over the year.

More pictures from the XNA group.

The bar was being disassembled, which isn't a good sign. Time to move to a new location. Especially the UK and Irish MVPs were suggesting going to the Irish pub on the other side of the street, which we of course did.

A quick picture from our long walk across the street.

Here you can see the UK XNA guys ready to cross the street.

We finally reached the Irish Pub and are enjoying our first beer here (additionally to the beers we had already of course).

Lots of different beers here. We tried of course several different ones.

Looking at my glass. Not a good sign ^^

An hour or two later some more XNA MVPs came by and joined us. More beer and I was already pretty drunk (I am not as trained as those other guys).

Time to go home now, it is pretty late, 8am on my europe clock, which is 11pm here.

One last look at Bellevue, I just fell into my bed once I reached the hotel. The next day my head was brumming a little, but I guess I still had a good night sleep, which was very much required.

The last thing I recorded this day was this police car at night: