A couple of hours after checking into my hotel on the Hong Kong waterfront, fireworks started going off outside...the real kind. Turns out I'd arrived on China National Day and the streets outside were closed because crowds had gathered to watch the fireworks display at the harbour. 56th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. I hussled myself outside to watch. Quite an amazing show.

Luckily for me I'd arrived before the streets were shut down. But after having been here earlier this year, I could have got here, open streets or not, on the excellent subway that gets to within a quarter mile or so of the hotel. It's always easier to find your way around the second time.

Tomorrow starts the pre-con for TechEd Hong Kong, which promises to be quite an event. If you haven't registered yet, you might consider it. See previous post about me, pre-cons, and too much material. Be prepared. I have some breakout sessions too, that ought to bring the pre-con material overflow down.

There's even quite a bit of new material since I was in Hong Kong last. Some folks see this as a "churn problem" with the feature list of SQL Server 2005. Ha. I see it as indicative of the immense number of features and countless hours of development. Kimberly has two slides that come to mind; SQL Server 2000 new features (a very dense slide with feature bullet points about 80-100 features) and SQL Server 2005 new features, where she has to bring the font size down about 6 points to fit them all in, almost 2-3 times as many features.

See you there.