thomasnguyen.com blog

B A T E N O N N M

This was one of the weirdest and most interesting Vegas trips I’ve been on. From an awesome old wise Italian driver (Mike), to a blackjack dealer full of jokes (Peter), and even a waiter who sat with us for coffee (Thuong). “What’s the secret your marriage” -Ann “She smooths out the bumps in the road” -Mike, our Italian driver “I say ‘holy mccow’ because I’m Chinese. *awkward pause* If I’m Indian, I saw ‘holy cow’.” -Peter, the blackjack dealer

I would write the whole story, but you just had to be there to get the full effect. I’ll be adding more pictures as I go through them. It’s unfortunate that the Grand Canyon pictures (or any picture really). James put it right in his post about Washington, “I am small and insignificant“.

I had the great opportunity to attend the Microsoft Management Summit this year. Unlike last year, this year I’m staying at the Venetian, rather than the MGM.

My experience with this kind of event comes with much hesitance for me. I’m uncomfortable in an environment with a throng of people. Here’s a crazy fact about me: I learned the word “throng” from when I read Scarlet Letter. Many people in this case is about 2,500 people at booths and wandering around trying to sell stuff and ask for advice. It’s a sales thing, but the reason I’m going is for the sessions and to challenge my fears. I’m here to soak in all the information about new features as well as upcoming features for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and put myself in front of potential clients or just casual inquirers about our product line.

[Saturday]
I woke up in a mad dash to finish up washing clothes and packing. My flight was at 2:35 PM and I’m running around like crazy to get my things ready. After my last round of dried clothes are laid out on my bed, I make sure I have everything again and just in time to leave the house to head to the airport. I hate being a procrastinator.

Any way, I land, grab a little snack and met up with Kevin to wander around the strip. We picked up some drinks and checked out the Mirage’s new Volcano show. It’s freaking awesome. After little debating, we went to Wolfgang Puck. Everything was just freaking awesome.

[Sunday]

Work day. Enough said. The server room was in the bowels of the Venetian. After finding the command center, we went through a backdoor, downstairs to an elevator. After hopping off, we walked down through what looked like a service hallway. There was a door that required a key and that’s where we were, Floor .5. The Server room. Well after setting up our products to monitor the show’s network, I was eager to find a television to watch the Rockets play. We went to the AquaKnox and I sat myself directly in view of the game, awesome. it was the 4th quarter and all of the sudden everyone is standing up…NO!!! Well, good thing we just walked next door to some restaurant. We made a pitstop at the circle bar which is our typical meeting spot. Lavo was our last it stop for the night and for good reason. Waking up at 8:30 AM was not exciting. Thanks Coffee and Advil. Thanks a million.

[Monday]

I felt really queasy all day, but manageable. Before the Expo opened, we went to Grand Lux Cafe for small bite to eat. I had a small salad and maybe three spoonfuls of soup. Food wasn’t making me happy. The Expo was great, but like I said before this was something completely out of my comfort zone. Talking to wanderers who wanted to know general knowledge was nice, but the most fun was talking to the guys who wanted to know more about the product I actually develop. After the Expo closed, we went off to grab dinner at Pinot Brasserie. I was ready to pass out from hunger. By all means, I took care of the hunger.

[Tuesday]
The best session today was “Common Mistakes When Using Operations Manager and How To Avoid Them.” The speaker, Cameron Fuller from Catapult Systems, was very engaging: kudos to him. Tonight was a chill night with the Rockets. Too bad we lost, but its a home game coming up Thursday!

[Wednesday]
Sessions were good, but it seems like some speakers shouldn’t be speakers. I know I’d be horrible at it, so I know I’d never do it. Speakers need to learn to vocalize, hell it’s the most important thing to keep your audience awake. Good material can be presented in a monotone voice and makes it completely a bore. I also found it a little interesting that the speakers who loved to take in questions mid-sentence and interact with the audience to be the most effective. Other speakers who wanted to keep Q&A at the end seemed to be really focused, maybe a little too focused about what they were presenting rather than how the audience was taking it in. Any way, dinner with the company at David Burke was awesome. Thanks, Secure Vantage for taking care of us!

I finally hit the slots, up $30. Thanks to Wheel of Fortune and some random penny slots game I found interesting.

[Thursday]
NEVER have a cappuccino after dinner, EVER. I barely slept and was up at 4:00 AM for no reason. I tried going back to bed, but no success until around 6:00 AM. Today’s session was “Lousy Network Performance: Top 10 reasons the Network is Slow” by Laura Chappell. I’m definitely going to check out the tool she showed off, Wireshark. I’m also going to try it out on our network to see how we perform.

GO ROCKETS! Man, 12 years is a long time…

[Friday]

Last day and flight is at 6:25 PM. There are no shows during the day, so all we did was gamble and watch some sports. I was really glad to finally get out of there before I lost any more money.

This was my first event of this type, size and magnitude. When I read that the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) sold out for the first time and there was going to be about 4,000-5,000 people there, I didn’t know what to think. Yeah, it’s a lot, but seeing it live is a totally different story. It was a five day/four night event full of hands-on labs, sessions, q&a, and an expo in the Venetian for an IT summit and SecureVantage (SVT) was one of the sponsors.

After six months with SVT, I’ve learned more about our product suite and now I can give you sky-high view of what our company does, “it’s easy as 1-2-3″ (our sales pitch):

1. Security Management
Real-time alerting and health monitoring of Windows security events and group policy changes.
-Windows Security Auditor: Alerting, operations and knowledge guidance.
-Group Policy Auditor: auditing for changes and setting configurations.
-Security Management Dashboard: centralized console for alerting.

2. Security Auditing
Administration, archiving and reporting for Audit Collection Service (ACS).
-Audit Collection Admin: Console to administer ACS.
-Audit Collection Archiver: Solution for archiving and historical reporting.
-Audit Collection Base Reports: Forensic and IT audit reporting, filter lookups and dynamic grouping.
-Audit Collection SYSLOG Gateway: centralized syslog event collection and reporting with ACS.
-Security Auditing Dashboard: Centralized security console for Security Management and auditing solutions.

3. Security Compliance
Comprehensive regulatory knowledge and control mappings that deliver GRC-specific auditing and context sensitive alerting, knowledge guidance, operational views and security reporting.
Solutions: Compliance Management Packs, Audit Collection Compliance Reporting.
Libraries: CoBITs, DS484, FISMA, HIPAA, ISO 27002, PCI and SOX.
-Security Compliance Dashboard: IT Auditor and Executive Portal for GRC Summary Analysis.

Items in red are the items I’ve developed with the help of our team. It’s awesome to hear customer feedback, inquiries and stories while I was at the expo, especially when it’s about the product you’ve created.

NOTE: A few pictures coming soon…hold your horses.
Here are the few pictures I took.

Vegas: $20 on red. | “Be my wing man.” | Binion’s $5 steak, potato, and veggies. | Star Wars’ penny slots. | Ho Chi Minh’s sister. | “Because I have a PSP” | I’m up $5, cash out! | Roman P, you still in Vegas?

What I’ve missed out on:
Dustin got an AE-86, that whore.
Sohel uses insecticide to wash his car.
Christmas shopping…I should start, huh?
Having that special someone for the holidays.

Kashif, I did it: Monday evening through Thursday evening without a laptop! When I came back, first thing I did was pass out, but after I got up, I turned on my laptop to see what I missed:
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers
Insect/bug Macros
Evolution whispers some secrets