Today was the first official day of the 2004 Global MVP Summit (registration and product fair). In general, not much happened today other than picking up our registration package and general networking (of the social variety) with other MVPs. There have been social gatherings, lunches, and dinners all over downtown Seattle the past two days as people were starting to get into town. I attended a lunch put together by Susan Bradley to take the Security MVP Lead out for all of his hard work in keeping us informed about the latest security bulletins, tools, and advisories (Thanks Susan!).

At the MVP Expo this evening, I ran into Scoble (nice horns! - I wish I took a picture of him), Doug Knox, Thomas Lee, Barb Bowman, and many many others. I also met Al Jarvi (aka Sooner Al) who is a fellow MVP who participates in the discussions in the work_remotely newsgroup for the first time tonight. I tried to take a few pictures tonight (more on this later), but unfortunately they didn’t turn out too well - I need a better camera for indoor pictures).

I spent the rest of today taking in more of the sights around downtown Seattle (I’ll have plenty of time for this, though, as I am up here in the PacNW until the 14th). I’m staying at the Seattle Grand Hyatt and have an excellent view of nothing… Well, not quite nothing - I get to look out onto the balconies of an adjacent apartment tower. This morning, I walked down to the shoreline and visited Pike Market Center. I spent most of the morning there before returning back to the hotel for the lunch at the Rock Bottom. After that, I wanted to see what the big deal was about REI. So I decided to walk to their flagship store which is located quite a few blocks from the hotel. REI was awesome - I wish they would have a store closer to home than Houston (although their map showed a location in Austin that I have never seen before). I picked up a few odds and ends there before returning back to the hotel for the MVP Registration and Expo… Finally, I walked down to the Westlake Center and took the monorail to the Seattle Center to partake of the sites there.. Needless to say, my feet are very tired and sore…

I have photos from today in my photogallery at http://photogallery.jeffreyrandow.com. Please be considerate of my bandwidth as these are hosted (along with this weblog) on my home server over a DSL link.