EduGeek @ BETT

It's taken me a while to get these pics up but here we go...
Monday - The Week Begins

We arrived relatively early on the Monday to begin the preparation of the stand and were presented with an empty shell.

Nothing could really be done until we had some hardware stand so we decided to go off for a wander amongst the ensuing chaos of stands being built to find our very kind sponsors to collect bits and pieces.

Anyway, we had pretty much no luck fining anyone... in fact we discovered some people wouldn't be turning up until Tuesday afternoon! However, we eventually managed to grab somebody from Promethean so we could set up the interactive whiteboard and projector that they loaned us.

Of course, all the time that this was going on, Tony was being mithered by work about SIMS stuff which made my eyes glaze over every time he tried to explain it to me.

By this time we had begun to start getting hungry so we popped off for lunch... to a traditional english pub - except that the entire menu was made up of curries! Quite odd. Upon our return we didn't have to wait long for a delivery from LapSafe - a nice kiosk to display our fancy web site on :-)

Tuesday - Not long to go

So Tuesday came and we eventually got some hardware. Firstly a box on loan from Stone Computers to run demonstrations on and connect to the Promethean board.

Then came the SmoothWall box - kindly donated to TickMike after we'd been let loose on it!

Then, in the afternoon, came the monster DELL server (which we would later name BEAST). This quad-dual-core Opteron with 16GB RAM and SAS drives was quite something. The only problem was that it had no OS and no setup disks.

When we did eventually get the server going, it was quite something to look at as it sat there without breaking a sweat with 6 virtual machines running!

So anyway.... there wasn't much time for picture taking during the show's opening hours. Steve Thomas from Novus did get rather tired of the standing at one point though.

And Tony made time to print some additional promotional material.

Finally a quick thank you to Art Lader - our Moodle Evangelist that was flown in from the States by Sun to help out on our stand. Well done for pulling that one off Tony ;-)

I'd also like to thank Jo (aka LinuxGirlie) of Koroshi fame.

Another thanks to our sponsors who had people helping out on the stand. Of course there was Steve Thomas (Novus), two experts from RM and two experts from Solutions Inc. (Apple experts). We also had a helping hand from Mandy Brereton and Sacha at EuroLaser (who also donated 2 laser printers as prizes and are generally very nice to everyone).

If there's anyone or anything I've missed out (I know that there is a lot!) I'm sorry.