About a week ago I started delivering the LATAM Jumpstart event, which is a 1-day Microsoft event (3 day in Brasil) in which we get to showcase the features of Windows HPC Server 2008 (version 2 of Windows Compute Cluster 2003). So far, it has been a great experience in both terms of showcasing the new and improved features of the product as well as meeting with very nice and cool people that use or are planning on using this product.
The first event was in Bogota, Colombia – where I must say, are the nicest people I have ever met in my life. People from Bogota are extremely polite and very very helpful. The event went well despite the NVidia driver on my MacBook Pro crapping out 30 minutes before the presentations. I managed to get the machine back online through a series of black magic spells and internal cussing. It would have been terrible if I had not been able to use the machine as all the demos were running in Hyper-V, and getting everything back together would have taken quite some time. We had about 60 people show up, which was a great number. Most of these folks had never used CCS in the past, so it was a great way to let them know what they have been missing 
The last 3 days, I’ve been here with Phil Pennington, developer evangelist at Microsoft, delivering a 3-day training/session kind of thing in Sao Paulo. I had no idea this city was so big, I was quite impressed. Our attendees in Sao Paulo were really great. During the labs, we realized that ALL the machines had been imaged from the same source without being syspreped, and that is a very very bad thing when you are dealing with active directory. The HPC pack could not communicate well with the DC, so we had to carry out a series of tasks such as syspreping ALL the machines and creating a new DC so that things were normal again. All this while, our attendees were very patient about the whole deal.
Right now I packing up to go to the airport and catch my flight to Santiago, where I will try and get to know a bit better over the weekend. The bad thing about these events is that they are very close one from the other, so it has been literally impossible to get to know any of the cities I have been to so far. Oh well, maybe next time we’ll manage to plan it somewhat differently.
