Holy smoke, it's an explosive demo

I've spent the last couple of days in London helping out with the first Exchange Unplugged 2007 events, which have gone really well. One attendee to the first session, held with BT at the Tate Modern, said in 15 years of working in IT, it was the best Microsoft event he'd ever been to. Let's hope the rest can keep the standard so high.

Anyway, today's event (in association with Dimension Data, at the Radisson Mayfair hotel) had an unexpectedly dramatic turn. Brett's demo server (used to run all the demos for the first 3 sessions, running numerous VMs in Virtual Server) gave a sudden burst of fan noise and emitted a puff of smoke, during the 2nd session. The noise continued throughout the session in bursts, and there was a funny ozone-like smell close to the box...

Somewhat amazingly, it carried on and he wisely decided to leave it on, until after the 3rd and final session was complete. Just as well, since after it was powered off, it wouldn't come back online again - power supply failure, methinks.

Anyway, here's Brett and Julian standing by with precautions, in case it happened during Julian's brilliant unified messaging demo session.

They got through that session and hopefully a replacement Shuttle box will have arrived before the third event of the week, tomorrow!