Meeting cool people

Although I finished my lab at 8:45, I didn't get to leave campus until 10:30 as John who is giving me a lift was still completing his. That did mean though I got time to talk to one of our lecturers and it turned out that Alan not only wrote the bandwidth calculation spreadsheet I have been using the last few weeks on the work I had to get done before I came out here, but was also responsible for the edge server (I know you won't understand what that is but never mind) when he use to work for Microsoft and we ending up whiteboarding a problem a few of us had been looking at with our customers and had been getting conflicting views on how it would work.
On the subject of people, who am I with out here. Well there are 16 (I think) of us on the course and a bunch of lecturers over the next 3 weeks, some of whom I know. I am staying in an appartment over the road from a park and lake. My flatmate is Marc who is from North Carolina. Craig is from Microsoft UK (ish, he is based in the UK, but actually works for our global team so his boss is in the US) and he only joined MS a few months ago, John is from the UK and works for one of Microsoft's partners (Craig use to be his boss) and was on the plane out with me. John has a hire car (one of the advantages of working for a partner) and is kindly ferrying us aournd, even though the apartment he and Craig are in is not near ours.