Chicago TEC Center

The Chicago Technical Exploration Center is one nice looking office space. Almost completely wrapped in white walls, ceilings, partitions, countertops – it’s like walking into an Apple iMac, minus OS X.

The decor is sleek, modern and of course, the ever-present glass-house showcasing IBM hardware is there. Today, it was serving a variety of small pSeries systems, a massive p570 and a side-order of 1U retractable 15′ LCD panels. I want a rack. They’re soooo coool…

The WAS V6.1 STEW takes place in that setting, and each classroom is equiped with gigabit ethernet and WiFi-G, as well as a high-res projector, and a few 40′ plasma screens for good measure. A very good class setting, by any means.

We spent the day today going through the product intros, and did 2 labs focusing on the installation options (LaunchPad, InstallationFactory) as well as how to create & deploy a JSP/Servlet/EJB application which uses J2SE 5.0. Most people were able to finish the labs, so the pace is reasonable, not too quick, but not too easy either.