Tag: vmworld

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Weekly Wrap 123: Food, drink, virtualisation and snow

My week Monday 8 to Sunday 14 October 2012 was yet another exercise in chaos, but this time with added snow.

Virtually nothing in the schedule actually happened when it was originally planned. There was too much moving around, and then Friday’s snowfalls almost derailed the week’s close.

Still, it was my first-ever encounter with actual snow at close range, so there were a few childlike moment of joy. And then I decided to spend the weekend in a SEKRIT hideaway.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 158, “Partitioning porn from PowerPoint: VMware’s virtualisation vision”. VMware’s vision of a virtualised future extends far beyond their existing desktop and server virtualisation products, to include virtualised mobile devices, and even software-defined data centres (SDD).

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday I was a guest of NetSuite at Sydney’s Aria Restaurant, where of course they paid for the food and wine. We also received gift vouchers from some of NetSuite’s customers: Avago ($100); SkincareStore ($75); and WineMarket.com.au ($75).
  • On Wednesday I was a guest of Alcatel-Lucent at the Australian Internet Industry Association’s NSW branch forum Customer Centric Services, held at the Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney.
  • On Friday afternoon I was a guest at MooresCloud’s press event, held at the City Hotel, Sydney. There was food. And drink. And mysteriously flashing lights.

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’ll be producing the Patch Monday podcast and having lunch with someone from Trustwave SpiderLabs before returning to Wentworth Falls. I’ll spend the week up in the mountains catching up on many, many loose ends of both media work and general geekery.

[Photo: Waratah in the snow, not the same specimen of Telopea speciosissima as seen last week, but another one at Bunjaree Cottages.]

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Weekly Wrap 117: Cheese, booze and virtualisation

My week Monday 27 August to Sunday 2 September 2012 was spent in San Francisco, and as I write this on their Labor Day holiday Monday I’m still there. Here. Whatever.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 152, “Geo-engineering: fixing climate for just US$6 billion?” A conversation with Dr Caspar Hewett, visiting researcher at the University of Newcastle in the UK, and Danish author and political scientist Dr Bjørn Lomberg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre in Washington.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

VMware’s VMworld was such a large bunch of stuff that it deserves its own section.

  • VMware covered the travel and accommodation, including flights Sydney to Los Angeles to San Francisco, and back again San Jose to Los Angeles to Sydney. A car is being provided for today’s drive from downtown San Francisco to San Jose airport. Four nights accommodation was provided at InterContinental San Francisco.
  • Food ranged from the truly frightening breakfasts in the conference’s media rooms Monday through Wednesday to gorgeous canapés and cheese platters like the one pictured above at the evening cocktail parties. The latter were held at the InterContinental on the Sunday before this week commenced, the St Regis Hotel on Monday, and the Temple Club on Tuesday.
  • On Tuesday night I also went to the Sourcefire cocktail party at the Marriott San Francisco. That’s their cheese platter pictured above.
  • The big VMworld party was Wednesday night and featured Jon Bon Jovi, but I didn’t go because I was exhausted and the last thing I needed was to be in a room with 15,000 drunk nerds. Sorry.
  • The conference backpack contained a VMworld-branded t-shirt, hardcover notebook and ballpoint pen, along with a sheaf of sponsor-related crap on paper. Pretty much all of the latter was thrown out.

I think I gained about 20kg in weight, 75% of which was my liver.

Also this week:

The Week Ahead

I leave San Francisco on Monday evening. That’s tonight. The limousine is scheduled collect me at 1745 PDT to take me to San Jose airport for a 1945 flight to Los Angeles, from where I take the 2250 Qantas flight to Sydney. I arrive in Sydney at 0740 AEST on Wednesday morning and will be heading straight to my hotel to collapse.

Wednesday night is the conference dinner for the ACCAN National Conference. I’m speaking at that event on Thursday afternoon.

Symantec is launching the Norton Cybercrime Report at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum at 1100 Thursday morning, and I plan to be heading to that.

The rest of the latter part of the week will be full of an awful lot of writing, I imagine.

[Photo: Cheese platter at the Marriott San Francisco, courtesy of Sourcefire.]

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Lots coming later in the week

What with the end of last week occupied by Consilium and then travel to San Francisco before covering VMware’s VMworld from today, there will continue to be a few days of radio silence before I post new material here.

But if you want the most current details about what I’m doing you’re already following my Twitter feed, right?

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Visiting San Francisco for VMworld 2012

I’m heading to San Francisco for VMware’s VMworld 2012 event starting on Sunday 26 August and staying on for the rest of the week.

I see that the logo features the words “Right here right now”. If they play that effing Fat Boy Slim song, I will truly go postal!

This will be my fifth visit to San Francisco in the last two years, and I must admit the place really is growing on me. Apart from the fact that it’s in that collapsing empire called the US. It does depress me to see the disabled veterans begging on the streets.

I mentioned this trip on Twitter about half an hour ago and already I’ve been told to visit a “beer mecca” called Toronado. What else, do you think?

And yes, I’m travelling as VMware Inc’s guest.