VMWorld Wednesday

Today I noticed three things:

1) All the good sessions ran today.

2) Lines for everything!

3) You can't do back-to-back sessions all day without burning out.

Today's sessions were not to be missed, and everybody knew it because lines starting forming 45 minutes before some sessions. VMWorld has been on their toes, however: I didn't miss any session that I wanted to hit, and the most popular sessions from Monday and Tuesday got added back to the schedule on Wednesday and Thursday so everyone would have a crack at them. This is some very nimble work for a conference this big. Well done, VMWorld!

Here's the photolog:

My morning run takes me down to ferry building and up the Embarcadero. Here's the view at sunrise.

This lovely scene is the hallway in my hotel. Creepy, but swank!

Lines! Today was the day of lines! This was the line first thing in the AM for the Labs.

More sidewalk art outside of Moscone South.

Bean-bag Alley - where people and devices go to recharge.

The line for the Active Directory session. Yes, it extends all the way into the distance. And yes, I made it into the session!

The exhibit floor! This is where geeks get our wardrobe. I have 17 T-Shirts from the conference.

VMWare Party Wagon!

VMUG!

The view from above. I snuck into the press area for a second to snap this photo from the mezzanine. 

Blogger Powers, Activate!

HP. Lots of HP lovin'. Their new G7 servers running VMWare can replace 15 G4 servers. The electricity saved alone buys the new server in 3 months. Sheesh.

These guys? Not working.

Great shot of the freebie VMWare 2010 backpacks we got, though!

Say, "Cadillac"! This one's for Randall.

Well, well, well. An historic carousel, where have I spotted one of these before?

So the conference day winds down and it's time for 17,000 I.T. nerds to party. What does that look like you ask? Let me show you:

VMware Saloon on the Green.

By "Saloon" they mean: "booze + 80's cover band". I saw no swinging doors, which I thought was essential for "Saloon-ness".

Pool tables outside. Also, a picture with more than two women in it. Both novelties at this conference. More women in I.T.!

Slot Car! Slightly more popular than the 80's cover band playing.

99 Luftballoons in German was impressive, though. 

867-5309

Mostly Dudes.

So, bless those VMware folk. They threw one swank-ass party. It was like one of those parties you see in movies, it was so swank. This was the "Taste of Heaven" room, with sampler foods and groovy DJ beats. 

The problem? No matter how swank a party you throw, there's 17000 people, and 16900 of them are dudes.

Here we see the VMWorld attendees in our native habitat. In front of Tekken 5.

Word.

Very important iconography. Future anthropologists will be puzzling over this one for sure.

Geek Slingshot.

Geek Ball.

The other 80's cover band, INXS. Of course, they were covering their own material. 

More INXS

More INXS. 

INXS in excess.

Turns out, us nerds love us some INXS. Or free booze. Or Both. The concert actually got to rocking pretty hard for a bunch of I.T. folk after three days of conference-going.

Thus ends Day 3 of VMWorld. Tomorrow is the big finale! I get to make my CIO jealous because at 9AM, Pranav Mistry is presenting at the general session.

More to follow!

VMWorld Tuesday

Day two of the conference, and my San Francisco adventure!

A picture is worth a thousand words, and I have lots! Let's get started:

I passed this sign on the way to the conference. My kind of breakfast specials!

The crowd lining up for day 2.All that royal blue is the EMC crowd. 

Day 2 was the big keynote, and I got to see what a big crowd was really in attendance.

Sidewalk art outside Moscone South

The Ferry Building:

After the conference today, I walked down to the ferry building and did a little browsing. I got to hit Boccalone for the salumi cone, and officially knocked off my first item from "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" list. 

The doors were closed up on this shop when I visited, such a pity!

Here's a view down the center of the ferry building.

The impeccably styled Imperial Tea Court

Amen, brother.

Meat pies, fruit pies... whatever. 

So good.

Fungi!

Tasty Salted Pig Parts. These captions write themselves!

The Salumi cone was super-tasty, but it wasn't dinner. Off to R&G Executive Lounge for Salt & Pepper Crab in Chinatown. Ohhh soo tasty. Like all the best moments in life, I was too busy enjoying it to take pictures. Suffice it to say, I have not made a mess like that at the dinner table since I was 5.

The tunnel that separates Chinatown from my hotel in the financial district.

If you make the last turn up a stairwell in the tunnel, you come up here. Tunnel Top. The finest bar in San Francisco as far as I'm concerned. Those old afficianados of the Pelican Club will know exactly what I'm talking about.

A shame this picture didn't come out better. I'm pretty sure these folks are all regulars at Tunnel Top. Yes, that's the whole size of the bar.

Bill's shenanigans are the stuff of legend. As soon as the video of the infamous "hat swap" is up on youtube I'll post it here. Suffice it to say, there is a very disappointed Yankees fan, whose hat got replaced by a Giants hat when he wasn't looking. I'm all for hometown pride, and anyone who messes with Yankee fans are good in my book.

VMWorld Conference Day 1 (and Day 0)

Not much commentary, I just wanted to lay down some photos.

I arrived early on Sunday, found my way to the Moscone center, hopped on a bus with 300 other crazy VMWorld attendees and rode out to the shore for a 5k at dusk in San Francisco. I forgot my parka.

I hit a nondescript "wine bar" for dinner. The dinner was decent enough, the wines weren't anything special. I was fed, I was tired, I was ready for bed at about 9:00PM.

Monday started the conference. It was hard to miss:

Here some photos throughout the day at VMWorld:

Social Media and Blogger Lounge:

This is where the cool people hang out and tell each other how many Twitter followers they have. You know how you can tell they're cool? The dancing little icons under the cloud. Also, they'll tell you. 

Lab Thunderdome:

Okay, the labs are clearly where it's at this conference. The monitors you see facing you are just 1/4 of what's in this room. The lab text appears on the right hand monitor, the left hand monitor is a Virtualized set of machines for you to experiment with. Very nice setup, VMWorld! 

Cisco's new APs are scattered around the three conference buildings, and are doing a damn fine job of keeping the public wireless network up and running. This bodes very well for my future plans, considering there's about 17,000 conference attendees and most of them have at least 2 WiFi devices each. Way to go, Cisco!

The Microsoft Exchange session was jam packed. Very interesting things from this session. Exchange used to run on one server, now it's split into roles and functions, and so Microsoft split them into distinct servers. VMWare is bringing them back together onto one physical box. The circle is now complete. 

How 20th Century: e-mail and print stations. 

A panel of experts. The most interesting comment? That company employees are being more productive for the company with publicly available cloud tools like facebook, youtube, gmail, and Google Apps than they are on company software, and they can't use any of these tools from inside the firewall. Apparently, everyone is having this discussion, Bennie.

Our New Overlords:

That raised dias in the middle of the Lab Thunderdome is even more ominous in person. Also, bad techno seems to be emanating from somewhere inside of it. Ominous. 

Stress-Relief:

Foosball, ping-pong, pool. The usual geek pressure release valves.

So much for the conference. I'll get some pictures from the exhibit floor tonight, but I was way too wiped out for it yesterday. It was a sea of humans doing the zombie-shamble between booths with platefuls of buffet food. No thanks, time to find a real dinner.

Here we go:

Tadich Grill: California's oldest restaurant. Opened by, of course, a Yugoslavian immigrant. I am not at all surprised. My people are feeders. 

Of course these pictures don't do the place justice, but the gentlemen wearing jackets are the waiters behind the counter. They were superb.

I asked the waiter to bring me, literally, food and wine, and he selected two excellent choices. A decent enough Pinot Noir along with some form of bouillabaisse with the best sourdough bread ever. Perfect dinner!

I'm off to grab a bagel and a coffee and hit Day 2! Stay tuned!