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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!

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