I’m in silicon valley for VFD3, this is my first time in the valley so I’m having the experience of seeing tech company signs on way more buildings than I’m used to in New Zealand.
On Monday afternoon (day –1) Marco Broeken and I went to the VMware campus where John Troyer showed us around the vast collection of buildings. One surprise for me was that Xerox PARC is across the road from the VMware campus, PARC is where Ethernet was invented along with being where Steve Jobs got the inspiration for a GUI for the Macintosh. The evening was a traditional Ethiopian meal with the VFD people who were in town joined by GS as well as John & his wife Kat.
The VMware turtle pond, turtles hibernating, must come back in summer.
Day 0 started with a meeting at Nutanix, good to meet the people I’ve been working with for the last few months as I’ve been delivering the Administration course around the APAC region & plan for doing some more interesting things with them. With easy travel between the offices its clear that being in the valley is great for start-ups. For lunch I went to Google with Marco and Paul Meehan, we were met by Alex Maier who all past vExperts love. We had a nice walk around the Google campus and had the obligatory photos with the Androids outside the Android building.
Alex, Paul & Marco in front of the Androids
I persuaded Marco & Paul to walk to the Computer History Museum, a little over a mile including the detour because I forgot that North is in the other direction in the northern hemisphere (in New Zealand the sun is to the north). Alas the museum is closed Monday & Tuesday, so we were turned away. On the positive side we did make our ten thousand steps for the day.
Back at the hotel more people were turning up and the long evening of talking about more and more geeky things began. This is some of the most fun of these events, hanging out and unashamedly talking geek. Half way through Tom’s exposition on why NAT is bad and IPv6 is the greatest I decided that I’d better get some sleep, the next three days will be long.
I’m pretty sure this large bottle of strong beer is why my head hurts this morning.
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