Virtualization symposium 2008 May 6, 2008
Last year I was in Riga, Latvia at the EMC2 Forum. At that time it was all about EMC2 products and the aim of the forum was more advertising products rather than showing live demos and holding technical talks. Besides, I was very tired so all in all I didn’t like it much. This time it was different.
It is very pity that I didn’t take my camera with me, though I wanted to. I consider myself a geeky person but the first thing I noticed were girls saying “Hello” to me and showing the direction where I should register myself and take the badge. One of them I met earlier last week when I was going to Tartu. It was here Japanese tattoo on her back that took my attention first and then everything else. Today we had a friendly chat and she showed me her tattoo. I felt a little shame for learning the Japanese language for two years and still failing to read and translate what the text said. I understood some parts and she helped me to get the rest.
There were both technical and talks with live (and not) demos and lectures for sellers. Some funny moments were when one of the guys from VMWare was asked a lot of questions about the licensing of certain product and then on how to license the Windows on it, he first went out of the room shouting for somebody from Microsoft. Having no luck he quickly returned back and said “Ahh, fuck it”. It was funny the way he told it. And it made the presentation more live, not just mumbling for oneself.
This is not the first time I attend such events but it is definitely the first one I had so much chat with unknown people there. I met one our company’s client with whom I recently spoke via e-mail trying to solve some problems. I also saw one guy with an OpenBSD sticker on his laptop and went straightly to talk with him. I never thought that somebody here in Estonia is using OpenBSD in his environment. Usually it’s Linux and more often Windows. I was wrong. There was one interesting guy with whom I had a chance to speak. He is working for Mikrolink (one of the biggest IT companies in the Baltic states) doing some projects on VmWare. We exchanged the contacts to have a talk later somewhere else.
It was very positive and fun to be there. Hope that there will be something similar soon.