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Tech Field Day #5 wrap-up – Day 0 – Arrival & Dinner

Well Tech Field Day #5 which was held in San Jose, CA is over and it was a great 2 intensive and long days spending time with various vendors. This will be a series of posts on my thoughts and experiences at TFD5, overall I had a great experience there and would highly recommend it to any bloggers out there that get invited. The event is run by Stephen Foskett and his Gestalt IT company and is designed to bring together highly regarded bloggers and vendors from various IT industries. Delegates are selected from a list of independent bloggers that prior TFD delegates rank in several categories using a point scale, those at the top of the list get selected, apparently I was the highest ranking delegate that had never attended a TFD event, I had prior invitations but had turned them down due to conflicts. There were 12 delegates for TFD with a variety of backgrounds that included virtualization, storage, backups and networking.

BloggerWebsiteTwitterLocationSpeciality
Sean Clarkhttp://seanclark.us/@vSeanClarkIowaVirtualization
Jeff FryFryGuy’s Blog@FryGuy_PAPennsylvaniaNetworking
Robin HarrisStorage Mojo@StorageMojoArizonaStorage
Bill HillVirtual Bill@Virtual_BillOregonVirtualization
Tom HollingsworthThe Networking Nerd@NetworkingNerdOklahomaNetworking
Matthew NorwoodNetwork Therapy@MatthewNorwoodGeorgiaNetworking
Devang PanchigarStorage Nerve@StorageNerveNew JerseyStorage
W. Curtis PrestonBackup Central@WCPrestonCaliforniaBackup
Maish Saidel-KeesingTechnodrone@MaishSKIsraelVirtualization
Eric SiebertvSphere-land@EricSiebertColoradoVirtualization
Greg StuartvDestination@vDestinationArizonaVirtualization
Chris Wells@vSamurai@wygtyaJapanVirtualization

I arrived late Wednesday afternoon and after a meetup in the hotel lounge we were off to a group dinner at a nearby restaurant, Zeytoun which featured middle eastern food. Dinner was great, we had the whole restaurant to ourselves and featured great food, gift exchanges and a belly-dancer which was the highlight of the evening. The gifts were small tokens from each bloggers local culture and consisted of micro brews, Japanese whiskey, rocks from Colorado, pastries from Israel and much more. It was a great time and gave a chance for all of us bloggers from all over the globe to get to know each other better. I had previously met about half the bloggers at other events and knew a few of the others but there were some that were completely new to me.

After dinner a bunch of us hung out in the hotel lounge before heading off to bed to get some sleep before our 7:30am start the following day which included a visit to Symantec’s HQ, Drobo’s HQ and the Computer History Museum for a presentation from Xangati followed by a reception. Stay tuned for the next post which will cover our trip to Symantec.
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