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.
| Blogger | Website | Location | Speciality | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sean Clark | http://seanclark.us/ | @vSeanClark | Iowa | Virtualization |
| Jeff Fry | FryGuy’s Blog | @FryGuy_PA | Pennsylvania | Networking |
| Robin Harris | Storage Mojo | @StorageMojo | Arizona | Storage |
| Bill Hill | Virtual Bill | @Virtual_Bill | Oregon | Virtualization |
| Tom Hollingsworth | The Networking Nerd | @NetworkingNerd | Oklahoma | Networking |
| Matthew Norwood | Network Therapy | @MatthewNorwood | Georgia | Networking |
| Devang Panchigar | Storage Nerve | @StorageNerve | New Jersey | Storage |
| W. Curtis Preston | Backup Central | @WCPreston | California | Backup |
| Maish Saidel-Keesing | Technodrone | @MaishSK | Israel | Virtualization |
| Eric Siebert | vSphere-land | @EricSiebert | Colorado | Virtualization |
| Greg Stuart | vDestination | @vDestination | Arizona | Virtualization |
| Chris Wells | @vSamurai | @wygtya | Japan | Virtualization |
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.
