My grenoble Diary - Day Two

Day Two - Before I blog today, I would like to apologize to those I offend with my blog format. I am not a frequent blogger as I find it difficult to free up the time or the inclination. As such, I tend to treat my blog as a dumping ground where formatting is a afterthought at best.. If you feel this is too much for your eyes to endure, feel free to close the window now.

 Breakfast on Day Two is another reason why Protein bars need to be part of my carry-on luggage, that or getting checked into a hotel that has more than two choices for breakfast. I was left to choose from sweetened muesli or full fat sweetened yogurt (8.9% Sugar). There of course was the basket full of pastries, however that was not even a consideration...

 Got to the Sun Office ~08:30 hours, checked in to the event and went and introduced myself to the event organizers (Herve and Dominique). After replacing ThinGuy name with mine on the agenda, I proceeded to "network" with the influx of partners coming into the room.

 The main event started a little bit late due to the fact that we had a steady stream of attendees (approx 120 in the end), however it was not long until Fat Bloke started his "SSGD" presentation. The presentation generated huge interest, so much so that Fat Bloke exceeded his presentation slot by over an hour. After promising the audience that the outstanding questions would be addressed in the afternoon session, Fat Bloke finally handed over to me. Now, I do not know if many of you have had the pleasure to see Fat Bloke present, but one thing is for sure, he is a very tough act to follow. That said, I presented my plagiarized  slides on SRSS 4 update 2 and Kiosk (Thanks to ThinGuy and Brad for the materials) in about 20 minutes. Most questions that arose were roadmap related (Day Three material), or were comments/critique around features or platform support that were currently missing.

After my presentation it was Dirk doing his VDI update. This was also cut down somewhat due to the Fat Bloke overshoot and we were under pressure to get through the presentation quickly as there was supposed to be 3 other presenters after Dirk. It turned out that only the first of the three presenters was able to complete his presentation before lunch, meaning we started the afternoon session  approximately 1 hour behind schedule.

This to me though is testament to the interest in Sun's Desktop solutions, as the reason we were running behind could be clearly traced back to Fat Bloke the quality of the materials presented.

I have to own up to the fact that I did not attend all of the afternoon sessions. Having eaten smoked salmon and some sort of nutty, grainy, seedy bread that was served up as lunch, I was struggling to stay awake through the Access Manager presentation, so I decided to head to a Sun Ray terminal in order to write a presentation I am giving later in the week whilst catching up on email and twitter.

The evening, 18 of us decided to go back to the restaurant we had eaten in the night before only to find it closed (I am thinking restaurants in France are seasonal or something...). So instead we end up in a Fondue restaurant further down the street. Now for those of you not familiar with Fondue, here is a brief description:

 
Melted cheese, hot oil or chocolate served at the table in a pan, into which bread, meat or fruit is dipped.
 

 Anyway, I was lucky in that a colleague pointed out a Tuna Salad (no dressing except vinegar) as a starter, which I followed with yet another steak, washed down with wine and water. Here is hoping that Day Three has some better culinary choices.

Posted at 06:41AM Jan 16, 2008 by binwooke in Personal  |  Comments[1]