December 11, 2012: SpiceCorps DFW with Drobo

I worked until late last night, about three in the morning.  Probably not the best idea but there is just so much work to be done.  I can never get to everything.  So today started off with me being pretty tired.

I went into the office this morning.  Just the usual.  Dan finally got in and said that he had gotten stuck working until midnight yesterday!  Good thing that I hadn’t tried to stay at the office waiting for him.  That would have been bad.

At lunch I ran over to Dominica’s office.  She actually got a new office since I was there on Thursday.  She has been moved to a new location.  She has a really large cube with two Dell Windows desktops and an Apple Mac Mini desktop.  Quite the setup.  Nicer than my office by a long shot.

I set up two Drobo B800fs NAS units and got one of them racked and the other set up on Dominica’s desk.  That took a while then it was right back to the office.

I raced home as quickly as I could after work was over but traffic was bad so it took longer than it should have taken on a normal Tuesday evening.  Dominica had spent the whole day cleaning the house, setting things up, baking and getting things ready for SpiceCorps DFW tonight.  We have thirty one people RSVP’d but we never get as many as commit.  Hopefully something close to that will actually show up.

Maggie was the first one there, showing up around five.  She ran some errands for us, like running out to pick up beer for the event.  Normally Watson does that but he texted that his municipal bus was running about an hour late due to traffic coming from downtown.  Kim, coming from uptown, texted to say about the same thing (although she was driving, not taking the bus.)  So it appears that traffic is going to be a painful factor tonight.

Turnout wasn’t too bad, we ended up, in the end, getting nineteen people tonight.  The last several didn’t arrive until between seven and seven thirty, though.  Starting at six appears to just be too early.  It is just so hard for everyone to get there then.

Matt from Drobo came in from California to demonstrate the Drobo SAN equipment and talk about it.  We ended up having a really informal night but I think that the format worked out well for him as several people talked to him for an hour or more before he did the presentation and considering how many clients and potential clients he had there I think that it was really valuable for him.

After seven thirty he did do a formal talk too which went well.  I skipped doing my talk tonight partially because I was never able to have prepared as much as I had hoped that I would have but also because there just wasn’t a good time in which to do it.  It worked out just fine.  Drobo got us all pizza too.  Dominica made Francesca’s new bread dip in a bread bowl, brownies and more.  It was a pretty good spread.

As always, we intend to wrap up the meeting at a reasonable time but we actually went until three in the morning with the usual crew remaining – Chris, PSX and Matt were the last to leave which is pretty common.  Randy didn’t manage to quite hang on until the end but probably made it until at least two.

So it was around three when I went to bed and I need to be in Austin first thing tomorrow.  Tomorrow is going to be a very, very long day.

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