Disclosure: Cloud Field Day 3

This is one of my regular disclosure posts. You can read more of them here. This one is about Cloud Field Day 3.

Flights and Accommodation

Gestalt IT paid for my travel and accommodation. Gestalt IT paid for economy seats on Qantas, and I few premium economy from MEL to LAX thanks to an upgrade at the gate, paid for with frequent flyer points. No business class upgrade this time, alas.

I flew economy the rest of the way.

We stayed at the Santa Clara Marriott hotel, in Santa Clara CA. It’s quite nice.

Food and Drink

Tuesday 2 April 2018

Breakfast in the fancy Qantas lounge at Melbourne international airport. Proper coffee (the last for a few days) and poached eggs with mushrooms and spinach. It was really excellent.

Lunch on the plane, which is really breakfast again, but also dinner because timezones. I pretended it was dinner and had a glass of red wine to help with getting to sleep. It mostly worked.

Breakfast again at something like 4am SF time so I just had fruit and some tea. I’ve taken to avoiding coffee on airplanes because the tea, while not great, is not as large a contrast as airplane coffee is to actual coffee.

I made it to the Qantas lounge in LAX in time for a shower and second breakfast. Coffee and poached eggs with mushrooms again. They make it for you in the fancy lounge, like in a restaurant (because that’s what it is, unlike the buffet in the standard lounges) and they accidentally made some sausages, which smelled so good I changed my mind and had some.

I didn’t need lunch.

I had a bar special martini at about 5:00pm while waiting for other delegates to gather for dinner because it was happy hour and I figured the sugar would help me stay awake until 8:30pm so I could resync my body clock. It was mostly gin with citrus flavourings which made it very tasty and refreshing, but also dangerous because it tasted like a softdrink. Just the one was plenty.

Chris Evans arrived and I joined him in a local beer, some sort of lager as I’m really quite sick of IPAs.

Dinner was the delegate welcome dinner at the hotel restaurant Parcel 104. Starter was a variety of nibbles plus salad, which was tasty. For main I had a steak, paired with red wine. Dessert was a chocolate something, and the menu on the website is of zero help reminding me.

Wednesday 3 April 2018

Breakfast was coffee during the delegate welcome meeting. I skipped the earlier breakfast because I was catching up on email and work tasks and my body clock wasn’t properly in-sync. My plan to have coffee in my room backfired when the machine didn’t actually work.

It sort of did, in that it heated the water, but it didn’t actually do the make-the-water-go-through-the-grounds thing. Figuring out how to turn the machine off was also fun, because the plug was behind the cabinet the TV and everything else was on, so I had to move a bunch of furniture to unplug the silly thing while it merrily tried to turn my room into a sauna. I managed to not injure myself in the process, which I feel is a significant achievement having not had any coffee beforehand, and with the coffee machine doing its best to burn me with hot steam.

This is the second time I’ve had to negotiate a surprise early-morning hotel coffee-machine related obstacle course in order to obtain coffee, and I am not looking forward to the inevitable next one. Reception swapped out the machine for a new one while I was out during the day, and managed to get the furniture back into place, so it was a big win all ’round, really.

Lunch was at Delphix, which was a Mexican selection including a couple of stunt-length burritos. Something like 8 feet long they were, cut into pieces. Novelty value was high, but deliciousness was sadly lacking.

In the afternoon we were at Oracle and they had these enormous Rice Krispy treat things that looked liked they’d give me diabetes from 4 feet away, so I went with a cookie instead.

Dinner was at an evening reception at Mistral which has a lovely view over the water. It was a buffet-style selection of various Mediterranean-style options including grilled shrimp, scallops, and vegetarian pizzas. I sampled a few things but was mostly too busy chatting with people and wasn’t paying attention to what I ate. I had a couple of gin and tonics as well.

Thursday 4 April 2018

We had a very early start (in the limo by 6:45am) so I brought room coffee with me in the limo and managed to not spill it all over myself.

Breakfast was at Rubrik, and was a fairly standard American buffet style affair. I had some fruit, a croissant, and a Red Bull gifted to me by new delegate @nickjanetakis because it’s not his thing.

Lunch was also at Rubrik, and I scoffed a hasty selection of something I don’t quite remember. It was buffet stuff, and I think I settled for chicken, a couple of slices of beef, and some vegetables. I recall mushrooms featuring heavily.

There were some lovely snacks at Riverbed that I would have liked to sample more of, but alas we were in and out quite quickly, given the tight schedule for the day. I did snag a cookie on the way out, and it was very nice, and the sugar hit helped to sustain me through the afternoon.

We stopped by the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose where AppOrbit were doing their launch event. I missed out on food in lieu of talking to people, and had a glass of some Argentinian red, I think a Cabernet, which was fine but forgettable.

We had a proper dinner back at the hotel, in the sports bar next to Parcel 104. Starter was share plates of wings and grilled tuna and edamame (I’m not a big fan of edamame, so I didn’t bother). For main I had a US burger called a Hail Mary which was spicy and massive and vast overkill after the starter nibbles. I ended up waking up every hour overnight to drink a glass of water, so I must’ve had my month’s intake of salt all at once but I regret nothing.

Friday 5 April 2018

A more leisurely start to the day (and the previous night’s indulgence) meant I joined the others for breakfast at Parcel 104 and nearly contented myself with just coffee. I relented to some fruit and a croissant.

Lunch was at Druva, which was a catered lunch of macaroni-and-cheese, various sliced meats, salad, and a diet Dr Pepper from the Druva fridge.

After Veritas we went to a small bar on the Symantec campus across the road for some nibbles and drinks. I had a glass of local Zinfandel and a couple of grilled prawns.

Dinner was at the sports bar back at the hotel and I cannot for the life of me remember what I had this time. I hope it wasn’t a burger again because I’m pretty sure I only had two the whole trip.

That was it for the official Cloud Field Day parts of the event.

Saturday 6 April 2018

On Saturday we were left to our own devices as people flew home. My flight wasn’t until late that night, so I had coffee in my room for breakfast, and then shared a packet of beef jerkey with Chris Porter while we both caught up with some work in the hotel lobby. I had lunch with Chris in the sports bar, and indulged in the Hail Mary burger again because why not? I also harangued Chris with my theories on SRE, enterprise architecture, systems and organisational design, and human nature. Surprisingly, he is still talking to me.

At the airport I had a glass of local white wine and some cheese and crackers to tide me over until dinner on the plane. I didn’t need much after the massive burger from lunchtime.

Dinner was on the plane, as was first breakfast very early, and then second breakfast after a shower at Sydney airport in the Qantas lounge. And a proper coffee at long last.

Swag Etc.

• A limited edition Cloud Field Day 3 3D-printed token thing, designed and built by Stephen Foskett.
• A Morpheus Data t-shirt with a print on it that looks a bit like Deadpool.
• A couple of Morpheus Data stickers.
• An Oracle branded pen.
• An Oracle branded black Haynes t-shirt.
• An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure sticker.
• A Droplet Computing branded Chromebook. Once their demo system is up and running, I look forward to seeing if I can do insane things like run Elite or Spacewar on MSDOS 6.2 in the browser. Also Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect 5.1. I miss them so.
• A Rubrik branded aluminium water-bottle.
• A Rubrik branded soft-shell jacket, embroidered with Cloud Field Day 3 of the left shoulder.
• A few Cloud Field Day 3 stickers specially made by Rubrik for the event.
• A pair of Rubrik branded socks.
• A Rubrik branded notebook.
• A Rubrik shirt with Galaga-esque print.
• A NetApp branded Makeblock mBot robot kit. I already have a bunch of other Arduino stuff, so I look forward to seeing if I can program the robot to drive somewhere if the humidity drops below a certain value or something equally silly.
• Some Druva branded socks.
• A Veritas branded USB power brick with a built in LED light/torch.

My delegate gift was a massive bag of cheese and caramel popcorn from Illinois, given to me by Martez Reed. Happily, the rest of my family aren’t big fans of it so I get to eat it basically all of it myself. This compensates somewhat for having to stand in the special quarantine lane to get the popcorn cleared through customs on my way back.

I gave three pairs of Australian merino wool socks, some eucalyptus lozenge sweets, and a copy of Russ Russinovich’s book Zero Day.