Exhaustion in Austin

I’m running on adrenaline and bottled water at Dell World 2013 at the moment.

The flights over here were brutal. Really bad weather in DFW sent delays through the entire system, so my flight out of SYD was delayed by 5 hours. It meant I missed out on the #vBBQ meatup and didn’t get the hotel until 11pm some ridiculous number of hours after leaving home. I’m not going to count them because that will be depressing.

But! I got here in one piece, and have met up with a bunch of people I already know, and made a bunch of new friends as well.

I’ll write more thorough stuff later on after I’ve had time to absorb and digest the firehose of information, but here’s a quick summary:

We spent yesterday out at Dell running through a barrage of briefings from all kinds of people, from storage, servers, software, pretty much the whole stack. And we got a tour of the acoustics labs, which are incredibly cool in a geeky engineering kind of way. We also did a thinktank, hosted by @michael_keen, which was nominally on Innovation in the Enterprise, but the conversation roamed all over.

And last night was a nerdy gathering of fellow twitteristas where we chatted about all kinds of things over cocktails. @plankers and I are agreed that a nightcap last night was a tactical error, but the conversation with him and @michael_keen was worth it.

This morning we had the keynote, which underwhelmed me, so more on that later. Then I skipped over to be on the Backup.U live broadcast with @storageio, @gminks, and fellow guests @nerdblurt, and @Michael_EDavis, which went really well. I also had a briefing from Armughan Ahmad, VP of Networking Solutions, from which I gleaned some good info on Dell’s strategy, particularly their brand architecture.

In between all that I’ve been doing other regular work stuff, so I’ll be ready to collapse into bed tonight.

I’ll update this post with better links later (such as to the Backup.U recording, and other people’s twitter handles) but now I have to run to another briefing and another keynote and a bunch of other stuff.

Whew!