Periodic Disclosure, August 2020

In a regular year, I would ordinarily attend a lot of conferences and need to disclose a bunch of travel, accommodation, and occasional swag. Clearly this is far from a regular year.

I’ve decided to wrap up disclosure into periodic summary posts, rather than event specific posts. This is partly for length, and partly because the additional workload of dealing with [gestures broadly] all this has made it harder for me to get the disclosures written down. Still, I think it’s important, so better a little delayed than never, I guess.

This post therefore covers swag related to the period of January 2020 through to the middle of August 2020.

Veeam

For VeeamON this year, Veeam sent me a dressing-gown made of heavy knitted cotton. They’re black and have a Veeam logo embroidered on the left breast. Think a thicker version of those fancy towelling hotel robes, if you’ve ever been lucky enough to be at a hotel that uses them. Not the thin scratchy towel ones, the thick, snuggle into them and stare at the TV while you eat room service ones. These are a bit thicker and heavier than those. They’re quite warm and cosy, and apparently worth about 30 USD.

I haven’t quite reached the point of this isolation period where I’m wearing them for all my video meetings, but mostly this is because the green Veeam logo gets picked up by the chromakey masking I have set up in OBS Studio and looks weird. Not a branding design issue I would have thought of before this year, but we’re all learning new things.

Pure Storage

For their annual conference, Pure Storage sent me a packet of Crunchy Clouds. In Australia we’d call them a variant of chocolate crackles, but Americans can think of chocolate rice crispies treats.

The packet describes them as “dark chocolate with grated coconut and rice crispies”. They were pretty good, and were apparently made in Switzerland.

Commvault

Commvault FutureReady 2020 swag box

Commvault FutureReady 2020 swag box contents

Just before Commvault’s annual conference, this year called FutureReady, Commvault sent me a pine box (metaphor alert!) with the Commvault logo burned into the side. It contained a variety of mostly foodstuffs, including:

  • An 8.3oz jar of apricot and hibiscus jam
  • Some allegedly red licorice candy, but it tasted more like the lightly flavoured chewy wax I believe Americans call Twizzlers.
  • 4oz of peanut brittle. Tasty enough, but not as good as Stephen Foskett’s peanut brittle. If you get the chance to try some of his, it’s worth it, and I say that as not a big fan of peanut brittle generally.
  • A 4oz bag of cinnamon toffee popcorn.
  • A 3.8oz pack of “deluxe mixed nuts”.
  • 7oz of Green onion cheese.
  • A 2oz pack of watermelon sours.
  • 340g of churro pretzels.
  • 7.5oz pack of rosemary parmesan crackers.
  • 5oz of butter shortbread.
  • 6oz of cheese salami. This was less weird than I thought it’d be, but more weird than it should have been.
  • A 16oz jar of black bean and corn salsa. This was pretty good salsa, but it made me miss the excellent Mexican and TexMex food that I now won’t likely get to have for quite a while.
  • 7oz of tortilla chips, to go with the salsa.
  • A 10oz jar of artichoke and lemon pesto.
  • A Commvault branded jigsaw puzzle that I have not even started.
  • 4 raspberry and cranberry cookies.

My family helped eat everything progressively over a few weeks.

Cloud Field Day 8

For Cloud Field Day 8 the folks at Tech Field Day sent us swag boxes with a combination of TFD swag and items from vendors. Mine arrived after spending a couple of weeks on holiday in Japan for some reason, so the USPS issues had started earlier in the year than I think a lot of people realized.

Cloud Field Day 8 swag pack.

Cloud Field Day 8 swag pack.

My box contained the following items:

  • A set of stickers in the new Tech Field Day branding. I really like the new branding Stephen went with. The brand architecture is excellent.
  • very nice Tech Field Day brand embroidered patch.
  • A Tech Field Day branded bring-your-own shopping bag thing.
  • A Tech Field Day brand embossed microfibre cloth, royal blue.
  • A Veeam branded box containing a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but I’m keen to give it a job somewhere that can be connected to Home Assistant somehow.
  • A HashiCorp branded pop-out phone holder thingo called a PopSockets so you can hold your massive phablet with one hand.
  • A Fortinet branded pen, sticky notes, and a 12 page glossy brochure about Fortinet and its products.
  • A Fortinet branded USB-A to Lightning/USB-C/micro-USB cable.
  • A Diamanti branded lip balm, notebook, pen and USB-A to Lightning/USB-C/micro-USB cable.
  • A Virtual VertoCon 2020 t-shirt that will probably fit me if I consume an entire American male first.
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