Another long day at SNW. I say its a lot of work, but when I think about it, its really not. You spend most of the day waiting for other peoples stuff to be working. While you are waiting you do work, because there is nothing else to do, buts it not the work you wanted to get done. I put in long hours (about 13 a day), but you are really only working half of that time. The rest of the time you are installing products, installing updates, bullshiting with people from other companies, and waiting. Waiting for the internet to work, waiting for providers to get up, waiting for disk arrays to be configured, and waiting for replies from emails you sent out. The worse part is you are standing up the entire time. There are no chairs in my section, and the tables the machines on are standing level. So for 99 percent of the time I am on my feet. Its also freezing in the lab. When I say lab, dont think of a computer lab you would see at school or at work. Our Lab is a section of table and computers in a huge conference room. There are around 5 labs, all in one half of the room, and the other room is vendor booths where companies try to sell there products to end users. So you leave the hotel and its 75 and sunny, and then you walk into the conference hall and its probably 45 and noisy. These machines make a lot of noise, and there are dozens of people yelling and talking that adds to the noise. i cant hear the person next to me without yelling. I wish I could describe the other engineers at the conference, but my literally skills hinder me in providing an adequate description. These guys are hard core. Most of them are leftovers from the mainframe days (so 50 years old, long hair, and sandals). They are very passionate about storage, and the SNIA standard effort. Most of them are hardware guys (people in the industry understand the difference between software guys and hardware guys (and I use them the term guys, because 99 percent of us in the lab are men)). But they are all very friendly and try as hard as they can to have a good time. There is plenty of beer in the lab and at the end of the day they pump some music through some speakers (with all that storage you have to figure they have some music on there). I am no where near where I want to be at this point with my demo. It will be a long day tomorrow. I didnt get a chance today to explore Arizona, hopefully tomorrow. After I finish this I am going to go down to the hotel bar and finish watching the game. Body for Life Yeah right...I did do cardio, but diet wise I cant even remember. I will try to summarize. Meal 1 bagel Meal 2 turkey sandwich Meal 3 tacos Poker None tonight. However, I did read my new card player magazine that I got at the casino.

Source: Ditty Runs the City