On my last visit to Bulgaria I got chatting to Todor Grigorov and I agreed to come and speak to his team at DXC the next time I was in Bulgaria. Once I knew my sessions had been accepted for this conference I dropped him a line and said I was still up for it if he was interested, and so a plan was hatched. That’s why I arrived in Bulgaria a day early for a “day off”. 🙂
At 08:30 Todor picked me up and took me to the DXC office, we all sat in a room and just started to talk. Rather than doing presentations, the idea was for this to be a day long informal question and answer session. This sort of thing can be quite daunting, especially when some of the people asking questions are better at this stuff than me, but it’s good to challenge yourself. The questions ranged from specific to general, and I gave answers ranging from technical to opinion. There were a couple of storage related questions I dodged with the line, “Email me your question and I’ll send it on to someone who will be able to answer it!” 🙂
There was one storage question from Krasimir Kovachki that confused the hell out me. I thought he said “Team Provisioning” and I guess I must have looked like a rabbit in the headlights. A bit later was speaking to him and it dawned on me he had said “Thin Provisioning”, at which point his question made so much more sense and we had a discussion about that. That made me laugh. 🙂
At lunch time we went out to get some food and guess who appeared on the TV behind us? That’s Krasimir next to me. By the way, this photo was taken by another Krasimir. 🙂
After lunch we got some drinks and went to sit in a park to continue the question and answer session in a less formal environment. I also got to try some boza and banitsa. 🙂
It was a really fun day and it was nice to meet the ladies and gents that make up the team at DXC. Thanks for making me feel so welcome!
At about 16:00 Todor drove me to take a quick look at The Bells Monument, and waited for me to ring the UK bell before telling me adults weren’t supposed to ring them. 🙂 From there it was a quick trip over to the Hilton to meet up with Bryn Llewellyn and Roger MacNicol for our ride across to the RIU Pravets Resort, ready for the first day of the BGOUG Spring 2017 conference the following day.
I got into my room, unpacked my stuff and it was then I noticed I didn’t have my laptop charger. Panic! I rang the hotel in Sofia, who had found it in my room, and said “someone” would be picking it up for me. I sent a panic email to Milena and Todor and we arranged for Todor to pick it up on his way to the conference the next day. Phew!
That did leave me with no juice in the laptop, hence this blog post is coming out a day late and some work stuff has backed up. 🙂
In the evening we walked round to the golf course on the other side of the lake and had some food. It was a really nice end to a very busy day!
The next post will be about Day 1 of the conference (today). 🙂
Cheers
Tim…