@bfd_diplomacy is an unusual twitter handle for an IT geek, but then again, when you understand that the diplomacy bit is the boardgame Diplomacy (and a lot of the people who still play this are in IT it seems) then you might get it. Anyway, in an attempt to step away from the recent IT frenzy, both at work and in the #vDM30in30 challenge, I’m away for the weekend as a member of the organising committee of MidCon which is “A Boardgame Convention in a Posh Hotel” in the middle of the UK.

We’re now a mere week away from the VMUG UK UserCon on 17th November, but there is still time toregister ahead the day itself. You should also remember that you can simply turn up on the day, as always. We’ll be happy to see you either way. If you want to come to the vCurry the night before (7PM - 9PM, in the Premier Suite at the Motorcycle Museum) then it’s best to pre-register for that so we know how many people want feeding.

It’s a triple point Tuesday (well, it was when I wrote this and it’s OK, they are all triple point Tuesdays) so what better day to take a look at CloudCred and see what it’s all about? This is another post as part of the vDM30in30 series that I am trying to keep up with. CloudCred was launched by VMware early in 2013 as a learning site, with a pretty solid gamification angle to it, which is what a lot of people were doing at the time.

Maybe this is a bit of a #vDM30in30 cheat, but I updated the “About Me” part of this blog to include a whole lot more stuff, as I have not had a lot of time recently to do more with the whole #vDM30in30 thing. Sometimes they make me do stuff at work and sometimes that stuff goes on for a while. This is Tuesdays post, I have another in the can for tomorrow.

Every so often, the question gets asked - what are the good tech podcasts that I should be listening to on my commute? (or while dog walking, on the plane back from Barcelona, whilst downhill skiing etc.) OK, I couldn’t help it, we’re talking about podcasts so bonus points for knowing what podcast that kind of journey related stuff comes from. When thinking of 30 posts to do in a month for #vDM30in30, this was one of the first ideas I jotted down and started work on.

I’ve just had to recover virtualmachinery.co.uk from an outage. Fortunately, this was my first experience of my blog being unavailable since I added the custom domain on to the front of it a couple of years ago, but non the less, it’s left a sour taste in my mouth. Repairing it has also bitten into my blogging time somewhat, but has also given me fuel for a blog post. I’m right in the middle of blogging for the #vDM30in30 challenge, so I am giving my site a lot more attention than normal so I spotted the problem and set out to investigate.

So this is a post that comes on the back of a promise made in Barcelona this year to spread the word about TAM Customer Central, an easy promise to keep given that I think it is such a great resource. First off, what’s a VMware TAM? Well, he or she is a Technical Account Manager who is dedicated to your Enterprise (this is usually a big company thing) from 1 to 5 days a week, depending on what support level/cost you engage at.

It seems like everyone and his dog has written a post about this already, so here’s mine. The biggest buzz at VMworld Europe was actually about an announcement that came out the week before, which is quite something, considering that a lot of nice announcements were made over the duration of the show as a whole. If you’ve been living under a rock for a while, VMware and AWS are planning to co-operate so that by the middle of next year you can run your VMware VM’s natively on the AWS cloud.

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be attending my fourth UK VMUG UserCon, which is set to be the biggest VMUG event in the UK this year. As usual, the UserCon is being held at the National Motorcycle Museum, close to the NEC and Birmingham Airport. This years date for the diary is Thursday 17th November. With the demise of the physical vForum event, this should be the biggest VMware related gathering in the UK this year.

As a confirmed Homelab freak and a#vDM30in30 participant, I guess that a post on the content of my lab would be pretty much expected. I’m a permanent member of staff in a large company, so I do have access to a considerable amount of kit on different continents within which I can play around at times, but I’m still of the opinion that having something to mess around with at home is viable.