Well, here we are once again at the end of a very busy, exciting and tiring year.  I get to the end of every year thinking that it had been more hectic and faster than the one before, though this past year has been exceptional both with work commitments and also selling and then moving house.  The result of this has been less time to dedicate to my home lab and also blogging, which you may have noticed with the decline of regular posts.  I have tried to keep semi-regular posts flowing with mixed success.   Of course, having all of my lab equipment in storage for four months whilst we move house didn’t help things.  

Now, I’m not saying any of this from a negative perspective, far from it, moving out of London was most welcomed and I have been fortunate enough to be involved with some exciting projects and have worked with some fantastic and talented people.  My role at EMC has seen me involved with many different things; all around team enablement via creation of collateral, show/event support and the creation and evangelism (great US term) of EMC vLabs.  The vLabs have proven to be highly popular by providing people with the opportunity to get hands on time with a vast range of EMC’s VMware integrated products.  Plenty of hard work and long hours (as with most jobs in IT) but very rewarding to be doing something I enjoy. 

As with any role you see people join and leave the company, though one thing I love about this industry are the people in it and how we all continue to stay in touch irrelevant of where we are in the world and who we are working for.  All bound by the passion for what we do and the industry we’re fortunate enough to be part of.  

Moving back into the present.  After using up  my annual leave and moving house during December my batteries are now almost fully recharged and I’m ready to face the coming year with all the fun, challenges and excitement it will no doubt provide.  For me 2012 should prove to be more stable having moved house, which should (in theory) provide more “me time” to blog in the evenings and weekends. 

The new house provided a new ‘Man Cave’ space which was significantly larger than the oversized shoe box I had whilst living in London.  After moving into the house my new Man Cave started as an extremely tired 1970’s looking room with terrible cheap, worn and filthy carpet complete with tatty 1980’s Magnolia coloured walls, with a lovely damp smell to boot.  I had my work cut out for me to transform this sad and tired looking room into a light and vibrant workspace for me to work from in the evenings and weekends.

Below Left: Not dissimilar to how the room looked before the hard work began. Right: New Man Cave being renovated, complete with fetching vacuum cleaner – not mine (honest).

After much hard work removing the old carpet, dirty floor tiles and painting the room with a nice bright coat of white paint the new TechHead Man Cave is now operational.  The task of unpacking of boxes containing kit and cables still remains though this will happen in the coming days, but I’m very excited to have all my computer kit back out of storage again.  Photos of the completed room to follow…

I will be overhauling my home lab configuration so expect to see more regular posts on my home lab and a more steady flow of posts covering virtualization, general IT and tech topics.  I did contemplate overhauling the look of the TechHead site though due to the Man Cave preparation activities taking much longer than anticipated I have unfortunately run out of time, though the current site’s theme still seems pretty robust so should be good for a while longer.

A side project that myself and Simon Long kicked off  around 18 months ago was vBeers (see here for more details) and in early 2011 we decided to make things easier for people to create and spread the word of their own vBeers event by creating a dedicated vBeers site. vBeers.org was born. Both Simon and I have been really pleased how the virtualization community has taken to the concept of vBeers and the site itself.  With an increasing number of vBeers events being held every month the world over.  Any mechanism to increase the communication and opportunity to meet like-minded people who work in the virtualization and IT space can only be a good thing, especially in a relaxed social context – so from both Simon & myself thank you for partaking in vBeers!   

If you haven’t taken part in a vBeers get-together yet then why not check out the vBeers site for an upcoming vBeers in your area.  If there isn’t one planned, why not plan your own – it’s real easy.  Check out the page here for more details on how to do it. 

For all the vBeers regulars, just to let you know we plan a number of improvements to the vBeers site in the coming year.

So to end this post, a massive thanks to all of the existing and new readers of TechHead and as always I welcome and value all of your comments.  It was great to meet some of you at some of the tech events I attended throughout the year. 

Thanks very much and a Happy New Year to you and your family.  All the best for 2012!

See you back here soon.