The VMWare Forum is on each year, usually in the Darling Harbour Exhibition Centre.
SM arrives this morning just after 4km of Squad with Vlad and Co in the ABC pool at the Domain. Mixed set of stroke correction, medley drills, and longer 500 metre sets increasing pace just to get the heart going. Blackdog Hanby appears after his adventures in the channel, all fired up and raring to go again next year.

A pall of bushfire smoke hangs around the city from the inferno raging to the west in the Blue Mountains where lots of folk have lost their houses. The smoke haze seems not as bad as on Friday morning and the squad session after which SM felt like he’d smoked a pack of Marlboro. Everything in perspective though – one of the guys at work lost his house in the Wednesday fires, including his two Alaskan Malamute dogs which were in a dog run on the property and couldn’t escape.

On booth duty at the forum which is a talkfest for the IT industry all around the glories of virtualisation, network, storage, data centres and the like. SM makes his crust selling stuff for the dark maelstrom of madness which is the data centre space. More and more apps and business processes getting put off premises in third party data centres (aka the Cloud) but it’s amazing how many business owners and corporate types don’t get too worked up about the risk to their operations if enough resilience hasn’t been built into the thing. Security seems to be a big theme this year.

A guy tells us at the stand, one of his ex-customer (ex because the company folded leaving 30 odd employees out in the cold) was a bit slipshod with their network security. A crew of hackers breached the firewall, took over the admin rights of the system, launched a malware virus which zipped up everything and demanded a $5K ransom for the encryption key.

By the time the business owners called in the cavalry, all their data backup had become infected and all (that means all) of their business data was locked away forever in the cyber version of the Prisoner of Azkaban. Paying the ransom didn’t work for others who suffered the same fate as the encryption key regenerated each day and so the data was lost anyway.

Need to up the carbs after a squad session but had to wait til lunchtime to get the fangs on the Forum catering – but it was worth the wait with a first class Spanish Seafood Paella served up on a kind of plywood mini platter. Small, delicate portion sizes required SM to do an Oliver Twist and give it the “please Sir, may I have some more” routine – more than a few times. Think they might have called security in the end to get rid of the monster scoffing all of the VMWare Paella.

Did a paltry 12km last week in the water.
Aiming for 15km this week and 20 next week – building it up in preparation for the Rottnest Channel 20km swim off the coast from Perth in February and the good news is there’s a sniff of a boat in the wind via a work colleague from the Wild West.

Got to give Deano at least a bit of a run for his money. Word is he’s away for a week and a half soon, so it’s time to Carpe Diem!