Welcome to the Funcave

Planes, Trains, Automobiles

OK…so there weren’t any trains involved.

But Mark Crall’s trip to Alabama yesterday was definitely an ordeal for him.

Ya see, as a favor to me, Mark took a short hop over to talk to Alabama SMB. Basically to show our members the PFM he demo’d in NOLA on bare metal restore, virtual recovery, etc.

But one cancelled flight yesterday morning, and Mark was stuck in Memphis. For 7 hours.

As luck would have it, he managed to get a flight into Huntsville. Then Jackie, one of our group members who lives up there, gave Mark a ride to the meeting, arriving just in the nick of time.

Not only that, but Jackie had also managed to convince his girlfriend to attend last night’s meeting. So El Jackareno definitely gets the “Most Valuable Attendee” award for last night.

Great turnout last night. Lots of visitors, and lots of good feedback. The bare metal restore demo blew quite a few minds. A couple folks from Atlanta made their own drive to attend, which was cool as ice.

Mark got to crack on me some more for ditching out on Symposium and WPC, by presenting me with a Tweet shirt, and an SBSC mouse.

I returned the favor by giving him a pair of TS2 stress balls and an instruction book on how to use LiveMeeting (you have to see the recording of his presentation to Bitzie’s group to get that). Also, an Exchange 2000 ship gift, a swank pocket watch, courtesy of KC Lemson’s swag-a-palooza giveaway from over a year ago.

And after the meeting was over at 8p, about 10 of us adjourned to Bottega Cafe for a bit to eat and some time to talk. Like, for another 2.5 hours or so.

So here’s a guy who took time away from his business, made the trip over, put up with tons of crap, and for what?

I can tell ya. Our group has zero funds, since we don’t charge dues. So I couldn’t pay him anything but his dinner last night at Bottega.

With all the whining and complaining about community this and who’s doing that, etc. etc. that’s flying around all over the place, most of it busybody sour grapes from one person about another…ad nauseum.

Personally, I think all that crap is a damned big waste of time and energy. But what do I know? I’m just a guy with a blog.

Even so, the Funcave’s giving big huge props to Mark. Not because he made the trip over here, but for ALL the community stuff he does, both visible and not.

|| posted by chris under business, community, hardware, it pro, more cowbell, shoutout, travel, virtualization || comments (2) || ||