I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

Another round of events is coming up – and this time it’s all about the NGO-s.

So what’s the deal with Microsoft Connection Days? TechSoup Romania has teamed up with the ITSpark community in a Microsoft-sponsored event designed to bring NGO and IT people together, in an attempt to help the civil society use technology in order to achieve faster and more efficient results. This is one more thing that makes Microsoft’s investment in Romanian civil society an obvious commitment on their part.

I’ll be travelling along with the rest of the ITSpark team to Cluj-Napoca (April 5th), Bucharest (April 8th) and Timișoara (April 15th), and we’ll talk about Microsoft tools and their benefits for civil society. If you’re in any of those cities and are interested in attending, the details about the events are here (in Romanian).

See you there!

I’ve just returned from this year’s MVP Summit, and it’s been quite an experience! Got the chance to talk with a few fellow MVPs, and most of all, got to spend a couple of amazing days with Ben, Mike and the rest of the Virtualization team in the Microsoft Campus over in Redmond (or the “NDA Campus”, as people ended up calling it on twitter, due to obvious reasons). We were among the few “privileged” MVPs that got a good load of “super duper secret special NDA” material. But all I can say right now (while still under NDA) is that really cool things are coming, and they’re well worth the wait!

The Sheraton in Bellevue was also a very nice location to stay in, and Bellevue in itself is quite a treat. The flight to New Jersey wasn’t as pleasant as I would have expected though, but hey – you win some, you lose some, I guess.

I’ll be staying in the US for another 2 weeks or so, getting to go to New York, Miami and Las Vegas. Should be fun!

Yes! Thanks to Microsoft Romania, I have been given the opportunity of attending this year’s IT Professionals conference at TechEd in Barcelona. I’ll be in Barcelona during November 3rd – November 7th November 10th (apparently, I’ll also be attending an invite-only User Groups conference taking place in between the two TechEd events), staying at the Duques de Bergara Hotel, somewhere really close to the world-famous “La Rambla” (and actually not really that far from the International Convention Center in Barcelona, where the TechEd event takes place).

There’s lots of interesting speakers, so it should be fun!

Another long (but fun) Academic Tour week got to an end: UBB Cluj (last Friday), Oradea (Tuesday), Târgu-Mureş (Thursday), and UTCN Cluj (today) were the past 7 days’ events. All in all, the speeches were well received, with the only remark that in some isolated cases, part of the audience had trouble related to the topic at hand.

For instance, my presentation, being a bit more in-depth than the others, and addressing a smaller scale of the audience, was at times ill received for the sole fact that people weren’t particularly interested in the subject (most of the people in the audience were developers, not sysadmins). That’s why I got a few conflicting remarks on the feedback forms, stating, for instance, on one hand, that more examples were needed, and on the other hand, that there were too many examples.

Even so, the people seemed to have enjoyed the events, and were definitely thrilled to have attended. Right now, I’m going back to packing, since I’m leaving for StudIT in Timisoara first thing in the morning, where I’m invited as a guest speaker.