Day four on my DevCentral trip to Tokyo started with some work in the hotel room and preparations for my presentation at the first Japan DevCentral Users group meeting.  I went through the slides once figuring that since I know the material pretty well, the flow of topics would be all I needed.  Boy was I wrong.  More the that later...

At 11:00 we headed to the F5 offices to meet some colleagues, grab some lunch and head over to the user group meeting.  We have been lucky enough on this trip to have some wonderful hosts that have taken us to very small, out of the way, restaurants that have just been amazing!  I've found that the quality of the food is inversely proportional to the amount of american text and pictures on the menus - meaning full Kanji menus meant very very very good food.  We stopped at one of these places for lunch.  It was a old residence converted into a Chinese food restaurant.  I had a rice bowl with a layer of egg covered by crab with a teriyaki type sauce - mmmm!  The rest of the group all had steamed dumplings that I'm told were equally as impressive.  I sure miss home, but I'm going to really miss the wonderful food I've had here.

After lunch we headed to the user group meeting.  Did I mention that it was being held at the US Embassy!  Another first for me.  Security was pretty strict.  No electronics of any kind were permitted.  And once we made it through the 3 checkpoints and were escorted to our room, no food or drink was allowed and you needed an escort to leave the room and walk the 1 foot to the restroom door.  I was a bit worried about speaking without a water backup, but it went well.

Jeff started the talk going over DevCentral Japan and how we see the community growing.  Following Jeff, the "PowerShell God" of Tokyo from Microsoft spoke about PowerShell and walked through the iControl Cmdlet's for PowerShell including the installation and execution of some of the CmdLet's to return system data.  I was stoked on that one as it's always fun watching someone else demo a product you personally created!  I followed that talk up with my presentation on Sumo Gambling techniques with a little bit of iControl and iRules thrown in for good measure.  As usual, the iRules Optimization Tricks slide was the most popular.  My talk was followed by another F5 Joe who ran some iRule challenges that each table competed in to win a prize.  I'm not sure what was asked as the questions were all in Kanji but that didn't stop me from helping judge group "B" as the winners!

After a reception a group of F5 folks headed to another wonderful place for beer and sushi. Double Yum!  And of course the night wouldn't be complete without a little bit of Karaoke.  Let me just say this, Jeff does a mean "Born to be Wild"!  It was also a treat to see some great performances of Japanese songs by our F5 colleagues.

Then after getting lost in translation for a second time (our cab driver couldn't find our hotel), we told him to drop us off at a shopping district and we took the trusty train back to the hotel.  Tomorrow is the partner conference with the added bonus of seeing me in a suit.  Then it's off to the airport for a red-eye back to the states.

-Joe