I was recently accepted as a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau. It's a great honor for me and I'll do my best to live up to the expectations :).

You can find more information about INETA at http://europe.ineta.org.

I'm heading back home today after the first leg of a European tour where I delivered the Application Platform Optimization workshop in several countries like Romania, Ukraine, Latvia, and Croatia. The APO initiative is part of the larger story of Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization (Core Infrastructure Optimization, Business Productivity Optimization, and Application Platform Optimization). The workshop is dedicated to sales persons from both Microsoft and Microsoft Partner companies. I have to say that I had a lot of fun in this first set of countries and I had the chance to meet extraordinary people. I encourage all of you to take a look at www.microsoftio.com where you can learn a lot about IO (including APO).

All you need to do is click the image above and enter one of the most amazing competitions!  Good luck and may you reach the moment when you finally see the (silver)light! :) :)

Isn't this cartoon cool? See the original version here.

Have you ever been in a situation when having lots of possible outcomes of an event, you just have a feeling about the final outcome? Well, I just had one of those experiences today, during the draw for the European Football Championship's groups. (Un)fortunately, my initial guess about our opponents turned out to be 100% true. Who are our opponents? Well.... The Netherlands, France and of course, Italy :) As they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

As one of our Romanian sports commentators (Andrei Vochin) says in this post, the problem is not going to be the exceptional value of our opponents, but our ability to be heroes two times a week.