After more than a year, I’m back in California, anxiously waiting to meet my fellow bloggers and ask some tough questions to a fantastic lineup of vendors presenting at Net Field Day 2011. Stephen Foskett’s well-oiled organizing machinery is already in full gear; I’m typing this post from a WiFi-equiped car that picked me up @ SFO airport (you see, dear vendors, it’s so easy to make my inner geek happy ... all I need are some fantastic features that are actually usable and work as well as this WiFi connection).

The vendors we’ll see during the next few days include fabric heavyweights Brocade, Cisco and Juniper (in alphabetical order), OpenFlow-focused NEC, our good friends Force10 (now with the Dell logo) and two unknowns: Embrane and Gigamon. I’m positive they’ll surprise me (then unknowns picked by Stephen and Greg Ferro usually do).

So, I’m looking forward to two fantastic days jam-packed with geekiness, technical deep dives (hopefully no Gartner or IDC quotes) and awesome conversations. Hey, and you know what – join us. NFD presentations will be streamed live over the Internet; or you could follow the NFD delegates or #TechFieldDay tag on Twitter.