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Our report from the VB conference, by Sunbelt VP for Product Development Mark Patton:

Sunbelt Software is sending a small army to the Virus Bulletin conference in Geneva, Switzerland this year. We’re a sponsor!

The VB conference is for the hard-core AV guys, so we sent CEO Alex Eckelberry, Chief Technical Officer Eric Sites, Anti-Virus Technologies QA Manager Casey Sheehan, Malware Response Manager Dodi Glenn and me.

We also sent Business Development Associate Tracy Koppenhoefer and Chad Loeven, our VP of Business Development. Chad, Alex and Eric know about 90 percent of all the expense-account-toting attendees, so there’s never a shortage of dinner invitations. And when I say “dinner”, I mean beer drinking.

We are arriving a day early to recover from jet lag, but instead of wasting the day shopping for watches, we are trying to get a tour of the world-famous Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) Large Hadron Collider – a particle accelerator ring 16 miles in diameter and 100 meters below ground. They accelerate atoms to the speed of light and smash them together to see what kind of fragments fly off. It’s too bad Mike Neitzel isn’t with us – no doubt he could talk them into starting it up and smashing some atoms while we watched. But then again it might accidently create a Black Hole that would destroy the Earth and that would ruin the rest of the trip…

There are lots of websites that explain what this thing is. Here is one.

The rest of the week we’ll be attending the conference, networking with other AV guys and of course going to “dinner.”

Thanks to Mark Patton for the travel log and thanks to Curt Larson for the headline.

I asked them to bring me a Higgs boson refrigerator magnet.

Tom Kelchner