Introducing Dan Pilling – Fun, Music Addict, Petrol Head

I managed to grab 5 minutes to interview Dan Pilling, a recent convert to Technet UK as the IT Professional Audience Marketing Manager.  And what better way to introduce Dan to you properly than with 10 Questions!

Dan Pilling

1. What is your name and where do you come from? (Imagine this being said Cilla Black – Blind Date Style!)

Dan Pilling from Reading – Established 1977

2. How would you describe yourself using 3 tags?

Fun, Music-Addict, Petrol Head

 3. What is your favourite gadget?

My Sonos Kit – It’s a Wireless Music System

 

4. What would we find if we asked you to empty out your pockets?

My wallet and 5 coffee reward cards. (Dan’s a bit of a coffee addict you see! – Caramel Latte’s are his favourite!)

 

5. If you were on a desert island what 3 items would you take with you?

My acoustic guitar, iPod with headphones and a solar charger to charge the phone.

 

6. What was your first Microsoft product and what is your favourite current product?

My first Microsoft product was Dos 6.11 and my current favourite Microsoft product is my Xbox. I’m looking forward to playing Viva Piñata tonight! It just arrived in the post! (We suspect that Dan may be attached to his Xbox all weekend now!)

 

7. What did you want to do when you were little?

Something to do with cars…. (I asked driver? and he said…No,) a car journalist.

 

8. How many pets do you have/ or had and what were their names?

I used to have a dog called Taylor, he was a Labrador

 

9. What are you looking forward to in technology?

Spotify on Windows Phone as it means that I can then mirror my music collection and listen to my collection wherever I go. (including that desert island!)

 

10. What was your most embarrassing tech moment?

Dan actually gave us two answers to this one so I’ll give you both!

 

Being in a room with 100 CIO’s and senior IT folks and waiting to introduce Bob Muglia a senior VP at Microsoft at IT Forum.  I got a call from his business manager saying that his plane had technical difficulties and he couldn't make the presentation. I managed to turn the situation around and ended up turning it into a a giant discussion session.

 

Another embarrassing moment was when I rant he Windows 7 Enterprise launch were Steve Ballmer was due to present. 10 Minutes before the presentation I got a call from his business manager saying that the slide deck was wrong, the thing was it was up on the podium and there were already 150 CIO’s in the audience happily waiting to see it. My heart rate went through the roof at the thought of having to alter the slide deck on the fly.  Fortunately a few minutes later I got another call from the business manager saying sorry they had been looking at the wrong set of slides and it was all fine.

In order to help get to know our readers better it would be awesome if you too gave your answers to the same 10 questions I’ll do the same and post my answers next week for you. I’ll also be going round the rest of the IT Pro team and getting them to do the same! And remember that you can also follow us on Twitter !