Type faster, I hear banjos ...
OMFG, why didn’t anyone warn me about Vegas?
Black Hat was the most bizarre combination of Copacabana, Comdex, LSD trip, and Bataan Death March. It combined the “best” of jet lag and Rolfing. It was like being inside a pinball machine with a few good friends to keep you company. Being an INTP, I can’t deal well with distractions anyway (the multiple tracks within my own head are bad enough), and Vegas is built to be nothing BUT distractions.
But here are the few highlights of my trip:
- Hoff’s talk (pretty much the only one I sat all the way through)
- Meeting up with a dear former colleague after ten years apart (let’s not wait that long again, m’kay?)
- Meeting Jack Jones, although we really should have been sitting in a Zenlike tea house, contemplating every word with reverence, rather than shouting over a dead crustacean the size of a Volkswagen with Elvis impersonators walking by
- Meeting so many of my other security pundit heroes (I should have known Rothman would be suave in person, myrcurial rocks the house before detonating his verbal IEDs under the foundation, Dave Lewis is my other other evil twin besides rybolov)
- Talking about my special c*mpliance woes with guys who Get It
- Getting into the Microsoft party, but more to the point, escaping again with my eyes and ears intact
- Jeremiah Grossman’s talk at the Fortify dinner
- Bending Shostack’s ear while he was sitting still long enough to eat
- Goddammit, why is everyone in Vegas so TALL???
- STEAK BITS!!
- and of course, my buddy through thick and thin, without whom I would have been lost, clue-depleted and chai-less.
Assuming I ever go back there, I will probably go only to Defcon and bring a large dose of Ritalin and a Segway.
Discovering all over again how old, decrepit and uncool I am ... priceless.
Posted by shrdlu on Sunday, August 10, 2008(1) Comments • Permalink •
