I am so fucking beat.
Last couple years I wrote up stuff at the end of each day so that I would have a good plan moving forward. This year, though, there was so much fucking shit to do that I just skipped it. As such, I’ll be rattling this all out stream-of-consciousness. It probably won’t make much sense. To the yards of you who want more detail, too fucking bad. Guess you should’ve gone.
Defcon 15 and the accompanying vacation is all over and done with. It went very well. To such a degree that I’d be glad to go back next weekend and do it all over again.
This year was a big deal for me personally as I had several friends (David, Nikki, Jay) who I’ve known since I was young and colossally stupid and I really never got over that desperate need for validation. Especially after convincing them to drag their collective ass all the way from the various corners of the US in which they live, I really wanted them to have a good con. I hope they did.
There’s a moment any time you go a long way to do something you really want to do that it all washes over you and you realize it’s actually happening. That moment happened on Thursday around 11 when we lined up to get badges, Deviant walked up with his badge running and all I could do was stand there and stare at the goddamn thing like an idiot. I would later find out that the badge itself made Slashdot, Digg and BoingBoing. (The Hacking Contest winners were ridiculous, the winner having a working VU meter function among other things.)
Tracks were really good this year. Dan Kaminsky and Bruce Potter were both really fucking fantastic, and there were lots of new stuff I hadn’t seen before. There were so many things that I wanted to see that somehow I mist Major Malfunction’s talk. I’ll be flogging myself later.
Didn’t make it to the White Ball but the Black Ball was OK. Hacker Jeopardy was fan-fucking-tastic, largely because of the fact that the teams they picked out were so terrifically bad that we basically spent both nights heckling them. It was hilariously fun.
And then there was the Dateline thing. I mist the talk in which the reporter got outed. It’s too bad, I would have loved to have seen that in first person. I’ll save the detailed opinion for later, but suffice it to say, if hackers are punished for not living within the rules I don’t see why turnabout isn’t fair play. Press are required to get green badges and agree to the press rules. There’s no special treatment that I’m aware of, and there were lots of extremely awesome press people there. One of them was among the first to post hacked badge photos, so it’s obvious that at least some of them are there having fun like the rest of us, even while they’re working. Fucking rad.
On Monday Pat and I went out to Hoover Dam. I guess I had it in my head that nobody would be interested in anything as simple as a landmark and historical monument. Boy howdy was I ever fucking wrong. That place was PACKED. Turns out being packed in a very long line with people who can’t seem to get their kids from not crying like maniacs. After finally dragging their asses through the line, we got on with the tour. In case you didn’t know it, Hoover Dam is fucking HUGE. Like unrealistically fucking huge. So immense that even after seeing it in person it’s hard to quantify as real.
Dave and I went downtown and saw the old preserved signs, like the 5th St. Liquor sign and the original Aladdin’s lamp. That was pretty fucking nifty.
The STi drove like a dream, and I feel about a hundred zillion times more confident in my driving skill now having actually taken the car all the way through Vegas and back a few times. (I really wanted to take it over Hoover Dam, but the traffic was horrid.)
So, where does that leave me?
I still want to figure out a way to participate. I’m not nearly l33t enough for either of the CTFs or the wireless contests. Scavenger hunt, maybe? Or BCC… Pat wants to do DefconBots, perhaps we could enlist Rab’s help for that one.
This was definitely the best Defcon ever, and I’m really looking forward to what comes up next year.
But I really, really want the badge pix from the closing ceremonies and the Kingpin rap song. Hurry the fuck up already, guys!
