Chris Gerling

So the live show was interesting Sat.  Thanks for all that tuned in.  I need a better way to manage the incoming callers and stuff

I’m listening to dubstep, an offshoot of my buddy Greg’s freshsets site that has listeners this time around.  Really good music.  Check em out at http://www.dubterrain.net/

In other news, I won’t be able to go to Defcon this year.  So I will likely see all the security types at Shmoocon once again next year.

I’ll have a more detailed writeup of my experience at Shmoocon this year sometime during the week. For now I am relaxing back at the Hak5 house and thankfully have the day off tomorrow to recover from what was one hell of a weekend.

I managed to attend G Mark Hardy’s talk as well as Simple Nomad’s which were both excellent as expected. The live show we did on Friday had a bit of a “glitch” and no audio made it to the recording. These things happen and we’ll rebound from it. I made some new friends and contacts, and learned a lot of fun new things as usual.

surbo from http://www.i-hacked.com got us into Katsucon Friday night, and that was a total blast. Saturday was the Shmoo party and that was a lot of fun as well. The alcohol tab lasted a LOT longer this year than last. I didn’t do too much drinking though.

More later, as I need to unwind.

Obviously I’ve neglected to mention much about what happened outside of Shmoocon this past weekend, mainly because I wanted the Shmoocon posts to be about Shmoocon, and not much else.

So here we go:

DC Sleeps Alone Tonight

I had never really partied in DC before, and it makes VA Beach look like an elementary school playground. There are so many places to go, it’s a bit overwhelming. I should’ve paid more attention to the actual names of the places we went, but I know The Reef, Bourbon, and Adams Mills were pretty decent.

Friday night involved roughly 50 people from the podcaster meetup at the Chipotle near the Marriott Wardman. It was basically a train of geeks bar hopping, and while we didn’t cause any damage or get into any trouble (c’mon, geeks!) it was very entertaining.

Saturday night was even bigger, with the entire Adams Mill bar being taken over by Shmoocon people. Picture well over a hundred geeks talking about linux or hacking or whatever with a billion attractive women walking around, and those women finding themselves lacking attention. Well okay i’m fibbing a little, but hey this is semi-professional right?

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Today was just wrapping things up. We checked out of our hotel rooms and stopped by the con, I ducked in on a couple of the presentations going on, and picked up DVDs of the presentations I found to be the most interesting, or most useful for why we were sent there by our command. The plan is to use these to prepare up a full report and perhaps some sort of training to our peers.

What was interesting was that the presentations themselves, while great, were actually not the meat of the conference. It was all about meeting and talking with other people who work in the industry, and actually care about what they do. It felt so awesome to be surrounded by people who actually understood their field, and weren’t in it just for the paycheck (although paychecks are definitely a reason).

I’m definitely going next year.

Day Two was more about DC than it was Shmoocon. We managed to hit up some of the presentations while also making sure to visit with the various vendors and talk with some real security gurus at the same time.

Unlike the first day, this was more about one presentation for me than any of the others.

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I write this now, having slept from approximately 4am to 8:30am, but we’ll get to that in a minute or two

Registration was supposed to start at 1pm according to the guide, but it was more like 1:40ish. In any event Andy and I were all set by 2pm and collected some vendor swag, had an appetizer upstairs at the Pub built into the hotel, and hung out till things kicked off at 3:30pm.

Opening comments were by the Shmoo group staff, I forget the guy’s name now but i’ll get it later. He was decently entertaining, and basically is the founder of this thing, so he drives the flow of everything. I’m going to summarize each speaker:

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