We got home about an hour ago, and I must say that was the best Shmoocon I have attended since starting at Shmoocon 3.
I’ll post a full account of the event later on tonight or tomorrow, but I just want to say that I met some awesome people and I hope everyone had a great time partying with us.
See you next year!
~16 minutes left in January.
It’s amazing how fast the first month of a new year goes by. Those older than me probably recognize this better, but it’s definitely becoming more noticible as I get older. One minute you’re toasting some champagne with your friends and the next, well… you’re on the fast track to the next year. 
In any event, this month was pretty interesting. We started the new year off near Baltimore with friends, and then I went out to Vegas to cover CES with Hak5. I got the plague while I was there, and unfortunately didn’t get to do any partying with all the awesome people I met out there.
After recovering from the plague and spending a couple of weekends just enjoying Richmond, I went back down to the HakHouse last night and recorded a segment on USB device tracking, which I owe a great deal of thanks to Harlan Carvey for both his book, and his help in my understanding of the windows registry.
February’s looking to be a very interesting month. Shmoocon this coming Friday, and my birthday 6 days later. Valentine’s Day, and then a pretty busy rest of the month. Looking forward to seeing everyone at Shmoocon and hopefully seeing some new faces.
Peace
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.
We’re only two days away! It seems this conference just gets better each year it runs. I wonder if there will be a bigger venue next year, haha.
The live show is ~9pm Friday and should be really fun. We’re having some very cool guests. It will be the last time I will be having alcohol until after my surgery unfortunately, but I will enjoy it.
If you or anyone you know has an extra Shmoocon ticket I would like to get Christine in. There only seems to be one left on ebay worth pursuing and I don’t know if I will be at the computer in 4 hours to take a shot at it.
Somehow I managed to snag a $150 open registration ticket. The $75 tickets were all reserved in under a half second from the time the webserver hit 12:00:00 amazingly. I had even synchronized my system’s clock to it, but alas, no dice.
Happy New Year to everyone, and I hope you all had as good a time as I did last night.
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?
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.
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: