DefCon17 summary

I got back late Monday after this years DefCon17. This was my 4th year attending the conference. It was the best one yet as far as how fun it was and how much I got out of it. I remember my first year and it was crazy and I felt like I did not belong there. The talks were over my head and it was a zoo. The following 2 years it got better. This year though, I made it a point to plan out each days events etc. I also went well out of my norm to socialize, get people involved, and do what I could to make the event fun.

My friend and I did all of the timing and temperature measuring of the beer cooling contest. I bought about 4 cases of beer and passed it around. I also talked the hula hoop pool girl into hanging with our group and later put her up on the DJ stage at the black and white ball. One of the cute girls who sold cigarettes and blinking toys for the casino I got to follow me around and helped sell her out of inventory twice. I lost count of the girls I played with at the various parties. Mostly just getting them off their ass and onto the floor, or putting them up on stage for the crowd to cheer at and stuff. I ended up building a pretty good group of people that hung out informaly throughout the con. I would say 20+ or so by the events end.

The talks were pretty good. Talks that stood out were the opening and closing talks. Dan Kaminski gave a talk and if he wasnt so shit faced it might have meant something. Adam Savage of mythbusters was there to give a talk about failure. That could have been much better, They gave him 40 min after the talk for questions and there wasnt a single question asked about failure, just mythbusters this or mythbusters that. Scott Moulten (sp) gave another talk about data recovery. i have seen him speak ever year and for my line of work his has always been the best and I have gotten the most out of. There was a group who talked about the world of warcraft API. It was ok. but a huge disapointment. They used the api to use color notification for in game events to represent protected functions that have been disabled, This is nothing new and current ui mods do this to blink colors when someone needs to be decursed,healed,buffed etc... They then used a 3rd party app to translate the notifications visualy to make a bot and claim its ok because the multiboxing community use the same app. I wont say anything more about it than that as I dont want a thread lock/remove. But it was very meh and so not a big deal like they trumped it up to be.

In conclusion, this years was the best. Were thinking of maybe doing some 0 mechanical or steam punk driven piston and enter the beer cooling contest instead of just helping out next time. At $120 +travel/room/food/strippers/beer its a cheap event compared to others in the same catagorie. If you have any intrest in the computer industry etc. I recomend trying to attend next year. You wont be disapointed. If you bring your girlfriend, I will dance with her and prolly put her on stage. Im getting pretty good at it.