Day 1
Forgive me but I'm in a wierd shape right now, no sleep and very little sugar make Render a dull boy...
I arrived yesterday (thursday) and took a shuttle bus with a bunch of other people into manhattan from the airport. That was the most surreal thing I have ever gone through. Coming from a city of 800,000 of nice Canadians to here is a major culture shock for me. The first thing was seeing all the famous buildings in manhattan that up until 2 weeks ago, I thought that I'd never see. Everything has this wierd 'washed out' look that I can't describe except as looking at a photo, but knowing it's a photo. After getting an improptu tour of the island by our driver I learned why New York drivers have the reputation that they do. This place is NUTS!! Red lights: Suggestion. Car horns: background noise. Walk lights: ignored. After a short time you get used to it. I went to dinner with a gentleman who's name escapes me and during our walk we saw to cliche'd New York things: A cab on fire being put out by the fire deparment, and a bum passed out in the middle of the sidewalk. This place is nuts, nut not as bad as I thought.
I've adapted quite well to dodging traffic and other wierd things, It's not that bad here. It would take a little bit to completely ignore it, but if your planning a trip, it's actually pretty good. Just be careful where you go.
Today was interesting. First off was a presentation about 'pros and cons of working for the man', some definate useful info. Next I want out to time square, what a zoo. Bought a friend a gift from the Warner Bros. store and took 2 displays of the 'free' AOL CD's that they had on the counter, you know, the ones that look like a TIDE box. I think I'm going to have a lauch party with them. We are on the 18th floor afterall...
After getting back I grabbed a second row seat, then discovered that I was sitting behind Dildog and that WeldPond would be speaking along with Tommy Pickles about the MTV Real Life Hacker fiasco. Since I had'nt seen the episode, it was enlightening. I spoke to Weld Pond afterwards and I am going to talk to him tomorrow (and Dildog if I'm lucky) about thier dealings with Anti-Virus vendors in relation to L0phtcrack and BO2K
Later I hit the Hackivism panel, nothing of note there, then the panel of Emmanual, the EFF, and Emmanuals lawyer from for the MPAA trial on monday. This should be interesting. After that they had Jon Johnson (the guy who wrote DeCSS) and Macki (2600 webmaster) and thier side of the sequence of events. There is a definate calculated angle on the part of the MPAA to catch 2600 off balence at every turn.
Affter the DVD stuff ended I