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...

When I got back I wandered into the 'High school horror' panel. Not very interesting. I grabbed a seat in the second row for the next panel, a few minutes later I realize I'm sitting behind DilDog and a bunch of other l0pht crew. That was cool

Next up was Weld Pond and Tommy Pickles talking about the MTV REAL LIFE Hacker fiasco. Since I have'nt seen the episode it helped fill in a few blanks. After the talk I spoke with Weld Pond and should be getting info tomorrow from him about his dealing with Anti-Virus companies about l0phtcrack

After getting back I hit the Hackivism panel, then the panel of Emmanual, the EFF, and Emmanuals lawyer from for the MPAA trial on monday. This should be interesting. After that they went further and brought in Jon Johnson (the guy who wrote DeCSS) and Macki (2600 Webmaster) to talk about the sequence of events that led up to the trial. There is definate plan in action to try and catch 2600 off balance at every turn.

When the DVD stuff wrapped up I quickly ran to the 6th floor where I attended the workshop on independant/alternative media put on by Macki and Space Rogue. The presenters were cool and tehcontent was a little useful but more interesting was running into Kevin Poulson and finding out that SecurityFocus.com is great to work for (more on the significance of that in the future). After the presentation I hooked up with Space Rogue for drinks (if it were not for him and HNN, this site would'nt exist and the AV companies would'nt have an opponent). We ended up with Jehrico and Brian Martin and a couple others from the attrition crew in the hotel bar. That was very cool, spent much time in awe.

I eventually wandered up to the screening of 'Freedom Downtime' the 2600 movie. It was REALLY good. If you ever have the oppourtunity, go see it, I'll see about getting it into Edmonton for those of you local to me.

After all that I crawled to my room for a bit and caught a bit of the storm that is Howard Stern. The guys a looney, you ain't missing much

Stay cool everyone, if you want me to do something while I'm here,just mail me at Webmaster@AntiAV.com and I'll see what I can do. I must apologize for any spelling/grammatical errors but I'm tired, in rough shape and I don't have the time nor my normal resources for cleaning this up. Have fun everyone

RenderMan
Live (if you can call it alive) from H2K in New York

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