“Your mission, Boyd, should you choose to accept it is to fly from Manila to San Francisco and give a talk at RSA 2012. You’ll travel roughly 13,000 miles in 24 hours across almost every country known to man and present the day after you arrive, also you’ll be 14 hours behind yourself timezone-wise and half your stuff will go missing out of your suitcase.”
On the bright side, I’ll never have to watch The Terminal.
Just 24 hours before RSA, I was sitting in Manila watching a bunch of dudes try to rescue a small child from a locked car.
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Everything failed (including the ill advised attempt to prise it open with an umbrella, which ended up looking more like a somewhat forlorn javelin) until a master lockpicker chap arrived and busted the kid out to much applause. Prior to that, I rode a horse called Steve up a volcano:
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I dodged past a guard at a Star Wars convention so I could have my picture taken with history’s greatest monster (he’s the one on the left, in case you were wondering):
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I also saw this guy, who is clearly wearing the most amazing thing you’ll ever see in your life:
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Wind forward about 24 hours, throw in a bunch of praying for death, bad food and probable helpings of deep vein thrombosis and I’d arrived in San Francisco. Did I mention the busted suitcase? I had a TSA approved lock on the case, so imagine my dismay when I got my luggage back only to find 1) the lock missing 2) the zipper busted 3) various items and tighty whiteys MIA.
This will become a thing later in the blog entry. For now, a handy visual pointer as to where I am at this stage in the writeup:
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And now, to register and sit down for a well deserved break. Or, you know, not.
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I’d be lying if registration made much sense to me. RSA takes place in two large buildings separated by a big road thing. Humping it from one to the other takes a while. So of course to register I had to go in one building, get my badge then cross over:
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Here, you pick up all the conference related material and a speaker guide. After that, you walk back to the original building where the tradeshow and a bunch of the talks take place.
Whoops.
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I didn’t do a very good job of finding my way around, but then again the guide on the wall combined size 4 font with a great big coffee desk placed in front of it.
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See, this is why you carry a ball of string at all times.
I quite liked the below booth, because their entire gimmick seemed to be “dress up in bullet proof armour” which is something I can get behind 100%.
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This next one was brilliant, assuming you wanted to shoulder surf and write down lots of contact information.
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“Not sure if want”? Most definitely.
Here’s our booth below. Apologies if you came looking and didn’t find me. I was probably asleep on the floorspace located between Sophos and the cake shop.
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I also saw these guys, so of course I spent ten minutes complaining about my lost boxer shorts and broken suitcase.
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It’s okay, they remembered me from last time.
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Assuming I’m probably banned from entering the US for the next six thousand years I’d like to say it was a pleasure to meet everyone that came to the talk. Speaking of which:
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Now you too can know the terror of a room full of people eyeballing you. Fun fact: when I got up on stage, there were no chairs at the side. The tech setup guy was surprised when I told him that only a few years ago, they’d put chairs at the sides of the stage because apparently speakers had wandered right off and collapsed in a heap while rambling about Botnets or whatever.
I guess they don’t do that anymore.
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The talk was all about the shenanigans focused on the Japanese Tsunami / Earthquake, and how people tried to profit from 419 mails, malware, fake donation websites and SEO poisoning. Related podcast here.
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They didn’t record the talk, but they did record a 20 minute version for a very receptive collection of students and those should be on Youtube soon(ish).
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They asked questions and everything. Thanks for coming along, and I’ll definitely take part in any all expenses paid trip to your campus that you want to throw my way.
Well, that just about wraps up another long, rambling blog entry about a conference. Thanks for staying awake until the end, poke the guy sitting next to you that isn’t and I’ll see how far I can make all twelve of these airmiles stretch…
Christopher Boyd