Shmoocon 2010 Advice

I write here this morning in an attempt to return from a self-inflicted unhappy state.

One of the reasons I maintain archives of my content here — embarrassing as it always is — is because I force myself to revisit it at times like this, in the hope that I might learn more from my past mistakes than I did the first time through them.

I invite you to play along. Strike through and asides noted as we improve my own past. If only it was this easy!

Shmoocon.

I just signed up for Shmoocon, billing itself as “…an all-new, annual East coast hacker convention hell-bent on offering an interesting and new atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software & hardware solutions, as well as open discussion of critical information security issues.“

The last (only) LUG meeting I went to was full of Haha I use loonix! 1337! people and the last other geek meet-up I went to was a mix of ultra-brights and people that change backup tapes every night (on reseting TCP sessions: “So you could knock out an FTP session! other tape-changer: But could you knock over an ssl session?” (sorry that’s so obscure but it was silly at the time))

Hackers! As a lowly consultant (like a sysadmin albeit ~35+ times over, simultaneously) I ’ll expect to be surrounded by a bunch of extremely bright coders, a few people like myself, and a larger handful of nerds and clueless wannabe’s (those last three groups may intermingle a bit).

I hope I get a t-shirt.

What’s with the incessant, murky qualification and labeling and classification of fellow human beings? Lose it.