RobotSkirts

On Tuesday, we hopped a train to Berlin. Fabienne met us at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Europe’s largest two level train station. From there we preceded to the apartment she had found us. It’s fully furnished and has one bed plus a very nice futon. The only real issue is an unfriendly IPCop firewall. Friends from Austria are staying with us right now since there’s a tattoo convention this weekend. (more…)

We hopped on a EuroCity train Sunday morning and headed to Prague. Bre had lived in Prague in ‘95 as part of a film production company and wanted to see how it had changed. My initial impression was not so good, we were in the new town and it looked like the iron curtain had just fallen. I was disappointed about the lack of German words. With German you can take a wild guess at the pronunciation, but I’m completely lost with Czech. How can a language with 10 vowels manage to create a sentence with none? (more…)

I’m a vegetarian, Bre is a pescetarian, and Sean is vegan so we attempted to hit as many veggie friendly restaurants as possible. First up was Vegetasia. The sign says Taiwanese, but it was pretty much generic asian food. They create dishes using fake meat, so even the “shrimp” actually has the consistency of real shrimp. The first time we went was the all you can eat lunch buffet. It was really weird being able to eat every item on a buffet without a second thought. The next place was Rupp’s an irish pub with an all vegetarian and mostly vegan menu. They even had vegan schnitzel and apple strudel. I ate at Vienna Tunnel Line one evening. The vegetarian selection was great, the cooking was a crap shoot. Our final two days were spent at Formosa. It only has 8 seats, but that guarantees a hot, attentively prepared meal. It also doubles as a small veg/vegan market. This restaurant hunting experience was a lot of fun and I hope to do it a few other places in the future. While trying to find Formosa we stumbled across one of Vienna’s massive flak towers. (more…)

I spent a lot of time with Michael and Florian from Graffiti Research Labs Vienna. They’re known for the better laser tagging software. Flo took me on a tour of the legal graffiti walls around the Danube Canal (pictures on Flickr). Another interesting stop was the paint store. It used to be a standard paint store, but now caters to graffiti artists. I’ve also got two GRL shirts now that were stenciled using pigment. Flo gave me an overdue haircut. I think he was just excited about the interstitial mullet. (more…)

I went to Vienna for Roboexotica, a festival for cocktail robotics. It’s in its ninth year. The original idea was that there were always conferences to philosophize about technology during the day with parties in the evening, why not combine the two? I stayed with Bre Pettis during the duration of the event. During the month of November he was the artist in residence for monochrom. I think the simplest description I’ve heard of monochrom lately is “art pranksters”. I had met Bre a couple times before, but really got to know him at CCCamp. (more…)

I left for Vienna on Monday Nov 19th. I had packed electronics gear in a Pelican 1620 hardcase, my clothes in a duffle, and had my Timbuk2 as a carry on. Despite my creative redistribution between the bags the case still ended up being 9lbs too heavy. The previous two days I had cleaned the house pretty thoroughly in preparation for my exodus. I showed up at the airport early since they’ve got free wifi, but this practice has become more annoying since they changed the departure gate at least 4 times before we left. The flight to SFO wasn’t bad, but we arrived so late that I was only standing in the terminal 5 minutes before I was getting on the next plane. I lucked out on the flight to Frankfurt; I think I was sitting next to the only empty seat on the plane. The night before, I had checked in online and picked a seat in the only row that was completely empty. (more…)

I’m leaving for Vienna on November 19th. Once there, I’ll be meeting up with Bre who will be coming to the end of his artist in residency with monochrom. That week is DeepSec, a security conference, and Roboexotica, a festival for cocktail robotics. I’ll be covering both for Hack-A-Day. From there we’re going to travel to Berlin (via Prague?). We’ll be living in Berlin (fbz adjacent?) for a month and attending the 24th Chaos Communication Congress December 27th-30th. We’re headed home January 2nd. At least I hope we are; the picture above illustrates the last time I tried to leave Berlin and tangled with the S-Bahn system. I’ll be getting home in time for CES January 7th-10th.

I’m back in Vegas after spending last weekend in San Diego for TooCon 9. ToorCon has been my favorite yearly hacker conference. It’s never too crowded and the people you meet are great. I’m finally feeling like I fit in. You can see the talks I covered over at Hack-A-Day. I still need to write up the whole experience. I also need to cover bunnie and Christopher Tarnovsky’s silicon hacking workshop. I’m using the portrait Matt Westervelt shot as my new bio pic. (more…)

I got a flight itinerary from my parents this morning and found out they were headed to Boston (I’m not sure if they had told me in advance). I planned on visiting Boston sometime this fall to see my sister and friends. With the chance of me making it home for Thanksgiving or Xmas looking even slimmer I decided that there was no time better than the present to make the Boston trip and see my parents. I get in at 1AM tonight and I’ll be there about a week. I’m sitting in McCarran right now but my gate doesn’t seem to have either outlets or the sweet sweet free wifi; I think that’s a sign that I should go find some lunch.

(P.S. today was the first time I used Kayak, pretty damn sweet)

These are the events I’d like to go to in the near future. Any others that you’d suggest?

• Arse Elektronika October 5-7 San Francisco
• Toorcon 9 October 19-21 San Diego
• DeepSec November 20-23 Vienna
• Roboexotica November 22-25 Vienna
• Chaos Communication Congress Between Xmas and New Years Berlin
• SXSW Interactive March 7-11 Austin
• ShmooCon Spring D.C.
• ReCon Montreal
• Toorcon Seattle Seattle
• Plus SEMA, CES, AEE, HOPE, Blackhat, Defcon, SIGGRAPH, and many even more ethereal conferences: Goatcon, Hammockcon, Railcon, Containercon, etc…