RobotSkirts

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…