Well, I just got back from New York City! I attended the HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference and it was awesome! It was my first time in NYC so I did some touristy things too, like visting Empire State (which was closed), Nintendo World HQ of America, Rockefeller Center, 7th ave (with all the huge TV screens everywhere) and more. The HOPE conference was cool, I stayed at the hotel next door, Affinia (who decided to charge me twice for my stay, by mistake) as Hotel Pennsylvania was full. I got about 6 hours sleep total in 3 days, spent $1000 somehow, and got to meet some online friends.

The Conference registration was on the first floor where they gave you a cool light up badge that was a circuit board solder project itself. Mine didn’t have solid state components on it, so i got them and added them myself, by laying them in the right spots then laying the pcb onto the coffee maker in my Hotel Room.

We had a Mezzanine on the second floor, where I met a lot of vendors and saw a lot of cool stuff for sale. And a cool Lockpicking session was going it seemed almost the whole time I was there! And all talks where given on the 18th floor, where they also sold exclusive HOPE products and DVD’s from Shmoocon and HOPE.

The talks where great, but overcrowded. Hotel PA seems to be too small for a conference this big. but I finally attended my first Social Engineering session with Emanuel, Kevin Mitnick, a guy who had a dog and said the cops let him off of a tick cos he had a dog, a girl who complained about the vulnerabilities of a hugely open social networking site called Facebook, and a guy who said he tricked his college into letting him register late named “Not Kevin.”

When I met Kevin I asked him about his next book, the one that will really explain what he did when he was a fugitive. He said one year! I am dying to read that book. He is a great author with a cool sense of style and humor that you can only find with other computer geeks.

I met up with Murd0c and DrLight, Hektik and his GF, Kurt Cocaine and iBall,

Cessna, RogueClown (who gave a talk on being nice to n00bs), RTF (who was passed out at 2:30pm in iBall’s room, and made all of the awesome artwork for the convention), afreak (who gave a talk on Brilliant exploits). And I also finally met Kevin Mitnick, Emanuel Goldstein, Bernie S, Ed Piskor (creator of the Wizzywig comics (from Pittsburgh too!)) and more. Oh, and I saw one (1) guy from HackPGH (Pittsburgh Hacker Space) who said no one else from HackPGH came, and he was probably only there cos he writes weblogs for Make magazine. I have missed all of you and am glad to have spent my first time in NYC with my hacker friends!

All in all, it was great security conference, but I felt that my small venture to the worlds biggest city, was about meeting friends and having a good time basking in the “river of darkness beneath the neon lights.” A special thanks has to go out to iBall for calling my Friday morning and being inspirational, then dragging me around to cool things, and Murd0c for tagging all the people I didn’t know in my FaceBook album!

I can’t wait to see you all at the next Shmoocon in (Feburary 2011?)! That means YOU Brad Carter.