Daniel Spisak on Technology

Okay folks so its been a while since I wrote on here at any length. Why you might be asking? Well between doing classes at UCI fulltime for the summer session and working as a consultant on the side for this one contract that we affectionaly call the “Pit of Despair” I’ve been lucky to have enough time to get decent sleep let alone write at length.
So now that I’ve absconded with myself up to Big Bear with my friend Aaron to his parents cabin in Big Bear I’ve got some time to kill while I watch Aaron try to beat Ace of Spades on Hard in Guitar Hero (btw, if you havent played Guitar Hero get thyself to a PS2 and rock out).

So, DEFCON 14 was….interesting. Some highlights from this years con include:

Riviera Hotel security having SWAT on-call Saturday night. No joke.

Riviera Hotel security basically forcing the clearing out of the *entire* penthouse level of the Monaco Tower on Saturday night due to noise complaints from 4 or 5 levels below the penthouse.
Riviera has only ONE pool! And it closes at 7PM? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? That has to change next year somehow.

Some asshat decided on Friday it would be fun to hack into the HVAC controls for the Riviera and turn off all the AC in the hotel for 3 hours. His ass got caught and dealt with.

Some *other* asshat decided it would be a good idea to trip out of illegal substances in his room somewhere halfway up the Monaco Tower and throw a full can of Red Bull out of his window. Which then hit one of the hotel security guards. These asshats were swiftly 86′ed from the hotel and I think one had their badge removed as well.

Party-wise the 303 had a kicking party and the Ninja Hackers had a decent one as well but apprently they got caught having a minor drinking at their party. So of course everyone has to card at these parties now. Of course Cezars party was this lame party within a party at the Ninja Hackers party. Makes no sense to me why the groups have to be such elitest pricks about who can party with them. Siviak had a rocking party going on in his penthouse suite on Friday and Saturday night but I forget whom was sponsoring the party

Talk-wise there was some fun stuff at this years con. Some of my favorites included wifi sniffing using high powered amature model rockets, bump keying, safecracking, and the talk about how Hollywood gets hacker culture right and wrong. Other talks on wireless driver exploits and data forensics were pretty useful also.

For next year I am going to try and make sure I can stay at the Riv instead of Circus Circus because while its across the street its still to damn far to walk if I need to drop shit off.

ComicCon 2006!

Well this was the first time I’d been to Comic Con since my first time in 2000. If anything Comic Con is even bigger then I remember it being back then. After driving in rush hour traffic from Temple City all the way down to San Diego I managed to just barely get there in time before registration closed. Let me say that getting registered and your badge for Comic Con before Saturday morning is increadibly imperative. Basically, the line to register Saturday spans the entire length of the San Diego Convention Center, and then some because it folds on itself once or twice and can extend all the way to the adjacent hotel. At around 1 or 2PM that day they stopped letting people enter the line because they were not going to be able to get registered before reg closed at 7PM. Crazy shit.

I managed to check out a whole slew of places in the dealers room and met up with a bunch of actors I recognized from 24 and a few other shows like B5 which was a lot of fun. Also ran into Vincent at the Surge of Power booth where he was hawking the DVD for the movie (I worked on it as a 2nd assistant director, it was fun to make). I also ran across the THQ games booth and saw a demo of an upcoming PC game called Supreme Commander, an RTS game coming out in early 2007 most likely. Some of the cool features of the game included the ability to use a dual head display to play the game in along with extensive varieties of detailes unit types. Other nice aspects of the game include the ability to coordinate timed strikes with groups of units and my favorite feature of all: tacital and surgical nuclear strike capability! When a nuke goes off on the screen the whole screen flashes white for about 10-20 seconds where you can’t see anything. The open beta of the game will be coming to GameSpy.com in about late September or mid October. Look for it!

For now I shall leave you all with a photo of my friend Matt using the hotel hair dryer to try and dry his wet Browncoat’s t-shirt. I kept telling him to just wear it damp and it would be dry by the time we got to the con floor but he just wouldnt hear me out. So onto the silly public humilation!