Streets of Fire

Come on, come out of the rain.

You're not oppressed, you're just too learned...

"Streets of Fire", The New Pornographers

Friday afternoon, a bunch of us were standing in the lobby. Jessica came by and said she was having problems getting into her home machine to get her boarding pass info. She was using the business centre, which only had locked-down Windows machines with no SSH client. The wireless was $87/hr or some such, and the free wireless set up by Usenix was way the hell over on the other side of the hotel. She was just about resigned to get up and go when a guy beside her piped up and said, "Hey, there's this tool that should help you out..."

"So I use it," she said, "and it turns out it tunnels SSH over DNS. It was the slowest connection I've ever used, but it was usable, and I got into my home machine."

I looked at her with wide eyes. "Was that...was that Dan Kaminsky who helped you?"

"I dunno," she said, "I've never meen him before. What does he look like?"

Normally I suck at descriptions, but I had this one down. "He looks like Brendan Frasier," I said confidently.

She shrugged. "I dunno, I don't think that was him...oh wait, there's the guy there."

We all turned to see Dan Kaminsky grinning. "That's one of the few times I've seen that tool actually be useful," he said.

Turns out he's a very friendly and funny guy, and if I heard him right he was roommates with the guy who started Friendster, who Jessica also knew. I foamed at the mouth for a bit in fanboyish wonder, then told him about IPoD and William Shatner's rap of the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech from Free Enterprise. And of course, he wore the tracking monkey:

After that we split up for a bit, then re-united for supper. We hit FIXME, where we found a cute Mongolian waitress ("How many times can you say that?" asked Andy) and Bill Clinton burgers. We hit The Angry Inch in search of Angry Ale, which they no longer sold. Andy bought a t-shirt ("I'm never coming back to this place. And the last time I said I wasn't coming back to a place, I bought the place a round. This is cheaper").

Then we headed back to the the final LISA party. It was in the original hotel building, and it was the biggest goddamned suite I've ever seen. It had to be bigger than any two apartments I've lived in put together. There were lots of people there. I drank toasts with Wout (Cisco IT guy from Belgium; friendly, funny and BEST NAME EVAR) and Noah to Strata Rose Chalup, drinking this godawful Romanian plum moonshine...oh god, it was harsh. I spent a good 15 minutes with one of the board members of LOPSA trying to figure out the purpose of one of the suite's alcoves (we were stumped). And natch, I got more pix of the tracking monkey with William Lefebvre (top, 'member?):

and many, many others.

Eventually it came time to go home, so I said goodbye and collapsed in my suite.

Quotes I missed earlier:

• "I've got one user who considers 7-bit ASCII a luxury compared to what you can get from 5 or 6 bits."
• "'Cooperative collaboration.' Yeah, it's part of our vision statement."
• "90% of being a sysadmin is typing at computers. 10% is typing at users." -- Mark C.
• Pretty sure I saw Theodore T'so grinning (or at least had a confused look on his face) when I did Logan's Run.