• Security Conference: An opportunity to lock yourself into a crowded venue with a couple thousand people with few people skills, no respect for personal space, and a lifetime of being told they are the smartest people in the room.
• Hints to Speakers:  If your presentation amounts to no more than chest beating or a war story, save it.  If you feel the need to spend an hour doing a code review on the buggy software package you wrote for your thesis, I’m not interested.  If you want to demo a new product from your company, but can’t explain in a few sentences how it could be used in a real world situation that actually comes from the real world, try again.
• If you’re more interested in chatting up one of the young females who attended the conference than demo’ing and discussing your product and services to a guy from a Fortune 500 company, guess who’s going to have a bad day when you try to convince my company to buy said product and service?
• Using the Star Trek TNG font in red on a black background for your slides isn’t cool, it’s annoying.
• When attending a briefing on using the “hacker mindset” in a preparedness / survival situation, don’t sit in the back and make snide remarks when the presenter suggests that personal defense should at least be considered.  Especially to the guy carrying two pocket knives and wearing the ball cap from an ammunition dealer.  You know, the one who raised his hand to all of the “does anyone know how to…” or “has anyone ever….” questions.
• Seriously, dressing up like the guy you imagined you looked like in CounterStrike is just sad, especially at a technical conference.  Especially if you volunteer that information.  Especially if you’re concealed carrying an airsoft gun.

Many thanks to Scott Adams for the chuckle.  My 401k statement arrived the other day.  I’m going to just file that one away.  No sense in looking at it.  It’s going to be a very long time before I can think about retirement.

• Why are conferences and conventions always held in city centers where the traffic is always a nightmare and parking is always at least 6 blocks away from the event?
• Security conference demographics: 1/3 juvenile delinquents, 1/3 suits scared out of their minds, and 1/3 scarred up old shaman.
• Someone needs to tell Steve Jobs that Kevin Mitnick raided his wardrobe and is stretching everything out.
• On the other hand, Mitnick’s presentation showed just how easy it is to own the keys to the kingdom by snowballing a lot of little mistakes.
• By the end of the day, I was making a shopping list for the ordnance it would take to slag all of our IT assets as a last resort when someone gets inside the wire.
• Taking out of town visitors to Cunningham’s for one of their cheeseburgers or Kentucky Hot Brown sandwiches requires an explanation that you only eat like that once or twice a year, and it goes a long way towards explaining why Louisville has great stroke and cardio-pulmonary disease centers.
• Hint to vendors at a conference:  When someone stands in front of your booth, wearing an ID badge and polo shirt with the emblem of one of your local customers, it behooves you to at least acknowledge their presence.  It’s almost budget time, and your competitors across the way at least talked to me about what their product could do for me.
• Basically the speeches and presentations today came down to this:  minimize everything so you have less to worry about, prioritize your stuff, and pay attention to details.  Sounds familiar.
• With the wife and daughter out of the house for the evening, it’s really nice to throw a Dad movie in, make a simple dinner, and relax with Boo after a long week.  

The only patch for human stupidity is experience.  — Presenter, 2011 DerbyCon Security Conference

 Uncle BadTouch provided by the great Robb Allen.

This one is a riff on something Tam posted about the latest example of “Watch Your Neighbors” coming out of Washington:

Where do you draw the line? How far down the slope do you slide before you decide you don’t like the view anymore?

Talk about a thorny issue.  On the one hand, we all want to do everything we can to keep bad things from happening, and we all screamed to high heaven on September 12 when all of the little things that weren’t noticed or reported that could have at least reduced the risks and damage on 9/11 came to light.  On the other hand, citizens have the right to do things in their life that others might look askance at without risking a visit from the men in the dark blue suits.  The things someone would do to get ready for a terrorist attack are for the most part perfectly legal and innocuous by themselves.   It’s when the fertilizer is combined with the diesel and a mind to use them destructively that someone should say something if they see something.

Example:  Lots of my neighbors are shooters and hunters.  I know that at least a few of them reload because I’ve given them brass.  So that means they have at least some gunpowder on the premises.  To me, that’s normal.  But to the government, it’s none of their business until one of those neighbors starts packing that gunpowder into packages or pipes and attaches a fuse. 

Example:  I regularly hear shooting, sometimes a lot of it, from the fields around the house.  As long as I don’t hear rounds coming over the house, I tend to look up at the first shot and then ignore it.  If I started hearing loud explosions and the distinctive sound of a heavy machine gun, I might go on down the road to see what’s going on.  Hey, who doesn’t like explosions and machine guns?  But unless I see something that’s actually illegal, I’m not calling the cops.

Example:  A group of people who get together to practice shooting silhouette targets that are placed around realistic office or home settings may be getting ready for a terrorist attack or a robbery.  Or maybe they’re shooting IDPA.  Who’s to say?

Example:  A young woman leaves behind a backpack on a bus, and someone notices it after she’s a couple of blocks behind.  Is it a terrorist leaving behind a bomb or is it a young mother who forgot her diaper bag?

I guess my take on it is this:  I wouldn’t want my neighbors, co-workers, or some yutz on the subway running to DHS if they spy me carrying my gun, reading a ‘subversive’ book, or heck, talking to a friend about how much we don’t like the current government.  So I mind my own business, try to not annoy the neighbors, and complain to the neighbors when they annoy me. 

What comes of programs like this are incremental steps towards a  true surveillance state.  People in the Soviet Union or Germany both before and after World War II didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become snitches all at once.  That frog was boiled very slowly over the space of years.

Reporting by citizens against other citizens for doing nothing more than living their lives the way they want to is a very dangerous thing, and it does nothing to make us safer.  If you see a crime, report it.  If  something seems odd to you, remember it.  Maybe it really was part of a crime, and you might be able to help an investigation.  But don’t report someone to the police for seeming odd.  This comes from someone who enjoys people watching, but admits his own oddness enough to recognize it as being part of being human in others.

• When a judge gives you an hour for lunch, and 4 of the 45 people in your jury pool decide to not return at all, it makes His Honor a bit testy.
• It is not a wise thing to come back from lunch smelling like a distillery.  But at least you came back.
• It is easy to spot the jurors who are normally working on salary and those who are normally under a union contract.  The jurors who work for a set salary are used to staying until the job gets done.  The union people start to get itchy at hour 5, and get downright irate at hour 7 if they believe they will have to stay late.
• When during the jury selection process the defense counsel plays the race card, you know it’s going to be a long day.
• For some reason I’m not surprised that I’ve told the defense counsel in two criminal jury selections that one of the local prosecutors and I are acquaintances and that his brother is godfather to my children and on both occasions I haven’t been chosen for the jury.
• Listening to some of the people who are serving with me reminds me of how lucky I am to have a boss and co-workers who are willing to take up the slack when things like this come up.  I’ve been at the courthouse for three straight days, and will be spending half of tomorrow there as well.  The clerk tells me that’s about par for the course, and I should expect the same thing next week.  The boss and my team seem to be taking it all in stride.
• Amazingly enough, a lot of lawyers seem to be willing to settle when they hear that the jury pool is on its way up.

Today was day one of jury duty.  I will be doing it for the next couple of weeks.  Today was orientation, paperwork, and all that.  Here are some things that popped into my head:

• The deputy sheriffs that work at the courthouse wear their pistols on their strong side and their Tazers on their weak side with the butt of the Tazer facing forward for a cross draw.  Never noticed any of the police on the street carrying them like that, but it makes sense.  If you train to cross draw for less lethal, you’re less likely to mistakenly draw your sidearm and shoot someone.
• Some people confuse a jury duty summons with a license to ask ignorant questions.  Seriously, how many times does the nice lady have to say “No, we don’t provide free parking.” and “You need to be able to serve every day for the next two weeks.” before people figure out that they’re going to have to pay to park and that they need to ready to come to the courthouse every day for the next two weeks?
• The instructions say “Call the hotline after 6 PM every week night to find out if you need to come to the courthouse the next day.” That means that when Mickey’s big hand is on the 12 and his little hand is on the 6, you can pick up Mr. Telephone and dial in seven numbers.  A nice person will have left a message telling you if you need to come the next morning.  It doesn’t mean ask the clerk three times if you have to come tomorrow while the rest of us want to get on with the day.
• When the form says “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”, if you have ever been convicted of a felony, you mark yes, even if it happened in 1989.  Sorry, those tend to be for life.  To his credit, the man who asked this seemed pissed that he wouldn’t be able to be on a jury, which shows that he may have gotten his act together enough that he wants to do some civic duty in the last two decades.
• To the genius who thought to put a public wi-fi hotspot in the jury waiting area, bless you.  Tomorrow the laptop goes to the courthouse with me.
• As much as I love a good page turner, taking Hard Magic to read through the boring parts of the day might have been a bad decision.  I read through it in about 3 hours, and then I had nothing to read.  Maybe Larry Correia could write a really long book for people who need something that lasts six to eight hours.  In the meantime, I need to bring something that is less enjoyable to read.  I need to find something in the sweet spot of interesting enough to want to read but not so good that I rip through it.
• When we were being taken by randomly selected groups to jury selection for several cases, the clerk would read off our juror numbers.  She asked that we say “Here!” or something so that she knew she was sending the right people to the right judges.  After the 10th or so person who didn’t say anything and didn’t move when called, I could almost hear her think “Pay attention and sound off like you’ve got a pair!” just like Drill Sergeant Decker used to.  The people who work in the jury office don’t get paid enough.
• Sitting within earshot of the clerk and muttering “This is bull****!” and “When can I go home?” over and over as you wait to be called to a jury pool isn’t going to make this any easier on you and is going to make life fun for the clerk if you ever need them to do something for you.

Now that Boo is talking in complete sentences, it’s time to teach him some important phrases for life:

• Nochmal ein Bier, bitte!
• Uno mas cervesa, por favor!
• Shall not be infringed!
• From my cold dead hands! (Already working on this one in relation to his toy cars)
• Molon Labe!
• Brown Chicken, Brown Cow!
• Oh yeah?  Well, so’s your mother!
• Take a bath, hippie!
• Get off my lawn!
• Kill a Commie for Mommy!
• I feel the need, the need for speed!
• Front Toward Enemy
• There can be only one!
• Can’t stop the signal
• Two is one, and one is none

 Yep, that’s me:  Always a good influence on impressionable youth!

“I said I didn’t have much use for one.  Never said I didn’t know how to use it.” — Tom Selleck as Matthew Quigley, in “Quigley Down Under“

We all have skills that most people don’t know about.  For me, it’s cooking and baking.  I find it amusing when people praise Irish Woman for a meal or a treat at a party only to have her point at me with that impish grin of hers.

What skills do y’all have that most people don’t know and wouldn’t guess?