Rational Survivability

It’s not the sordid tale of lust, information security and circus midgets you might have been expecting from the title, but instead the highlights of a couple of evenings spent entertaining a wayward analyst soul from Phoenix.

Rich Mogull, Gartner analyst and data protection mercenary, was in town for a couple of evenings, and I played cruise ship entertainment director.  It’s what I do.  If a fellow blogger or security wonk comes to my town, has a few minutes to spare, it’s my self-appointed duty to make damned sure they have a good time.

I’m all about the full disclosure.  It’s how we roll. 

As Rich so kindly nominated me for "Best Host for Security Geeks in Boston" I must suggest that he plays the role of visiting team quite well.  Damned good head on his shoulders, fun dude to talk with and listen to, and should you ever need saving on the side of a snow-covered mountain, it seems that he’s all you’ll ever need.

We had a great dinner at the Naked Fish (which incidentally has nothing to do with my tattoos,) and then ended up closing that down in favor of the hotel bar in Bedford in which we most certainly were the worst dressed amongst the crowd.  We executed on the wild tech. guy role very well using every free napkin in the house to scribble the solutions to every known security problem currently defined.

I called Shimmy because whilst late, I suggested I could do his podcast drunk with Rich adding beatbox sound effects in the background.  Alan listened to me ramble for 10 minutes before he asked "Who the hell is this!?"

The next night we hit BeanSec! and hooked up with Mike Murray, 78% of Veracode’s employees (except for Wysopal who is now finally too l33t to hang with us) and 46% of Crossbeam’s staff.

I tried for an analyst trifecta:

Jaquith was invited but he was in Utah gettin’ all Mormon’d up.  Rothman was, well, not there because BeanSec! is not pragmatic enough.  Stiennon was busy securing the network fabric of the entire nation state of Haiti and nobody @ IDC would answer my calls.  Ah well.

Despite that, a good time was had by all.

Good seeing you, Rich.  Come back sometime…as soon as you add me to your BlogRoll, that is. 😉

/Hoff

(P.S. Just to be clear, a "Grassy Knee" is one of the specialty drinks at the Enormous Room in Cambridge where we hold BeanSec!  along with the "Bad Babysitter" and "God in Little Pieces."  Any other imaginative definition is your own fault, you perv.  That is all.)