On the one hand, it was an absolute blast speaking to a room that was, well, not completely full, but at least had some people in it! CanSecWest is always thought-provoking, although sometimes in ways that were not intended by the presenters.
On the other hand, as a speaker, it had moments of sheer terror. "Flying by the seat of their pants" gives the organizers *WAY* too much credit for advance planning. Dragos likes to try new things. He obviously felt that he had invented the "fully hybrid" model of having both on-site and online participants, and to try and integrate the two, and it was like taking a balloon away from a kid to have to tell him, "no, we did that thirty seven years ago." (The technology was a little different back then.)
When something goes wrong, Dragos' reaction is not to fix what is wrong, but to throw yet *another* new and untried technology at it. So, as a speaker, you are never sure what is going to happen. The first day started late, and got later as time went on. Since I was speaking late in the day, this did not bode well for my being able to finish on time and meet (as pre-arranged) Number One GrandDaughter after she got off work. Two minutes before I was due to speak, as I was setting up in the alternate room, I was told, no, I was speaking in the main room, and would (which they had previously told me I wouldn't) also be speaking to the online audience.
Because of recent developments, I had to add some slides that referenced Gloria. I had done a longer version at BSidesVancouver, and had practiced it subsequently, so I thought I wouldn't have a problem. However, possibly due to the emotional hit from encountering the newest church, I almost lost it. Twice. But I did get through.
In the end, without any warning, they also cut my time from two hours to an hour and a half, so that meant I did have time to get to the rendezvous with my granddaughter.
As I say, the conference tends to prompt a lot of ideas. So, any time the presentations weren't too stellar (and they had a *lot* of boring talks on Thursday), I would head off and walk up and down the halls of the conference area, using their wifi to dictate notes, thoughts, paragraphs, and whole sections of papers and ideas to myself. I've got about thirty email messages that I still have to re-read, edit, collate, expand, develop, or research. (Probably next week, because this week has turned out to be suddenly and surprisingly busy as well.) I could do this without bothering people, because there weren't any other conferences going, so there weren't a lot of people around. I suspect I might have walked a few miles that way ...
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