Vegas 2012 by the Numbers

So, I’m finally back from a very long week in Vegas. How long you ask? well, here are some numbers that start to reflect how it felt:

• Number of days in Vegas: 6+1 (un-planned extra day due to a missed flight)
• Number of conferences attended: 3.5 (BlackHat, BSidesLV, Defcon, and IOAsis counts as a 1/2 con…)
• Number of talks given: 2 (in the same day… BlackHat + BSidesLV)
• Number of shipments to my room at Caesars: 3 (shirts, phone, and locks which ended up unused due to my failure to run the lockpick sessions at IOAsis 🙁 )
• Volunteer gigs: 2 (BSidesLV and Skytalks)
• Average hours of sleep per night: 3 (and that’s really stretching it)
• Number of nights I went to sleep after sunrise: 2
• Average number of parties visited per night: 3 (Freakshow skewed the numbers as there was NO reason to leave that place…)
• No. of phones I came in with: 1
• No. of phones I left with: 3 (Thank you NinjaTel!)
• Average no. of meals per day: 1 (I know… but Alcohol does not count as food unfortunately)
• Gallons of booze consumed: probably illegal in some states.
• No of friends I caught up with: not enough. And the ones I did manage to catch up with needed much more time 🙁
• Hangovers: 0 (keep drinking -> no hangover to deal with…)
• Workouts: 2
• Miles walked: waaaaay too many
• Weight lost/gain: 3.5lbs lost. Guess that’s the result of adrenaline rushes, parties, Infected Mushroom, long walks in the hallways, not much food, and lots of alcohol.

Overall this was personally the best Vegas trip I’ve had. I did take up a little too much on myself that I should have (as a couple fo friends duly noted, and excused me for some fuckups due to that), and I wanted to meet so many more people that I managed to somehow miss this year.

Nevertheless, some of the experiences were priceless – like having a chat with Infected Mushroom and finding out that Erez used to run a BBS back in the days, and that (although I don’t like to mention my darker days of hacking) we “knew” the same scenes. Having the opportunity to help out with BSidesLV and being amazed again by our community and what it can achieve. Being inspired by so many people, and learning constantly. These are the things that really make up the week of BlackHat/BSides/Defcon for me. It’s not necessarily the talks, but the socializing and the opportunity to pick people’s brains on a personal basis which makes it worthwhile to get to the levels of exhaustion that this week takes you to.

Guess it’s time to wrap up and figure out what timezone my body is on…