Reuben was regretting not getting more sleep the previous night. He had a chance to get more rest, but instead ended up speaking with Jack for quite a while. It was rewarding in that he helped another person under- stand how to be safe online and did a bit to fight the misconceptions about his line of work, but he really needed more sleep than he got. More importantly, he needed to go to bed on a local timetable, rather than the arbitrary one he seemed to be keeping now.Ah, well, he thought.I seem to do this every year, why change it now, eh?At least the first sessions of the day, which had just started, didn’t really interest him. He had an hour or so to get his “con-fu” working. DefCon needed better coffee though…beer really wasn’t going to help this process along just now. More coffee sounded great, but he just couldn’t get himself to drink what they were serving there; it tasted awful. Unfortunately, his time as a professional had garnered him enough personal wealth to become coddled about such
things, but so be it. Despite the occasional value of being able to suck it up and drink corrosive sludge for the caffeine, he much preferred being able to consider Starbucks ‘slumming’.
Deciding instead to just let himself get up to speed, he walked outside into the already-warm morning air.So odd, how it’s always so dry here, he thought. It was nice in a way, but it also felt a bit like being in an oven, lit- erally. Growing up on the coast of New England, Reuben was used to cold and water - lots of water. Being in a place where the land was so flat, and the visibility so good (dry air is clearer for longer distance) was odd to him. At least there were mountains in the distance, unlike the Midwest, which he just found disorienting after a day or so. He wondered how much water had to be pumped into the pools every week to keep the levels up; he’d heard that the fountains in front of the Bellagio went through tens of thousands of gallons of water every day from evaporation. There was something so surreal about all the effort it took to make Vegas work the way it did. Lawns by some casinos, gargantuan fountains, trees, enormous swimming pools, artificial ponds…all in a place that saw less rain in a year than his hometown got in some weeks. At least they didn’t have to heat the pools much, if at all.
He sat down on one of the chairs outside, and thunked down his pack, opening it and grabbing his minidisc player. Maybe some music would help…and while there wasn’t anything going on yet, it was a good time to just chill out and listen to some mood music to fit the setting. He rum- maged around, pulling out some trance music…nothing too hard, just something to reflect the feel of all the hackers spooling up mentally as the morning heated. He put in his earphones, thumbed the remote…
“Hey man! How’ve you been? Good to see you here!” It was Paul, someone Reuben knew from the 2600 meetings in his area, but hadn’t seen in a while. He hadn’t ever been a long-term steady attendee of the meetings, and luckily hadn’t been around for any of the few raids that took place.
2600 was a quarterly magazine about hacking and other related sub- jects, and one thing that they started were monthly gatherings in myriad large cities. For Washington, DC, the meetings were in the food court of the Pentagon City Mall; the funny thing was that you could walk right
past it without noticing, if you didn’t know what to look for. At any rate, at one meeting he met a group of guys who drove up from central Virginia together. After the meeting, which Reuben missed much of, he joined them to go out to a strip club.They were the only people in the club who weren’t intently watching the dancers, instead preferring to speak geek with each other.
Paul was one of the newer people to start attending 2600 meetings in the DC area, in the long-term scope of things. Back in the early 90’s, Reuben was a more constant attendee, and in those days he was also typi- cally one of a small minority that were over eighteen. In more recent years, the typical age of those at the meetings climbed, as the younger crowd by then had gone off to college, to be replaced by others who had been to college and were now working in the DC area with an interest in security. Reuben missed some of those guys. He had started going to the meetings shortly after “The Bust,” when the Secret Service decided to goose-step their way into the meeting and violate at least one of the first ten amendments of the Constitution. Mall security at that event had been reported as being unprofessional, and to this day Reuben preferred to bring his business to other malls whenever a choice was possible.
“Paul! How’s life? I didn’t expect to see you here!” Nobody expected to see people from back home at DefCon, unless they were in contact with them on a nearly daily basis. Reuben wondered why that was for a moment before his mind came back to the conversation.
“Not too bad. Were you here for the Briefings too? I didn’t see you…” “Yeah, I was. Funny…if I knew you were here…oh well, at least we know now! We need to go out for a drink later—are any of the other guys here?”
“Yeah, they are…I don’t know that they’re all up yet though. We went out last night and blew WAY too much money and far too many brain cells. But hey, it’s Vegas, right?”
“True enough! So have a seat, man…tell me what’s been up? How are things with your wife…uh, I forgot her name…”
“She’s good…she’s with me this year, actually.Today she’s going shop- ping…God knows how much it’s going to cost me! How about you, seeing anyone right now?” Paul was like Reuben in that he didn’t just
think tech; he also was a people person, more so than the average person and WAY more than the average hardcore geek.
“Nope…well, not entirely nope.There’s someone that it’s going well with, but I’ve been busy, and we haven’t exactly gone out yet. I plan to fix that when I get back, God willing.”
“Cool, cool…hey, I’m off to check out the CTF stats…catch you later?”
Reuben wasn’t sure if he was happy to be left alone to get himself up and running, or sorry that Paul was heading off and leaving him without any company. “OK…if there’s anything really shocking, come back and let me know, OK?” Reuben didn’t closely follow Capture The Flag, not caring so much about who won as much as about the general concept.
“Will do. Oh, hey, got my cell phone number?”
“Yeah, think so…wait, let me call you, then I’ll know for sure, and you’ll have mine; I just changed it.” Reuben pulled out his cell phone and toggled to the name in it, hitting dial.
Paul’s phone rang. “Yep, you got my number alright!” He answered it and hung up, saving the number. “Cool…talk to you later on today, alright?”
“See you then! Have fun.”
Reuben put the earphones back in his ears as Paul walked inside, feeling better.That was the one thing about business travel, for any reason; it was so isolating. He was so used to people in D.C., who were as cold as ice usually. He didn’t know whether it was partially because the city was so predatory…politics was the ultimate industry for ‘us versus them’ thinking and professional grudges…or if it was something else. All he knew was that when he went to other cities, including New York, he was astounded at how friendly everyone was compared to home.You’d be lucky in D.C. if anyone returned eye contact, much less smiled back or engaged you in conversation. But even that was more contact with people than you had when on business travel.You could only know someone so well in an hour, and it was only worthwhile to do so much to talk to them; odds are, after that hour or so, you’d not see them ever again. And it was so much work to be social in other ways too; if you wanted to unwind at the end
of the day, you had to find a place that you liked. And then, when you were somewhere else, you started all over again.
He got up, deciding to move around…maybe he’d see more familiar faces while moving through things, before it got too hectic. Enough of this sitting around crap.