Month: March 2022

Discussion of how long Bruce and Heidi have been married. Sixteen years this summer. My wife and I have been together fifteen in a few years (but only married for evelven).

I remember back in the day bringing my then-girlfriend with me just so they could come close to selling out. 2008-ish?

For potential speakers, you need to follow directions exactly. (I wrote the beginnings of a talk in probably about 2010. I had about 40 minutes of speaking, and half a slide deck. I started going through potential questions from an audience, and got to one I couldn’t answer….and it was a question that really related to the heart of the presentation….so I gave up, and just bought a ticket.)

The ticket sales glut has kind of ended after they put the kibosh on second-hand ticket sales.

That actually makes me feel a bit better about my tentative intention at this point to do the Shmooze-A-Student again. If I’m financially able, I’ll buy a ticket for a kid, and sell my ticket to someone else.

Physically, I can’t do this anymore. Much of what I did yesterday was sitting in my hotel room watching the stream.

Naturally when I was younger, I really appreciated the new experiences that came along with being in DC. The novelty has more than worn off.

They saved a lot of money this year by not having the drink-a-palooza on Saturday night.

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been to one of those. But they’re really not earning money on any of this, and are paying taxes on it.

(I’ll avoid going in go off on my bit about income taxes. More than half of the people who file don’t pay any income taxes. Payroll taxes are not taxes; they are contributions to the bankrupt Ponzi schemes that are Social Security and Medicare)

Close up was a potential giveaway of a (Dude-your-gettin-a) Dell server.

I have no place for toys like that anymore, unfortunately. And if I was going to get a nondescript Dell server, I think I’d like something with an Italic processor.

But they’re loud as hell.

I swear I’ll get many of the notes on other talks up over the next few days. As I said, I really don’t have the energy to do this con stuff anymore.

Discussion of odd WordPress plugins that might have security issues.

I understand it, but this, and the work call that had me watching this over the stream link from my hotel room, really reinforce my commitment to not using anything that’s not supported directly by a vendor.

Trying to do this stuff in-house is just too fraught with peril for my tasted.

Interesting aside that the totes-didn’t-used-to-do-evil search company downlinks sites that have WP vulgarities. I, generally, think that SEO is snake oil, but if that’s what that formerly not-evil company is doing, well…

Static front page that gets picked up, then escort users in after they land on the static site with tons of keywords in the HEAD element.

https://www.shmoocon.org/speakers/#tovpnornottovpnthatisthequestion

I tend to use ProtonVPN because I’m cheap, and it’s included with my ProtonMail subscription.

The tagline of this site works in reverse, too. Anytime you do something online, somebody can probably snoop. Deal with it.

Temporal connections are tougher to crack, but everything can be cracked.. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.

Schmoozed a student to get in again.

Delayed two months due to the oh-so-dangerous COVID-19.