A couple of weeks ago, I did my talk at Circle City Con. This was year two, and my second year as a speaker. It was a good CON, and I can’t wait to go back next year.

I spent all day Friday in Ed McCabe’s Threat Intelligence class. It was good, but too much packed in to 1 day. We went over the 8 hours. Normally Ed teaches the class in 5 days, not 1. There were issues, with some of the boxes. Due to not reading the schedule right, we missed opening ceremonies and the key notes. But that was ok. I think I got more from Ed’s class than from the talks. I can also get to those talks later at some point, watching the videos.

The first night party was good. Rance tried to get Emmy a hacker name but that didn’t work out. I didn’t stay as late as I would have liked because I was having problems with my talk. Stephen and Jen Fox were nice enough to work with me to improve it.

Saturday I made it to Kat’s HAM Radio talk. Mostly because her talk was the one before mine.

As for my talk, I was happy with the turn out at my talk, it got some good some good questions. There was a problem with the equipment. The first 1 was I forgot to turn on my power strip. Then one of the Raspberry Pis did not get a network connection. I’ve ran a cable tester on the cat5 since then and it came out fine.

Then I went to Ed’s talk. It was good too, more of the same stuff covered in his class.

After lunch I went to Lesley Carhart’s Building an Incident Response Program. Going in, I expected more of a road map to build a program and what skills to focus on. The class wasn’t that, but what it was, was amazing. It was literally figuring out the gaps and what needed to be done to fill them, using set budgets.

I kept getting pulled out of Lesley’s class though due to problems back home. I had left my rescue dog with my uncle, and she escaped. He called me, about the same time the people that found her had. Lots of calls back and forth trying to get that dealt with.

I ran in to Viss at one point. We’ve known each other on twitter for a while, we’ve even met once or twice at Derbycon. He gave me some great career advice. It was also at that point that I realized I miss the most of what the Cons are about, the Networking and hanging out with people. Granted, I have yet to go to a con that I don’t have a pile of home work waiting for me back in my room.

Sunday I went to Mark Kikta’s Alienvault talk, while Emmy took the E-textile class. I had to leave Mark’s class early. I don’t know what I missed, but I got what I needed to from the class. I have been having issues with my alienvault box not knowing what to do with it after I got the thing set up.

I left his class to go and take my radio exam.  I’m surprised I passed, but got my General license.

Because of the issues back home, and I had to work on Monday, we left after Emmy finished her e-textile class. I’m sad I didn’t get to stay though closing ceremonies, but at that point I was really ready leave, having learned a lot.