Chaordic Mind

Contemplation, originally uploaded by The Inadvertent Gardener.

Overcast Bay Bridge, originally uploaded by SFview.

Another great night with the Friday Night Drinking and Shooting (FNDS) photo team. This time Mik lead the team over to Oakland for some shooting around the 19th Street BART stop, inside some of the art bars, the Paramount theatre, and the very amazing Cathedral of Christ the Light.

I really love the team and friends I’ve made through this group. In all honesty it’s mostly because they like me as well. Eric gives the best hugs, Nick is so sincere, Mik is always fashion equipped, Bob has this allure about him, and Genie is so open about herself I want to listen to all her stories, and Dusty is always good for a high-five. All great people with smiles who I liked to call the “light chasers” as they are always looking for the best lighting to highlight their subject.

Scouts, originally uploaded by SFview.

Furries, originally uploaded by SFview.

Bay 2 Breakers is a “race” across the 7 miles (11.3 km) that is San Francisco. There are some serious racers up front by the majority of participants show their true San Francisco pride by breaking out the costumes and dressed up for a long, and mostly drunken, trot across the city.

Many of the “racers” group up into theme teams and make a day of it. Here are some photos I took of various team enjoying the sun as part of their run.

See more photos of the event here.

After swing dancing and playing mahjong (poorly) one of my favorite non-computer pastimes is hanging out with photographers. I fell in with the Friday Night Drinking and Shooting group and have met a number of great photographers.

It’s like traveling with my own paparazzi entourage!

Here’s a few of my favorite:

• Chipmonkey
• angryf
• Generik11
• bats1234
• JMSF415
• KayVee
• Nick.Fischer
• underthewaves

I’m up late doing some last minute planning for BSidesBay, a community organized security unconference happening at the HackerDojo in Mountain View, CA on 12/12.  I’m rather excited about meeting new people, old friends, and experiencing the birth of a new event.  This is truly a first for many of us and I hope it’s just as exciting for all in attendance.

Before we begin here are some useful links and references:

• Twitter: @SecurityBSides
• UStream channel
• Hashtag: #BSidesBay

BSidesLasVegas

This will be my first Security B-Sides event, though the second to occur.  The first was BSidesLasVegas that exploded on the scene earlier this year.  Ok, perhaps exploded is a little strong as it was off the main LV strip with a location only disclosed the day of the event.  Still, about 100 people come to this free hacker event which was covered by several media outlets including ZDNet, Dark Reading, Hacker News Network, and many other blogs.

Created in a little under three weeks lead time, a few key people hosted and put on an event that rocked the concept of conferences all together.  Jack Daniel, Chris Nickerson, and Jeff Espinoza worked hard to maintain this train on track during the 2+ days that it ran.

Those in attendance enjoyed a 10,000 sq ft house, pool, free vending machine (hacked of course), awesome presentations, and for once an opportunity to meet and mingle with the presenters and attendees alike.  This event happened in parallel with NeighborCon, a group of hardware hackers lead buy Travis Goodspeed, famous for the GoodFET chip, and Jeff Espinoza.

BSidesBay

A number of things came out of the first event, none the least of which was the desire to spread the unconference love and host more organic, locally grown events.

Allison Miller organized BSidesBay by tasking out roles and responsibilities to others, in true chaordic form.  First the venue, then the food, supplies, presenters, attendees.

• Ally organized and procured the HackerDojo event space and several speakers & will be MC’ing the event
• Trey Ford stepped in with his Big Green Egg to cook the food & moderate a panel
• Quinton Jones leveraged McAfee as a sponsor of the food
• Ryan Russell leveraged BigFix as a sponsor of the office supplies
• Casey Greene of the HackerDojo helped coordinate the event location
• Jennifer Leggio helped organize panelists and media conversation
• 40+ participants joined in for collaborative conversation

All of these events use the PBWorks wiki site that enables community participation.  If you want to attend the event you do not call up an event planner or subscribe to a mailing list, you simply edit the event page add yourself!

BSidesBay has already been written up in ZDNet to promote the conversation of security and risk in open platforms.  This event follows the barcamp style format in which there will be 2-keynote panels in the morning and collaborative, chaordic breakout sessions in the afternoon.

The morning panels will include:

• “OWASP & WASC: Impacts on web application security automation”
  • Robert Auger, Staff Information Security Engineer, PayPal
  • Jeremiah Grossman, CTO, WhiteHat Security
  • Brett Hardin, Manager of SMB, Qualys
  • Trey Ford, Manager of SaaS, McAfee (moderator)
• “Keeping Users Secure on Open Platforms”
  • John Adams, Operations Engineer, Twitter
  • Ryan Seu, Security Engineer/Incident Management, Facebook
  • Jeff Wu, Security Project Manager, Facebook
  • Andy Steingruebl, Manager, Secure Development, PayPal

The afternoon panels will include breakout sessions in the following format:

1. People will check out the session wall creating in the morning and gravitate to the Topic Areas they are most interested in.
2. The Topic Area groups will discuss, illustrate, brainstorm, and debate on the area of interest for an hour.
3. Larger group will reconvene to share highlights from their Topic Area.
4. If <5pm, then go to i. Else, wrap up sessions.

If that was not enough, there will be Rock Band available to attendees after the event at the HackerDojo.  We plan to project the screen on a wall and see who can rock out to the Beetles the best.  Come and sing your heart out!

A little less about work and more about personal life.  This past Halloween I went on a photo walk with the CaliberSF team.  The introduction came from Chipmonkey via TangoBabySF (aka. Miss Julie).

Personally, I don’t care for costumes and would rather wear something comfortable, and maybe ‘smart’, than dress up.  At the last minute I pulled out a Mickey Mouse hat from a prior client engagement and a tunic I got in Abuja.  Suddenly I was Mickey Mouse from his star role in Fantasia, though everyone who passed me whispered “oh, a wizard.”  I suppose this is partially true, as Mickey did take on the wizard’s hat and become him for a short while.

You can check out everyone’s photos from the event on flickr or you can check out my personal photos from the event.

Alternatively, you can check out Julie’s photo blog and read up on the event.

I really enjoyed hanging out with the CaliberSF team and meeting lots of new people.

For the event I was shooting with the Nikon D300 which is a really nice camera.  I only recently learned how to do the basics but having those multiple focus points and the ability to manually adjust the ISO, f-stop, and other light gibbery-jab was lots of fun.

I even liked it when the photos came out over exposed like this one of Julie.

Although, one of my favorite sightings of the day was this mural by “Eddie”.  It’s located in Hayes Valley down the same alley as Blue Bottle coffee shop.  I snapped it with my iPhone camera so I could upload it immediately.  It’s the kind of stuff that reminds me of other paste-up artists like Bansky.