I Like It, I Like It!

I awoke at am to take the 5:40 train to Birmingham New Street Station. 7 hours later I was in the Britannia Hotel, about to attend "BrumCon 2004, The Return of the Fed Guy". BrumCon is a conference organised by Brum2600, one of the UK's leading computer security groups. I enjoyed BrumCon a lot. All the talks were interesting with the one exception of Dr Kaos's speech on the nature of hacking, which was so crap that it defies comment. About 30 people attended, most of them being typical geek types, both in good ways and bad. I learnt a lot, but failed to do any networking, which is what conferences like these are said to be all about. I'll definitely attend many more next year such as DNS, HOPE(if it goes ahead), SDFCon and one or two of the ones in Europe.

For the first time in history, I watched "Monkey", a cult Japanese/Chinese TV series from the 1970's. I'm hooked. It tells the story of a monk and his three followers, Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy. They traveling to India in order to become Buddhists but each episode sees them coming into some kind of difficult that prevents them continuing their journey until they've had lots of big fights with people in dodgy looking wigs. Monkey is a god so he has magic and is able to fly on clouds. The prince never gets involved in fights but spends his time telling off the others. Pigsy and Sandy and very stupid and are usually the ones who cause trouble. Sandy is armed with a ornamental spear, Monkey has a staff and Pigsy has a rake...