DEF CON
Woke at 05:30, went for breakfast at 07:30 (at the Las Vegas Hilton). The coffee refills were in serious decline. Up until this point they had been coffee pot ninjas, but it started to get way busy over the start of the week-end. They sat us at a table, sandwiched between two tables. Shortly after we had gotten our coffee they seated two men to my left: An Asian man in his 50s and a balding white male in his 50s, with glasses. The latter one immediately launched into a tangent, and the other dude said about three words.
During breakfast, over 45 minutes, we learned that his name is John, inferred that he has socialist leanings, and is an anthropologist, though at first we weren't certain if he was a priest, a doctor, or some kind of scientist. We also learned enough about the Hutterites to give a decent PowerPoint presentation on them to a general-interest crowd. Hell, we didn't even know they existed, and now we have a real jump-start! John (who was loud) said that he was the first outsider, like ever, to be accepted by them, and that his work was pioneering. He wasn't the most modest person we've seen. We went back to the room to brush our teeth and looked the Hutterites up on the web, where we learned even more. At that point I thought I knew more than enough of the Hutterites. In fact, I was sick of them and their "laser-guided combines."
Note: it has just been made known to me that this is Prof. John A. Hostetler, professor of sociology and anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia. Ahem. Props to John, our breakfast lecturer.
We got to the Alexis by 10:00 to register. It looked like they had three times the number of people as the previous year. In 1994 there were about 300 people. Sheesh.
I don't think we saw any talks that day, though we had tentatively planned on two IDS speakers at 17:00. Once we were back in the hotel we got tired and stuph so we stayed in. We had dinner somewhere - Quark's? It's the restaurant in the Star Trek Experience. We had the pizza, which was pretty good, but apparently our waitress thought that one would be enough only for a high-fashion model, so were stuck with two large pizzas (a little more than one full one at the end). So, if you ever go, one pizza's enough for two people under most circumstances. After dinner we watched some CNN and passed out.