I’m back in Vegas after spending last weekend in San Diego for TooCon 9. ToorCon has been my favorite yearly hacker conference. It’s never too crowded and the people you meet are great. I’m finally feeling like I fit in. You can see the talks I covered over at Hack-A-Day. I still need to write up the whole experience. I also need to cover bunnie and Christopher Tarnovsky’s silicon hacking workshop. I’m using the portrait Matt Westervelt shot as my new bio pic.

I won a Pico E12 while I was there. It’s an FPGA in a compact flash form. h1kari the ToorCon founder works for Pico and has presented on both cracking WPA and GSM A5. You may have seen my previous love letter to the FPGA. I can finally tackle a project I always wanted to do and I’m lucky since these things are damn expensive.

Next up is SEMA (pictures from last year) in town Oct 30 – Nov 2. After that I’m hoping to present at BarCampLA. The two topics I’m mulling over are “European hacker culture and collaborative spaces” which is from my trip to Germany and “Fighting spam in online communities” to help people plan ahead when they build sites that are largely user content and is based on my work at Propeller. After that is Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas Nov 8-9.

Current truck status: broken. There’s brake fluid leaking, the electrical system is down, and somehow the two problems are related. I haven’t gotten a chance to get under the truck and diagnose it yet though.