Security Post

The weekend started off with a good evening with Patrick (one of the people behind Orange Parachute), and some of his friends at his place in Newport Beach. Newport Beach is quite different from downtown LA, not as busy, less traffic and great views of the Ocean. After a tour around the new house, we went over to a restaurant and had great sushi, sake and great conversations.

Today I made a tour around Santa Monica, Hollywood, Pacific Palisades and Los Angeles. As you can see in the gallery, we went by many big houses. Many of them owned by celebrities. We went by the walk of fame, the Rock walk, and some more stuff. We ended our tour with a great view on the famous Hollywood sign, and the Universal Studio’s.

Yesterday, I took my rental car and drove around Silicon Valley. This virtual valley stretches out over several cities and villages, so traveling around to the different companies can take hours. You can see some pictures of several big companies I drove by in the new gallery.

Next to driving by those companies, I spent some time at the NASA AMES Research center. This was a nice addition to my visit to several NASA sites some years ago in Florida. Some nice satellite, vehicle and airplane models were displayed all around.

I also paid a visit to the Intel Museum in the Intel building. I learned some extra things about making chips and their history. This is one of the examples where you can clearly see computers help building computers.

Weirdstuff warehouse is like my garage, only they make money with it. This store is huge! All packed up with old computer stuff. PC’s, servers, electronic parts, cables, cases, racks, switches and much much more. Walking through this store made me think about the first few years I spent my time on hardware. All the parts and things I had trouble finding in The Netherlands in those days, are available in big quantities in here, and they just cost a few dollars.

Fry’s warehouse is the biggest electronics store I’ve seen so far. For those in The Netherlands, it is as big as the Bijenkorf. The only difference is it’s just electronics. Al kinds of things for your car, PC, at home and more. The Mediamarkt is childsplay compared to this.

I ended my day at the San Jose Tech Museum where I visited the Bodyworlds 2 exposition. It was quite impressive to walk around real human bodies. It was clearly art, but if you take a close look at some details it can creep you out. Some of those things made me think of Gunther von Hagens like he could be a good friend of Hannibal Lecter.  He put a lot of work in to these expositions, and all the educational things around it.
Unfortunately I was not allowed to take any pictures, so if you want to see more of this, you will have to go yourself, or buy a DVD on the BodyWorlds website.

After the BodyWorlds exposition, I drove all the way down to Los Angeles. It was quite a long drive (6 hours), and it was quite boring in the dark. But I arrived around midnight to get a good night of sleep at the Westin Bonaventure hotel. The first 10 floors are just shops, restaurants, offices and things like the swimming pool and a fitness center.

After some really bad muscle and stomach aches and a relapse last evening, I feel better today. I had some breakfast and tea this morning, and I still feel fine. So hopefully I will be able to go out, and have a look around some of the bigger companies around this area.

Maybe I had some bad sushi yesterday as Sushitomi here in Mountain View, or maybe it’s the really bad smell in my room… But fluids are poring out of every body cavity I have.

So today I will stay in my bed and get some sleep (after I have moved to a different room).

Update: I have a different room now, smells much better!

Thank you all for your (Skype) calls, e-mails, SMS’es and other congratulation’s for my birthday. Today I turned 28, and my day started with a Dutch Happy birthday song from my little nieces and my sister on a Skype video call. It was a bit strange with the 9 hour time difference, but it made me feel like it was my birthday way before it really was.

This morning I expected a call from Orange Parachute’s HR department for a phone interview, but unfortunately they didn’t call. So I’ll have to pursue this on Monday. After replying on all your calls and messages, I jumped on the cablecar towards Fisherman’s Wharf to start my cruise to Alcatraz.

Walking around on Alcatraz and hearing all those stories in the audiotour, gave me the creeps. You can see the scars on the walls and floors, each of them have a story behind them. Just looking at them brings you back in time, and some of them give you goosebumps!

After this I took a look in the Bay side Aquarium, walking around all those cool fish! Because there was going to be a party at the aquarium, I had to leave early. So I went up to Pier 39 again, enjoyed the view and enjoyed a bit of reading. I ended the evening by having a nice Red Snapper filet at an Italian restaurant on the Pier.

Have a look in the Gallery to see more pictures, I finally managed to get most of them up there.

After being here for a few days, I have nearly seen daylight. So after a long night sleep I jumped on the Cablecar towards Fishermans Wharf. After some walking around, I took a peek in a mechanical museum. There were all sorts of amusement machines: music boxes, slotmachines, games and more.

Next, I boarded on an old US submarine, the USS Pampanito, active during the second World War. It was quite impressive to walk through this submarine, and imagining how 70 people could live for months together in such a small space. Later on I heard 85% of the USS Pampanito is still operational. Have a look in the gallery for some snapshots.

I walked down the piers towards Pier 33, the pier of Alcatraz Cruises. I was just in time to buy a ticket for the next day. So tomorrow I will celebrate my birthday at Alcatraz

I ended my day by a walk on Pier 39, with some terrific San Francisco sea food. Full of little shops and restaurants, this is a great tourist place to walk around. On the end of the pier you have an amazing view of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate bridge, and San Francisco itself. It the harbor of Pier 39 you can have look at the local Sea Lions. After some great cioppino (some sort of fish stew, a local specialty), I jumped on the cablecar back downtown towards the hotel.

Have a look in the Gallery for some new pictures!

Today I went to the other Expo here in San Francisco. This one was in South San Francisco, 20 minutes drive towards the airport.

When I entered the Expo, I didn’t have real good feeling about it. The Expo itself was really small, with not many interesting stands. Some of them were not even a security vendor. So after 10 minutes walking around the 10 stands, I moved on towards the opening keynote in the theater room. This also was not a really impressive, so I started browsing through the agenda and started picking some could-be interesting sessions. Unfortunately I needed an extra pass to attend these sessions, and after some carefull thinking, I didn’t think it was worth the money.

Because I paid for this Expo, I tried to hold on and visit some of the session I could attend. I started off with a session about server virtualization and security. Unfortunately the speaker couldn’t tell me anything new, even though I thought this was a subject I needed extra insight on. So I guess I know all there is to know about virtualization security…

Next was lunch, this was included with the admission. This was one of the things they did OK on. With our lunch we proceeded into the keynote theater. Finally we had an interesting session. It was a session about pickpocketing presented by Bob Arno. Have a look at his website, and be amazed! There are some video’s on Youtube as well. As usual, I get picked out of the crowd to go on stage, together with some other victims. After some great tricks on the others he tried me, but somehow he didn’t manage to steal anything from me. Although he could tell me exactly what I had in my pockets. I think my tie knot was just to tight for him.

After this awesome session, I tried to get an invitation for the roundtable sessions for managers and executives. After some interrogating questions from the host, if I was a vendor or anything, I was told he was not the one who could give me the invitation. But I could try for next year. Then why ask those questions then… Oh well… I wondered down the hallways, and noticed the roundtable sessions were not even half full. I decided to end my day, and go back to the hotel.

The second day at the MIS conference was mainly the EXPO, and a networking reception. I have met a lot of interesting and intelligent people. I have talked about several topics, and received some great comments and idea’s for the future. Not only for my technical skills, but also for my personal skills.

Next to these people, I have joined up with the guys from Orange Parachute again. Scott gave a great presentation at the CISO summit, and later introduced me to the owner Travis. We had some great conversations, and they invited me for some snacks and drinks afterwards at an Irish Pub (Foley’s). We had some great Irish beers, and I met some of the other people behind Orange Parachute.

Well what a great day this was! Normally it is very hard to stay awake on such IT course days, but today… even though is was Sunday, everybody was so full of energy, and time was so short on many subjects.All sorts of subjects passed by on the agenda:

• The top 5 best practices for reducing your company’s exposure to insider threats
• Panel discussion on leadership skills, what makes a difference, what’s overrated, or underrated, and how to make your mark
• Creating an effective Information Security program
• Managing stress
• Confronting Challenges
• Panel discussion on managing security in a global marketplace

And another 2 hours of receptions afterwards to network with other people.

I have met a lot of interesting people today, and I hope to meet some more in the next few days.

I managed to get here in San Francisco…finally. It took me all day, and with the time difference, it was even more difficult.Ah well, I checked-in to the the Mark Twain Hotel. The quality is quite different from Hotel Mela in New York, but it will suffice. The “Deluxe” rooms should have been renovated last year. But here at the Mark Twain renovation is just about a new paint job and a brand new television with video games. It’s just weird to have a brand new LCD TV next to a 20 year old coffeemaker.It’s weird to walk around here in San Francisco after being in New York for over a week. Last night I tried to find a good restaurant to have some dinner, but more than half of them were closed after 21:00. So I had some Thai food at the “Thai King” just around the corner. Turned out to be a good choice: fast, cheap and healthy food.