I'll be doing a more complete retrospective on the conference later (hopefully annotated on the flights home, and then typed quickly Sunday, if I'm allowed to do so:). Overall, Friday was a great ending to the conference, with a very light schedule (thank goodness). The highlight was the final key note by former-VP Al Gore, complete with a few hecklers. More after the jump...
Sessions
I only attended 2 sessions on Friday, skipping the middle session to go have tea with Dave N from the ABA ISC. The first session of the morning was on game theory by the CTO of nCircle. It was reasonably interesting. Later in the morning, I attended a fairly random talk by Amit Yoran. While I wouldn't call it overly educational, it was quite entertaining, covering scads of random points.
Keynotes
There were two keynotes to close out the conference. The first was the Hugh Thompson Show, which apparently is an annual talk show style event. It was reasonably funny, which was good. He had a couple guests on identity theft, and then, more interestingly, he had Bill Cheswick (co-inventor of the firewall) on. Ches was wearing a Knuth t-shirt - how cool is that? (at least half the crowd did not get that).
Al Gore's keynote was interesting. Nothing particularly new, though he did a reasonably decent job tying it to the IT industry and how we are essentially in the role of Obi Wan ("our only hope"). About 15 minutes into his talk, a woman down front in the middle stood up and started heckling him. Then on the far left some guys stood up and start singing. Then on the far right one guy got up and started yelling stuff. All were aggressively escorted out. Apparently at least one of them was tied to Lyndon LaRouche (aka "weirdo"). Anyway... I have pictures from the keynotes that I'll post later, along with all the others.
People
I met up with Dave N from the ABA ISC mid-morning between sessions, having a good chat. I really am compelled to delve deeper into law and legislation, and so I think there's lots of good opportunity there. The only other people-oriented notes were attendance of what's apparently a standing "afterglow" gathering. This was very fun, getting to meet a variety of guys who are in various lead roles within the industry (including the CEO of Echelon One). Good stuff.
Long Walks, Sore Feets
One final note from the conference. Boy are my feet sore, my legs tired. I've walked everywhere around this town (the weather's been great). Friday afternoon I walked from the Moscone to Fishermen's Wharf, which I'm told is about 2 miles. And then we all walked back to Union Square, which meant going up, up, up and over. :) It was fun. San Francisco is a very nice city - especially for being a "big" city. I know, the weather is gorgeous, so it's hard to gauge wintertime out here, but hey... I'll take it! It makes a compelling case for moving out here in 2009. :)
This concludes my daily updates on the RSA Conference 2008. As mentioned above, I'll be posting a full retrospective on the conference later (once I've had time to mull things over).
