Toronto: EnergizeIt: Get Your Geek On!

Energize IT

This past Saturday I was in Toronto to speak at their annual EnergizeIT event.

Let me tell you something: These Canadians know how to throw an event! They had the audience of 1,400+ cheering and screaming during the opening keynote! I've done plenty of events and this was by far one of the best I've had the opportunity to attend. I think we really need to change the name to Tech-Ed North.....because that's really what this was. A one day event (held on a Saturday to accommodate the IT Pros who work M-F), with major vendors, 10 breakout tracks (yes, that is correct...TEN!), 2 Hands-on-Labs, 3 keynotes, game developer camp, user groups, and an XBOX 360 lounge playing the new Forza 2 and Guitar Hero 2 on the big screen. Whew! Are you tired? I am just typing all of that. Hats off to Bruce Cowper, John Oxley, Barnaby Jeans and the rest of the Canadian IT Pro Team for putting on an absolutely extraordinary event. The Tech-Ed folks here in the U.S. could learn from your efforts. Even the slogan was cool: Get Your Geek On. They also managed to post all the decks rapidly using Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 and had a place to dump pics from the event on Flickr (tagged with: EnergizeIT). They even had the foresight to sell come baby sized shirts for charity, aptly emblazoned: BABY GEEK.  If you're interested in getting one, Bruce may still has some available.

Talk about Bad Placement....

The breakout session I delivered in Toronto was essentially the same session I did in Orlando, minus the FBI co-speaker. I did try and set something up at the last minute with the Toronto Police Dept. but I couldn't pull it off. I tweaked my Windows Forensics session a bit by throwing in some very interesting work that the guys at The Metasploit Project are doing in the are of anti-forensics. Sit down and see what work Vinnie Liu and his team are doing with tools such as Timestomp, Transmogrify, and Slacker. Take a moment and download his decks....definitely very worthwhile.

Of course, the fewer than normal number of people at the start of my session was delayed by a number of reasons. If you are speaker, you probably can't think of worse circumstances:

  1. Free copies of Microsoft Office Pro 2007 were being distributed during lunch and the line was soooo long it delayed the start of the breakout sessions.
  2. Lunch
  3. A session entitled "Top 10 Security Mistakes" was going on next door
  4. Guitar Hero II and Forza 2 on the big screen in the lobby outside my session
  5. Canadian National Yu-Gi-Oh! Tournament. If you got kids....you know what this is.

....I'm lucky I had as many as I did. Thanks everyone who came for all the great questions! Bruce is making the deck public and I'm going to record the entire session in Camtasia Studio so you can view the demos as well.

Download all the decks here: https://moss.energizeit.ca/Pages/Default.aspx. People are already yelling at Bruce to get the deck posted.....and I sent it to him today. Sorry for the delay but we had some....

Worse News

Well, it seems I can just never win. This morning, after getting up and saying hello to my dog, Dixie, I threw my back out so bad that I ended up going to the Hospital and getting a shot of Toradol, and they put me on a bunch of pain meds and muscle relaxers. Strict bedrest. Not bad if you are on vacation....not good when you needed to be in Sacramento on Tuesday. Here's to a hopefully speedy recovery.