Spring 1995 -> Fall 1995
After going to HOPE, and selling TShirts, we decided we had to go to some more CONS. The first one we had a chance to go to was Pumpcon in 1994, but we missed it due to schedule conflicts. The next best thing came up, Summercon in Atlanta.
Summercon 1995 - For the trip we had the Crew from Canada (Bio, Nettwerk, & Rommel), Filet of Feedback (Myke & Mark), and the local Pittsburgh Crew (Myself, Wipeout, and Dug). Canadians drove down in a suicide sports car with 2.5 seats for 3 people + 1 machine + luggage all the way from Ottawa. Mark drove in from Wisconsion, and Myke topped everyone by driving in from fucking Seattle, Washington. (Take a look on the map to view what exactly this looks like).
After we gathered our forces in Pittsburgh for the trip we decided that a huge van would make life easier for all of us. We rented a 12 passenger extended van, 4 wheels, but really, really, really large. We made the obligatory stop to pick up munchies and started aproximately 8 hours late. We had a 13-15 hour drive ahead of us.
We started off badly, instantly hitting a small 5pm rush in Pittsburgh, followed by going west when we should have gone east (unfortunetly this was my fault, but I'm going to gloss over it, since I'm writing this). When we figured out what we had done, Dug & Myke decided to try out a roadtrip experiment, and whipped out Potatoes and Tin Foil to try to make baked potatoes on the engine block. After about 100 miles down the road, we stopped to find the potatoes, they were no where to be found...
The rest of the trip went as you would expect. Long hours spending time doing nothing but trying to sleep or get the aweful taste of Sour Cream and Onion chips out of your mouth by rinsing it out with Gatoraid.
We pulled into Atlanta around 7am, and found a burger joint and ate some really disgusting food. After this, we gave the Hotel a call, and they agreed to let us check in at 8am, even though officially their early check in was at 3pm. We managed to save a days worth of Hotel charges with this one.
Everyone took showers and thought it would be really cool to take a nap, but even cooler if we could set up equipment and stuff. So instead of resting like we should have, we set up equipment. We had two adjacent rooms, so we took all the furniture in one room and put it the other (beds, chairs, tv with secure lock, etc). We then started setting up our equipment. We hooked up the sparc and two 486 boxes we had brought, along with some other networking junk. Myke had brought an Atari 2600 and Odyessy system which also had to be hooked up, of course. He also had some AT&T 3b1 system or something really strange (it got the "hack root and win me" sticker slapped on it).
After setting up the basic network, it was time to poke around and see who was showing up. We ran into Grave 45 who was from around the area and got some quick instructions on food and stuff. I think at about this time the choice of setting up equipment or sleeping was hitting us, because I can't remember what I did in the afternoon period. My guess is I napped for a short bit.
We duplicated the Hotel keys before 5pm. They were the ones that are plastic like credit cards, and have holes drilled in them. After a short bit of time we had twice as many as the hotel had told us we could have.
We kept running into people that we had met, but couldn't remember names, and things like that. By evening we had found the HBO Argentia Crew and talked to them about their current work. Along with talking to other people and generally teaming up with people we had missed before.
Friday night of course we were up 'til 5am or something like that. And of course the Con officially started at like 11am or something. We ended up missing that. However we were barged in by the Hotel maintenance people due to our 20 meter 10Bt cable running from our window to the Convention floor two flights up. They noticed the fact that beds were missing and threatened to call the cops on us. We made a call to the Hotel manager and convinced him to basically "not care if everything is normal when you checkout".
Friday night was chill and connect time. We basically discovered where people where located, and what room they were in. Along with finding out what people were up to and stuff.
Saturday morning after about 5 hours of sleep we went and watched some of the con for what officially it was for, people talking to an audience. We paid some small attention to it, then went to bullshit with other people. The day went by relatively fast and the reports of crap started to filter in. A couple of hackers decided it would be really cool to be completely trashed, and managed to get escorted out by police. Things started to get out of control around evening time, and we decided to stay out of it.
Around 10pm we scored our internet hook up, and had our hotel room up and running. Soon after the slip connection went in, the packet dumper started logging everything that went over it. We didn't really tell anyone right away, just figured we'ld see how paranoid people were. After watching all kinds of stuff go over the line, we decided to start telling people... That didn't stop them from entering passwords all the time... We gave up at that point.
Saturday night started get really hectic and other Convention goers started pulling some really stupid stuff (throwing chairs from 8th floor into the pool in the center of building comes to mind). About the most interesting thing that happened with all this, was we were introduced to radios... After watching groups of other people listenning to the local hotel security on scanners, we discovered more gadgets that we wanted to spend money on.
Sunday was kind of lazy as many people started leaving. We had booked the hotel until monday morning, because we were under the impression that people would stick around. Not many people did, but those who did ended up having a cool time. Dug & the Filet of Feedback crew took a hike into Atlanta to look around. I caught up on some sleep and chatted with a local called Speck, along with some friends of hers. They left at some point to catch rides and we found out the Argentina group was still around. We chatted for awhile, and then hooked up the Atari 2600 for a couple hours of 4 player WARLORDS.
Dug & Filet of Feedback showed up around then to add to the player pool for Warlords, and then presented us with some videos they'ld rented out of the art district in Atlanta. We had a choice video of SRL (Survival Research Labs), showing them blowing things up in the Netherlands and included a great line about how they were doing things in Europe since the valuable mineral of "Obtainium" was more common in Europe.
We vegated to machines killing each other, and blowing things up. Then the next video was presented. The White Room. It was not a video done by KLF, it was a German latex-porn video. I'm sure everyone who came into our hotel room while this was playing (including the pizza guy) will not forget it...
We put the room back together, and collapsed late sunday night. Monday morning we went to check out and were given all kinds of crap about how we would have to pay full rate for the Sunday night stays (another $40 per room) because the convention rate didn't cover that period. Things got ugly at this point, the video cameras got whipped out, things were said, and some nice women started screaming because the hotel was trying to stiff her like they were us. This finally produced someone who was the manager who called the cops on her, and then finally just gave in and left things as they were. He was not prepared to give in to us without first telling us that "we" (as in the entire convention goers) were the most horrible group of people who he had ever met, thought we should burn in hell, and god knows what else. I have it all on video somewhere, though it may just look like shit. I've never bothered to play it back. We got our refund. And got the hell out of there before they decided to do something else stupid.
We drove out to return the videos and ended up spending another 3 hours in the art district going into pawn shops, music shops, and other stuff. It was quite fun, and I'ld recommend it to anyone who's in Atlanta to check out when you're out there.
As a whole Summercon '95 was a painful driving experience, but a hell of a lot fun in general. I'm hoping something similar is going to happen in '96, but I've yet to hear of anything.
Pumpcon was a much more local event, and we had hoped for it to be much more interesting. Unfortunetly it wasn't that great.
We managed to score another van, but just took locals this time. Sean, Dug, and I made up the base Pittsburgh crew to go. Along with us came Socket, Packrat, two guys I can't remember their names, and our infamous local Sloppy (bugz bunny of the l00ney t00ns posse). The trip out to Philly was short, about 5 hours, and we had some basic equipment for the ride. The Canadian crew was supposed to drive down, but canceled at the last minute due to a lot of bad things happening all at once to them.
We forged on ahead and got to the hotel. We were dissapointed that we couldn't get two rooms next to each other, but dealt with it. We set up the equipment and started chatting with people. The clue level seemed down, though we did manage to talk to some cool people. Unfortunetly it didn't seem like many people showed up the night before the con, and then those who did went to bed way to early... So we called it a night, and crashed.
The next day the con was being held, Saturday. Sean bugged out to meet some friends of his in the local area, while Dug and I went to the con, for all of 5 minutes, figured it was a bunch of bullshit and left. We visited a large ISP in the area and chatted with the owner (who we had met a couple month before in Pittsburgh at an ISP type con). After that we went to the South Street area in Philly and went shopping, picking up some greate music and other stuff.
Going back to the hotel, we found out that many people had split. So we went up to our rooms to see who was still around and doing things. We talked with some locals who were much more into hardware then we were, along with finding a guy with more radio equipment stored in his room then I've ever seen. Along with our wonderings we discovered that "hacker" ego's were as large in person as they were online. I somehow managed to get someone upset when I laughed at someone giving their email address due to the fact that the domain name was funny. This went off into a much more than needed discussion on sites, and such.
Even later I chatted with Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric), A women who writes for Gray Areas magazine (I don't remember her name), and Roman Kazan (escape.com). We bullshitted for a bit, and then I called it quits. We crashed that night relatively early and got up in the morning. We checked out before 11am (which is amazing), and poked around. After discovering that there was no one we actually wanted to talk to, we left.
Overall I was disapointed in Pumpcon. After having been to HOPE, which was a lot of fun. And Summercon (a hellish drive, but worth it). Pumpcon ended up being just ok. Pumpcon itself I thought was just boring, the only thing that saved it was the trip around in Philly to do other things (like pick up music). Will I do it again? Probably, I'm a sucker for this type of stuff, and enjoy meeting people.