Fame & Fortune

July 4th 2024

It's finally happening — my blogger career is taking off, I'm getting paid to go places. Well, or something along those lines.

I'm headed to recon, who are flying me out here to Montreal and paying for my hotel room. Hopefully, that is — when I land in Montreal, I haven't received answers to my emails for a few months now. A bit lost in this new city, and without internet for the first time in a long while (the EU has made me soft!), I just head to the place I think the conference is taking place. I tell the receptionist at the hotel that I might have a reservation, and am relieved when she actually hands me a keycard.
It's an interesting new experience, this corpo travel lifestyle — I'm staying in a Hilton Double Tree, located inside a labyrinthine mall complex. I have to take two different elevators and countless liminal hallways to my room on the eighteenth floor. It has the largest bed I think I ever slept in, and a nice view of the Montreal skyline. But on a closer look, it's all a bit superficial: The window doesn't open, the shower has delusions of grandeur that the tiny showerhead cannot live up to, and the breakfast is $33.

The cute little hostel that I spend my last two nights in may have three strangers sharing the room with me (and perhaps a comparable total bedspace?), but it has windows that open, an unpretentious shower, and I don't have to work my way through a hypercapitalist maze to get out.
But let's backtrack for a second:

It's nine in the morning, time for the keynote to start. I've already made it through the speaker's dinner yesterday with minimal damage despite not knowing anyone (strategy: find someone with colored hair, stick with them for the entire evening — hi chris!).

The projector is not working. The projector is not working in such a severe way that after the speaker has done the usual fiddling with her laptop, Hugo, the organiser, comes up onto the stage and yells for new cables to be run:

I need an SDI cable in here. None of that HDMI bullshit. We need SDI. HDMI won't do it. We knew this, look at the spec. Can someone run an SDI cable? Hey! I need an SDI cable run!

I'm not sure if he's still drunk from yesterday or if that's just his personality, but this speech continues for forty minutes. And as best as I can tell, some of the people who actually seem responsible for the tech setup just hand him an SDI cable that's not visibly plugged in anywhere to keep him occupied? and in the meantime run another HDMI cable?? I was told that recon could get a bit messy, but this? Good start.

An hour into this, we eventually get a wonderful keynote, and some guy who claims to not work here comes up on stage and suggests we just all agree to treat the schedule as shifted by one hour. This will eventually create complications with the externally scheduled lunch and coffee break, but you know what, yeah, let's do that.
The conference continues without any more major incidents, but you're not here for the nitty-gritty of what's going on in the reverse engineering community, so I'll just say that it's a wild experience. Everything's new and busy and demanding, but I think I might get addicted to it:

At its best, i am walking through the early-morning streets surrounded by towering glass and concrete, wind blowing through my skirt, the perfect soundtrack in my ears - and I'm feeling international and liquid and free. I'm giving my talk and people are listening, for an hour, smirking and laughing when i want them to. There's a special kind of power here. Some of them come up to me after, asking questions, congratulating me, and I don't think I've ever felt this flattered.

At its worst, I'm at one of the never ending parties, clinging all night to the same two people that I somehow managed to talk to the day before. I'm feeling kind of jealous of the others, who seem to move so fluidly between groups, who seem to know everyone, who so effortlessly belong. I leave early, and retreat back to my hotel room in between talks when I cannot bear standing around, not knowing anyone.
When I'm fed up with the hordes of men in faded hacker T-Shirts in the evenings, I venture out of the hotel/mall compound: Just outside the hotel lies the sprawl of the world's biggest jazz festival, and it's just a few steps to the pleasantly pedestrian chinatown.
For dinner, I snack on a variety of dumplings, cheap noodles, and that dragon floss dessert that I should really know I don't like by now but keep trying anyway. Breakfast is more difficult: My quest for bagels takes me half an hour uptown by bus to the crowded, incredibly narrow Fairmount Bagel. I just barely miss my connection and by the time I've walked back I've missed most of the morning's talks.
I have three more days of vacation after the conference ends, which I use to attend the after- and after-after-parties, naturally. I finally manage to find — and get adopted by — the cool kids: The ones wearing dog collars and hacking their sketchy electronic skateboards. We talk about business cards you can play snake on and complicated ways to light christmas lights and electronic dog noses. It's quite fun, actually.
And once that's done, I stroll around Montreal — checking out the parts a bit further out from the hotel, touring the relics of the Expo 1967 and finally spending some time at the free concerts of the jazz festival.
On my last day here I "climb" the local "mountain", where you can find expensive-ish cafés, questionable takes on colonialism, and — maybe? — a beaver.
I'm still processing all that has happened in these past few days. I'm still riding the high of people telling me they liked my talk, but I'm already bracing for the jetlag and the everyday work life to hit when I land. It's been a good run.

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