Back at my Desk

I’m finally home from a 3-city in 3 days tour covering Atlanta, New York, and Chicago. Beyond the excellent turn out for the WH/F5 lunch and learn presentations, I’m always fond of the extracurricular activity. Since I’m still injured, visiting new BJJ academies was out of the question, so instead I substituted the time with food. Fortunately I was able to do so with meals that fit within my high protein low-carb diet (208 lbs is the goal). 30lbs to go!

In Atlanta there was Fogo de Chão, a stellar upscale all-you-can-eat Brazilian BBQ restaurant, that served 15 types of fire-roasted meats brought to your table sizzling on skewers. Now that’s hard to beat. In New York we stopped by my all-time favorite steak place, Smith & Wollensky, for a Colorado bone-in ribeye. The waiter said it was the most flavorful meat in the world, I’m thinking he was right.

Chicago, I left the venue selection to the OWASP Chicago Chapter locals. But before that Cory Scott and Jason Witty invited me deliver an encore performance of “Get Rich or Die Trying” at the recommendation of Ed Bellis (Thank you). The cool thing about that particular talk is afterwards people always clue me into other business logic flaws they’ve encountered. It’s really good content to add, especially if it involves money. For me I was excited to see the presentations by Mike Zussman and Nate McFeters since I didn’t get to see either talk at Black Hat. 

Afterwards we went out for drinks with several people including Nate McFeters, Thomas Ptacek, Shrikant Raman, and a dozen others. The appetizers were decent, but I think the chose the place more for the beer than anything else. Chicago probably has one of the more friendly and vibrant chapters around. Anyway, it’s good to be back home. I got to do some modest BJJ training over the weekend, play in the GGAFL finals (we got spanked badly), and hit some rides with the kids at Great America. Now off to do the expense reports. Yay! ;)