Speak, Steak & Sinkholes

While sitting at work on a Friday I'm enjoying a late lunch and notice an email from the account that a few months prior declined my submission for a conference talk.

I hope this email finds you well. I'm writing to inform you of an opportunity that has arisen due to a last-minute speaker cancellation. One of our scheduled speakers had to drop out after testing positive for COVID-19.

As a result, we have an open slot at 2:00 PM tomorrow. We would be honored if you could step in and present your submission "Reviewing Xbox & Xbox 360 Security from a Halo modder" to fill this vacant spot.

I knew my idea didn't really blend to any of the tracks, so I kinda expected a decline. I didn't however expect less than 24 hours away from the conference being asked to speak at it. Before hearing of the decline I was in progress of rewriting my deck from Keynote to Canva, but I of course paused that effort when I heard of the decline.

So I woke up my older Keynote deck of this talk I did way back in November 2022. I adjusted a few things that had changed in the past few years and tried to memorize the slides and was hopefully prepared for the next day.

I was ready to present and hit one technicality out of the gate that my speaker notes did not appear because the computer was mirrored. So I undid mirroring and the screens were reversed - ie speaker notes to the crowd and slide deck on my screen.

I could have sworn swapping those screens was in preferences, but I couldn't find the setting and I had no Internet on the device for a quick search. So I went ahead in mirror mode, which left me unaware to see the next slide or timer. Lesson learned for next time to not do that - I definitely needed the next slide to remember my place. I thought I could keep in memory a slide deck I made 2 years ago, but clearly I could not.

In my opinion my talk was a bit more rushed than I intended and folks could probably tell the few times I lost where I was in my own deck. However saying that I got plenty of questions and folks appeared to be interested so for a sub day turnaround I was happy.

Every time I attend a conference I have mixed feedback from excellent talks, great networking and poor talks. Take for example this talk I attended about API security from a co-founder of a company. I was expecting to hear about some cool techniques for security, but instead the first 30 minutes was learning about terminology at a near basic level between backends and an API.

We finally at one point hit a slide about techniques for API security and it was just a bullet point list of tools of like Burp, Postman, etc. I went into this talk expecting some deep dive into APIs with tooling to execute payloads, but instead it felt like a freshman class refreshing terminology and naming some tools. Perhaps what I'm looking for is a novice|intermediate|advanced marker on talks to plan out my conference day.

As my talk ended I had to leave the conference early to make it across town for a fancy dinner at Bern's Steak House.

I've only been to this place a few times and this visit was easily the best. I ordered the steak rare and it absolutely melted in the mouth with each bite. From running around a conference all morning and speaking I worked up quite an appetite which allowed me to eat everything on my plate.

Our waiter was excellent providing an explanation of what each type of meat cut was, including how its sliced and which direction and more. It just felt like the guy was extremely knowledgeable about beef which was cool to hear. We ended up grabbing some dessert and that pushed my stomach to the limit - I could not finish the mint ice cream.

The next day it was time to visit some sinkholes at a nearby park.

A water filled sinkhole just looks like a body of water, so a bit underwhelming. However, seeing a hole cautioned off with tape suggests a new formation of a sinkhole or a soil depression. There was even another depression of soil that hadn't been fully taped off. For some reason I just expected a big cylinder to look down into and that is not what this exploration had.

I'm guessing the constant rain we've been dealing with in Tampa is causing a bit of flooding and increased sinkholes. Thankfully outside of a tiny storm during the conference the rest of the weekend was rain free.