During the first 3 hour leg of my trip, I finished the slides for my talk. During the second, 8 hour leg of my trip, I managed to sleep for about 5 of them. I arrived at 7 am local time, took an hour to get through customs and get my baggage, another hour to take the train from the airport to the hotel area, and another two hours for them to have my room ready. While waiting for my room, I discovered that I was speaking that afternoon at 4 pm. Once my room was ready there was no longer time for a nap, so I gave my “VoIP Attacks!” talk exhausted and fueled entirely by RedBull. It gives you wings indeed.
Having lost my train of thought mid-slide a couple of times, and a few stumbles due to my brain being past ready to shut down, my presentation went surprisingly well. I hit the end of the talk with a few minutes left for questions, and have since gotten much favorable feedback from both conference staff and attendees.
I managed to stay awake a bit longer and hang out with a local friend, ride the tubes around London a bit and grab a snack, hit up the conference reception at the pub across the street from the conference hotel, and then I went to sleep for close to 14 hours.
Overall I was fairly impressed with the conference, although I didn’t realize what a small conference it actually is. I would estimate only a few hundred attendees as the single-track conference room was about half the size of the large rooms at BlackHat and was only about three-quarters-full at any given time. In addition to that every row of seats had a table in front of them for laptops so it’s not as if people were packed into the room; there was plenty of room to spread out even considering the size of the room.