Short, sweet, and to the point because I"ve been out of touch for somewhere in the neighborhood of a week now. Also because I'm tired, jetlagged, and fighting back a nasty headache that seems to want to reduce my forebrain to a 386.

Last Wednesday night, Lyssa and I drove back to Pennsylvania to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with her family. We spent part of Friday with my folks after several misadventures in trying to find an open bank in the North Hills on Black Friday. We parted company briefly on Saturday, and I traveled back to PIttsburgh to …

The guys over at the Hacker Foundation have put together a jaunt for globetrotting hackers that will be hard to pass up, a project that they're calling Hackers On A Plane. Through much wheeling and dealing, they've cut deals with the organizers of Defcon in Las Vegas and the Chaos Computer Camp in Germany, and they've made it possible to attend both. Here's how:

For $1,337us (or €1,337eur), you can attend Defcon in Vegas (though you'll have to pay for your own food and sleeping space), fly from Vegas to Frankfurt, Germany, catch a charter flight to the …

I made it to the LayerOne conference safe, sound, and on a shuttle bus that runs from the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California to the Hilton in Pasadena. Travel tip: If you can avoid it, don't catch a cab, they cost an arm and a leg. If you can charter a shuttlebus you'll pay much less for the trip. A cab ride would probably have cost me about $70us, while I paid all of $23us for a leisurely ride to the hotel, in air conditioning (not that we needed it) and comfort. Of course, I hadn't been there for …

0814 EST5EDT - Writing offline on Windbringer, high above the state of Virginia, I believe.

Somehow I managed to get to bed at a decent time last night in preparation for my trip to the LayerOne conference in Pasadena, California this weekend. However, that should not be construed to mean in any way that I had an easy time of falling asleep... being naturally inclined to life as a night owl (professionally and otherwise), retiring before midnight is often problematic, unless I've run myself into the ground and really need the rest anyway. Still, somehow I caught a few hours of …