Twestival Seattle

On Thursday night, I realized that Twestival was going on because I saw some tweets from a friend (Joy Argow) who was having lots of fun at the local event in Nashville. I’d been thinking of going to the Seattle event, but wasn’t able to find anyone to join me on such short notice, and opted for just heading home. I really didn’t feel like I had the energy for going into an environment with lots of people where I didn’t know anyone. However, when Joy direct tweeted me and said that I really ought to try it out, I caved to the pressure. )

I got to the Spitfire when happy hour was almost done, and a couple walked in just behind me and we struck up a conversation and ended up grabbing a table together. It turned out to be Crystal Williams and Dan Kaminski; neither names I was familiar with, but incredibly kind and funny folks. Actually, Dan was the hacker extraordinaire who discovered a major vulnerability in part of the underlying architecture of the Internet a few months back. Wired Magazine wrote a really interesting and entertaining article about that. Crystal Williams is quite a techie in her own right as a Drupal goddess. (For those unfamiliar with Drupal, it’s a great open source software framework for building some pretty amazing functionality into websites.)

I’m really glad that I ended up going to Twestival after all. Not only did I get to hear some great stories from Crystal about her times at Warner Brothers working for Metallica, and another job when she ended up having to manage a photo shoot for gallon bags of salad dressing (how sexy is that), but I also heard some funny stories from Dan. He talked about how he and Crystal had met, their plans to go to Antarctica soon for a couple weeks with about 50 of their closest friends, and the time he’d literally programmed himself into kidney stones – by coding day and night for three days straight with little food and water. I heard really interesting stuff about when Avaya started up, various hacker conferences Dan speaks at, and even about the time a couple years ago when Dan got into some hot water with some lawyers and got flown to Sony headquarters after uncovering the extent of the Sony rootkit. When we were done, they wouldn’t even think of letting me pay for my coke and fish tacos, so it ended up being Crystal’s treat. What a fun night!