A few months ago I was asked to keynote the SecTor security conference in Toronto. A million things flashed through my mind, like "Would I do a good job?" and "What would I talk about?" and "Do I speak Canadian?"

Thankfully I was able to harness my special powers of fear and stagefright to craft up something passable.

The conference was packed, a variety of security researchers, security IT pros, and security vendors were in attendence. It was my first trip to Toronto. Although I arrived insanely past my scheduled arrival time–

Wait, that was such an event in and of itself, I had to include it in my keynote.

It was an 8am flight so I was already kind of bitchy and cranky because if there’s anything I hate more than repeatedly being punched in the throat, it’s air travel.

Sure enough, the pilot comes on after we’re all seated. The flight plan computer in the cockpit has a non recoverable fault and they were going to have to, get this, reboot the airplane.

This involved turning the plane off, turning the plane on again, and waiting for the flight team to recertify the flight.

This process takes 30 to 40 minutes.

That didn’t work. So they…did it again. And it didn’t work.

So the pilot came on and said well folks, rebooting hasn’t fixed the problem so we’re going to potentially have to cancel the flight but first we’re going to…reboot it one last time.

And that time it worked.

So I got there insanely late and had just enough time to catch some crappy wings and a guiness with JJ, Jamie, and the Hoff before crashing.

Tuesday was a load of press interviews followed by what was probably the best event speaker dinner EVAR. It was at the Bier Markt downtown. OMG. All the beer. All the amazing food you could ever want. Best. Food. EVAR.

The talk was security trends, how awesome the food was, which was the next beer, how awesome the food was, security trends, beer, food, security? Wait Xbox? food. Beer? Security! Beer! wait what? SECURITY! wow. We were there until way way insanely late, and we stumbled back to the hotel.

Next morning I woke up early, hit some coffee, and gave my keynote. I hear it was good but to be honest I was a bundle of nerves and in the end realized the deck I provided was missing three slides from my practice so I actually ended 10 minutes early and was a bit mortified. Luckily the audience had questions. Here’s the text, along with a description of the slides in brackets.

It was overall a great experience with fun presenters. I can’t wait for SecTor ’09. Thanks to all who were there and went to my talk.