I met Dan through a mutual friend (viss) on Twitter. We quickly became friends and before I knew it, I was buying my first livestreaming Nokia from him over Twitter. We both share love for a conference called DEFCON, so we finally met up in person in Vegas before seeing Penn and Teller together. We had great fun.
When I first met Dan, I immediately thought he was uber-cool. He was a DEFCON Goon (event coordinator/volunteer/tech operations) and that instantly filled me with envy. I’ve been going to DEFCON for 12 years and I’ve always secretly wanted to be a Goon. Among Dan’s many talents, he’s also an awesome photographer.
What finally threw me over the edge for a SGA nomination was Dan’s role in the YouTube Live event that took place November 22nd. I was in England and was having a down night, so I decided to cheer myself up by watching the show from my hotel room. I sent out a tweet that I was sad that I wasn’t there in person and got a response from Dan that made me realize he really is one of the coolest guys in the world. Dan was at the event, but not near the stage. Dan was in the network operations center keeping the network up for all of the live-streaming that people were doing and the event itself streaming to YouTube. I mean, the event was super cool and all, but what he was doing was bad ass and he was part of making that history. Dan made it all happen and for that, I crown him one of the Sexiest Geeks Alive.
1. What is your favorite gadget right now and why?
Picking just one favorite gadget is pretty hard. Being the geek I am I’ve amassed a variety of doo-dads and gizmos. Right now however it has to be my new Macbook Pro, because it goes with me everywhere and I have so much of my life both professional and personal on it. I love the new case style for the Macbook Pro and I find it gets a lot of comments from clients. More importantly, the new laptop is blazing fast and just feels rock solid.
2. Do you do any sort of life hacking? If so, what do you recommend to others as the most successful hack you’ve ever implemented that’s stuck and improved your life?
I do some life hacking, but it hasn’t really been something I’ve spent a lot of time on. Probably two of the things I find have helped me the most is to get my phone talking to my laptop for contacts and calendar dates and then synchronizing all of that with an online calendar. Apple’s iSync helps make this a lot easier then it once was and in conjunction with iSyncIt I can keep my phone synched at regular intervals. Then throw in a WebDAV link to an online calendar like Google’s and it really helps to keep my time managed and available to my associates.
3. How long have you been going to Defcon and what was your favorite year?
It’s amazing actually, but I’ve been going to Defcon since Defcon 8. The fact that Defcon has lasted this long through the hotel changes, all the growth, is really amazing. My favorite year was 2001, Defcon was at the Alexis Park that year and my friends and I wanted to do something fun, but non-destructive to the hotel. Our original idea had been to turn a spa into a giant jello mold but then we thought better of it and somehow ended up going with a plan to turn pool two into a giant lagoon. In the process of buying dry ice in Las Vegas I ended up buying three grocery stores out of all of their dry ice and then almost getting myself a Darwin Award for driving in a car full of dry ice with all the windows rolled up. A friend of ours noticed we were acting oddly over the Nextel and we realized what we had done.
4. What do you like about Defcon?
It draws a lot of people whose interests span the spectrum of possibilities and yet at the same time possess a very deep knowledge on the subjects that furl their passion. My friends would skewer me alive if I didn’t mention that the evening party scene at Defcon is a big draw also. It’s one of the few events I can go to and be assured that I will run into all matter of friends old and new, year after year. Plus there is always someone with some crazy gadget or custom-made gizmo that does something wickedly cool.
5. What do you geek out on? What sort of category of geek do you feel you fit into?
You could say that I am sort of a geek of all trades. I do a little bit of everything! Some things I get deeper into then others be it because of time, money, knowledge or access to parts. I tend to geek out on computer hardware, specifically building small form factor systems, as well as work on my photography skills. I’ve also got a passion for astronomy. I have a nice computer controlled 8” Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope that I am planning to work on building a mount for my Nikon DSLR to try my hand at night sky photography.
Other things I geek out on are data forensics, which usually involves messing around with hardware and software to find a needle in a haystack of data. Or finding the right piece of software to read some cryptic/old/never heard of file format. And when those get old I tinker on my FreeBSD server that runs my blog, forums, email, and other services. I install beta versions of OSes that I am curious about. I mess around with Backtrack and VMware on my Macbook Pro with different USB wifi adapters keeping my skills up to date. I love reading science fiction novels. I try to mix it up and throw new things into the mix every now and again to keep it interesting.
6. You recently were involved in an event called YouTube live. Can you tell SGA readers a bit about the event from your perspective?
The company I work for as a technology & management consultant has a division called LocationConnect that does network & computer support services for the special events business. This could be anywhere from a one night event for the press, to supporting a movie shoot on location, or providing the entire network infrastructure for the pre-show setup for a concert. Every special event is different and requires a large amount of planning to make sure that they go off without a hitch because these kinds of functions only happen once, so everything has to work the first time.
In the case of the YouTube Live concert, I was working on the planning for it as early as September. I was in San Francisco the week of TechCrunch50 for a different event we were running in the Metreon and had to do some photo scouting of the location so we could finish writing up our proposal bid for the YouTube people. Typically events are in some kind of ballroom or meeting space with well know facilities but since Fort Mason was new to us we needed to know as much about it as possible. This information was critical because I had to design a network that would be fault tolerant, cover multiple buildings, and provide both wired and wireless networks to the production crew from the first day of pre-show setup to the last day of show teardown.
Because the event was going to be streamed live, network bandwidth, latency and uptime were critically important. Because of this, the YouTube event had multiple redundant WAN connections. Our biggest pipe was a 200mbps microwave link, followed by a 4 T1 multiplexed PPP link dedicated for the shows Flash video encoders, along with a 10mbps burstable landline link. On top of all of that, the show also had an onsite satellite uplink truck that was downlinked to Los Angeles where the company handling the streaming side of the show then connected to the Akamai CDN.
More importantly however was the network had to support the crew setting up the show, and this meant being onsite for full two weeks before the show was to start. We had to have pervasive wireless networking in all the buildings along with wired drops in strategic locations so the production company and various stage crews could get their work done each day. To give you an idea how much the production crew used the network, in the two weeks we had the network up and running there was just over half a terabyte of data transferred in total.
Probably one of the funniest parts of this particular job was a critical piece of fiber we had to string between two of the buildings at the Fort. Because of the sight lines for the microwave link there was only one building the 200mbps link could be situated on top of and that building had no copper or fiber infrastructure linking it back to any of the other buildings we would be in. The only problem was this building had a face along the marina and the other side couldn’t be used due to foot traffic and lack of a place to run a cable out of the way. So we waited for seasonal low tide and had people walking on rocks normally under a few feet of water on one end and another person with a weighted end of a rope trying to toss it to the person down on the rocks so we could pull this fiber to the end of the pier where it had to go. It was a bit tricky at points, but we got the fiber installed and its quite possibly one of the more interesting stories I’ll have now.
7. How do you think this event will change the landscape of user contributed content?
The fact that you had established performers from the music industry side by side with people whose primary claim to fame were their own channels popularity on YouTube is a significant event. I think it is at least the beginning of a validation for user driven content and community. But this movement is still has a long way to go to mature and blossom into a full-blown competitor to traditional media. Remember, traditional media considers a show with a 1 share to be a dismal failure whereas new media would gladly jump at the chance to have a million viewers so I think it will still be a while before new and old reach some kind of parity of audience.
8. You were one of the folks (if not *the* guy) responsible for getting the wifi/internet up and running at the event to support live-streaming from the audience as well as the event itself. What challenges did you face during the event? Did everything go as planned? What did it look like from the NOC? Did you see any of the performance live? How did you feel to have that much responsibility?
The biggest challenge for this event was figuring out how to distribute network resources between multiple buildings on a campus where the primary facilities were built in 1912 and 1934. We ended up needing to run some long fibers like the one that ran along the side of the marina and between some of the buildings and other building had been retrofitted with fiber between them luckily.
Bear in mind that our responsibility was for all of the onsite networking, the streaming servers and other streaming infrastructure & coding was handled by another company that was onsite with us. However, getting enough bandwidth to the Fort took a variety of delivery methods landline and microwave being the primary methods. We also had to babysit AT&T to an extreme degree to just get them to turn up 4 working T1 circuits, a process that took them almost a whole month to figure out. Near the end of that process I think we had something like 15 different contacts at AT&T working on the issue, it was truly nuts.
One thing I’ve learned through these special events we do is that whatever plan we come up with in the comfort of the office will get revised at least once if not a few more times depending on how much conditions at the facility have changed since when we scouted it out. That being said we had some issues with two of our contractors early on in the setup that we managed to work through and get things back on track. The YouTube Live concert itself went off without any problems that I was aware of from my position at the NOC.
Probably the one aspect of working on this that was a little frustrating is being the head of the NOC my position during the show really had to be glued to our various monitoring tools to make sure we caught any problems if they happened. So I was unable to see any of the actual concert itself live, but I was watching it via the various different streaming servers onsite and offsite, so I didn’t exactly miss anything per se beyond the physical excitement of being in the concert building. On the other hand, I was able to be in the concert building a few times when the musicians were warming up and working on hitting their marks so I think that made up for missing out on the concert itself in person.
The responsibility that comes with an event of this size I think is an order of magnitude smaller then the knots it puts in your stomach and brows it makes you furrow when contemplating planning out the details of said event. There were times when it felt good to have the responsibility and times when it felt more like a ball and chain around my ankle, but the important thing was to get through the event and make sure it would be a success for everyone involved. Events of this size only work when everyone is working as a team, otherwise its too much for one person to tackle. In the run-up to the event I was nervous because this would be the biggest and most complicated event we had ever done, so I was always playing out worst-case scenarios in my head.
9. What other events have you been responsible for on this scale? Defcon is one of the most hostile networks in the world - how did this compare?
Defcon really is on a level that is so hostile its practically artificial by comparison. Sure, your average server sitting on a DSL link or in a collocation facility will get scanned, probed and prodded, but its never the kind of intense level of hostile activity that you can see on the Defcon network. So where Defcon is an open network with all manner of users allowed on, the networks we build for our events are all managed and have multiple levels of controlled access so we can be certain of what users are using the network and where so we can pinpoint & isolate problems quickly when they pop up.
Other events that we do that are pretty big, but not quite the size of YouTube Live are the evening press/analyst shows at CES we do the networking support for. At those events you typically have a massive ballroom filled with 150 different companies or more showcasing new products or in some cases lab prototypes with over 1000 of the press core there. Those events tend to really stress the wireless spectrum for wifi devices and you quickly discover which companies have spent time torture testing their equipment.
10. How much downtime did you need afterward and how did you celebrate such a huge success?
After the drive back down from the show I needed almost a full day to recombobulate, rest, and catch up on mail, bills, the usual stuff. Well, okay, two whole days. As for celebrating the success of the show, I celebrated by finally getting a decent amount of sleep and catching up on TV shows I had missed while out of town. Not as exciting as one would want, but I was just beat by the end of it all.
I had an opportunity extended to me to make it to the afterparty with MC Hammer the night of the concert, but since teardown of the show started immediately after the concert was over by the time I had reached a stopping point on Saturday night I was just too tired to go out and party when I had to be back at the site at 8AM the next day.
11. What is your dream meal?
I think my dream meal would have to be to participate as a judge on the old Iron Chef show and the secret ingredient is some crazy ass thing I’ve never heard of. I still remember an old Iron Chef episode where the secret ingredient was live squid and the defending Iron Chef made squid ink ice cream for a dessert, it was crazy!
12. What is your favorite color?
British Racing Green
13. What are your top ten favorite websites you’d like to share with others?
Schlock Mercenary – http://www.schlockmercenary.com/
Digg – http://www.digg.com/
MacRumors – http://www.macrumors.com/
Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/
Kotaku – http://www.kotaku.com/
Tech Report – http://www.techreport.com/
PriceGrabber – http://www.pricegrabber.com/
CAIDA – http://www.caida.org/
PacketStorm – http://packetstormsecurity.net/
Bastard Operator From Hell – http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/
14. Who is your favorite geek role model?
This is a hard one to answer. I’m really a huge fan of The Doctor from Doctor Who. I got turned on to the show by one of the A/V tech at my high school library and ever since then I’ve been nutters for the show. I have always liked The Doctor. He always seemed to have an answer at hand for any situation, no matter how ridiculous or out of place. A close runner up was Scotty from the original Star Trek show. The whole miracle worker pathos, save the day, and all that kind of stuff just resonates with me.
15. Who else is a sexy geek? Who do you nominate?
Hmm, if I had to nominate someone I could toss out a name of someone already famous, sexy, geeky, or all of the above but I think that would defeat the purpose really. I’ll give you three sexy geek nominations, all good friends of mine so I could be biased of course. First is Trina of GamingAngels.com, you can find her on Twitter at @gamingangel. She is a sweetheart! Then there is my friend Genevieve who is working on her PhD in computer science at USC. She’s been published in a paper or two already discussing various aspects of networks that I always found fascinating. You can find her papers at http://is.gd/aNWL . Last but not least is Jena who has a great blog over at http://iamanenigma.wordpress.com/ and is also @Scandalous on Twitter. Any one of them is worth spending the time to get to know!
16. What do you find sexy?
Curves, knowledge, and the willingness to learn and challenge old ideas. I’m a sucker for smart people who don’t go about flaunting it. People who are nice and have a big heart. People who can disagree with you and explain why cogently. All that and a woman who knows how to be sexy.
