Conference redux: checking out the swag...

I am becoming increasingly paranoid about public connections, and the release, late last week, of a cute little do-whopper called "Firesheep" didn't help my state of mind. Firesheep is a sprightly piece of code that will display basic information about people who share a public network with you and who do not interact with, say, Twitter via an encrypted (https) connection. What's particularly pernicious about Firesheep is that it'll let you step into someone's Twitter session as them, because the software actually hijacks a copy of the cookie that's used to keep a session alive.

That paranoia basically kept me off the Internet during the conference earlier this week, because the wifi-sharing app on my DROID X phone is beyond pathetic. To add insult to injury, by the end of the day I was uniformly too tired to stop and summarize what had gone on of interest that day.

So here I sit, with all my conference goodies on the desk next to me. Let me start with that and see if they elicit any memories.

• A reasonably nice Rollabind^® notebook from Language Services Associates. The cool thing about Rollabind is that you can add and remove pages pretty easily, although the design is proprietary.
• The CIA gave out a doohickey that cleans LCD screens, which I haven't tried out yet. They also had lapel pins.
• Transperfect gave out small Nerf-like footballs.
• Corporate Translations gave out little hand massagers and thumb drives. I was expecting these to have a capacity of 2 GB, but was wrong. The device has a capacity of only 64 MB.
• R.R. Donnelly gave out a whatsis with a small yellow Post-It pad on one side and multicolored Post-It flags on the other. They also had a thingy consisting of an alligator clip attached to a short piece of cable, whose other piece is embedded in a small block of wood.
• Wordfast gave out a more substantial and more conventional spiral-bound note pad. This company also threw a COMDEX-style party on Thursday night at a brewery not far from the conference hotel.
• SDL gave out small humanoid dolls intended to be squeezed as a form of stress relief.
• STG gave out little styrofoam missiles (with fins and a built-in rubber band) that one could 'fire' across the room.
• CyraCom gave out a squeezable ball to relieve stress (do you discern a pattern?).
• National Geographic gave out sample issues of the magazine, in various languages (but not French or Russian). They also had a strange-looking lapel pin in the shape of the magazine's yellow border.
• Booz|Allen|Hamilton gave out a little note pad with a pen

As you might expect, just about everyone gave out pens, and very nearly all of them are barely adequate to their intended purpose.

I've finished documents I received Friday, so I better wind up this digression and go despeckle them and send them off.

Happy Halloween!

Cheers...