So we go back from Phreaknic last week. I know you were worried. I have to say, I was not impressed. I went expecting to spend my time watching informative presentations about moderately deep technical subjects. I was reassured by the fact that this is the longest-running hacker conference in the USA (not the oldest, but the one with the most total years of operation).

All that went out the window. Turns out it was essentially a 2-day long frat party. The majority of the attendees spent most of the weekend drunk, the presentations as a whole were fairly useless. One thing I can say for sure: geeks in general don’t make good presenters. The subjects that had a chance had presenters that really needed to retake their oral communications class.

There were a few bright points. The “Postal Experiments” presentation was very interesting. The presenter has spent the last year or so experimenting with what he can and can’t send through the mail. He’s gone to the trouble of going to his local post office and actually reading their handbook. He’s invented one of the slower ways to flip a coin: Address and stamp both sides of a letter, then see which recipient actually gets it. He took a foam pool noodle, addressed and stamped it, and stuffed it in a roadside mailbox. It went through. He sent an 8″ ball filled with pennies. He wants to try the coin-flip thing with a cube next time; 6 different addresses for the mail carrier to choose from. He also figured a way to get a little extra time to pay your taxes. Write out your check to the IRS, put it in an envelope, and then add your own barcode to the front that routes it through a town in Alaska that only gets mail once a month. You’ll have an extra month to make sure the money’s in your bank account.

The highlight of the con ended up being the WIFI Race. There were four of us in the minivan. Adam drove, Matt navigated with his GPS, Bryson ran the directional antenna, and I was on the omnidirectional. We set both antennae up on a tripod where the left middle-row seat had been, and I sat in the back. It worked out fairly well, though we were never in range of the “fox” long enough to log in.

One of the other contestants had a massive parabolic antenna that took up the entire back half of his van. He didn’t win. The winner was a family (mom, dad, two preteen boys) who had never heard of a wifirace, and won with an off-the-shelf cantenna and a couple of Nintendo DSs. Given who he his, though, it’s not such a bad thing.

Here’s Bryson’s account of the highlight of the race: our wreck.

The other good thing about the con was the exposure to actual hacker culture. Obviously I’ll get nothing of the sort here in Joplin, Missouri, so this was an eye-opener. Know how the Hackers gets all the technology horribly wrong? Well, it got the culture completely right. Imagine the hacker hangout in that movie, at a hotel, with lots of booze (and probably marijuana), and that was my weekend. Fascinating, really

All in all, it was a decent cheap roadtrip with friends, with an odd weekend thrown in. A couple of people at the con said it was the worst one they’ve been to, so we may give it another shot next year and see what happens