Well, having freshly returned from SANS NS 2006 in Las Vegas, NV.  I thought I would add a few thoughts.

First off, Vegas is a great city, it appeals to some, and others hate it.  I personally, love Las Vegas.  It's fun, my wife quotes it to be an adult Disneyland.  I think that's an appropriate description.

I did several things while there.  First off, on Sunday night, we had our Incident Handlers dinner.  Mike Poor, Lorna Hutcheson, Marc Sachs, Johannes Ullrich, Brian Granier, Ed Skoudis, me, and a couple others were there (If I forgot exactly who was sitting around the table, don't beat me fellow handlers!  Please remind me).  We had a good time sitting around swapping stories about Microsoft.

We each had our own respective classes to teach last week.  (Some are still out there teaching!), I taught the Snort: Building and Operating and Snort Rules classes, and in the meantime ran over and hung out/spoke in Mike Poor's Intrusion Detection in-Depth Class.

I attended a couple talks while I was there, notably Marty Roesch's (Creator of Snort, and founder of Sourcefire) "Snort: Past, Present, and Future" talk on Thursday night, and his "One Click Compliance" talk on Friday at lunch.  I didn't get a chance to attend Brian's Spam/Anti-Spam talk, nor did I get a chance to see Lorna's Malware talk.  Both of which I wanted to attend but had conflicting events.  I did attend a roundtable discussion Sunday night with Marc Sachs, Johannes Ullrich, Ed Skoudis, Stephen Northcutt, and Eric Cole on "Future threats".  It was an excellent discussion.

All in all, I met a lot of the readers, I hung out with a lot of the handlers, and was able to spend a lot of time with all my friends.

Maybe today will be a slow day for the Internet, and you, the reader, can write in and share your experience with us at Vegas.  Please use our contact link above, by clicking on the Handler of the Day's name.  Also -- my fellow handlers -- feel free to edit this article and add your own thoughts and experiences!

Reader entry:
"the conference I went to last week was NS2006 (Ed Skoudis' hacker/incident class and it was great)!"