Review of Rubi Con 2001
High Class Hooligan
www.mobsters.net/HCH/
tophat@mobsters.net



1.	All your _________ are belong to us.
A)	Blender
B)	Liquor
C)	T-shirts
D)	All of the above


Of my very limited con adventures (Rubi Con 200, PhreakNIC 4.0), I place Rubi
Con 2001 at the top.   Not only did the mobsters.net have fun and represent
(I'll get to that part later), but there were babes  there. BABES! Not those
IRC girls or the fat girls who room with computer hackers. Oh no. Real 
girls.  Real girls who know nothing about computers - you  know, the kind that
exercise and stuff.


Our adventure started about a week before the con started.  I received an email
from  sodium@mobsters.net informing me that he had pulled some scam and gotten
us free passes to Rubi  Con 2001.  About a day after that I was informed that
this scam consisted of sodium signing us all up  so do some speech on
something.  Whatever, we'd get drunk and pull something out of our ass.  I 
wasn't even 100% sure what I supposed to talk on until the night before the con
when I jotted about 2  sentences down on my laptop - that was supposed to be my
speech.  We (sodium and myself) had  found a ride up to the con via sodium's
girlfriend (did I thank you?).  She is very cool and actually  knows a tad bit
of H/P stuff from living with sodium.  Now, about a week before the con we
started  talking and making arrangements for the con.  Sodium_s girlfriend said
that her alcoholic mother  would accompany us and pay for our hotel room.  I can
think of nothing more amusing than staying  in a hotel room with a middle aged
woman who likes to party, at a hacker con no less. Can you?   Unfortunately
this didn't happen.  Sod's girlfriend's little brother just got on spring break
and begged  her to let him come.  He (Atari) is 15 years old and wanted to go
there to learn how to hack. And he,  in turn, brought along with him his friend
from school (Casper aka Gizmo aka the 12 yr old blond  kid) who wanted to go
there to drink beer and be able to smoke cigarettes without getting in
trouble.   He was like 15 or 16 and asked us on the ride up if we could make
him a fake id because he only has  his temps.  Can you see where this is
leading?

We leave cincy Thursday night and drive up to Columbus to pick up these kids. 
Since the drunken  mother wasn't coming we convinced Casper to get enough money
from his mom to pay for our room.   We sure as hell weren't going to do it.  We
try to pick up the kids from school Friday but somehow  missed them. Eventually
we got everything squared away and left Columbus around 3 PM.  We were  supposed
to speak in 4 hours.  Now let me be the first to say that sodium's girlfriend is
a great  person and is incredibly nice and fun.  Ok, that said she is one crazy
driver.  She is no Utahsaint (see  www.mobsters.net/HCH/utahdrives.txt) but she
must be a distant relative.  Her driving technique  consists of getting in the
left land and driving up to the back of the car ahead of her and giving them
a  couple taps on their back bumper to let them know that they need to get out
of her lane.  Then when  she gets to a truck and follows it so close that they
can't see her she'll switch lanes and pass them on  the right so close that
their tires rub up against our windows.  Now I may be exaggerating a tad, but 
really folks it was scary. I would estimate that our average speed was
somewhere in between 90 _ 105  mph. Oh and she likes to feeling that driving on
the rumble strips gives her__ Because of her reckless  driving we pulled up to
the door of the hotel at almost exactly 7:00 and sodium and I hop out  and
run  inside.  Our boy Rijilv, who is sitting behind the desk and seeing the
rushed looks on our faces,  throws two speaker badges around our neck as we run
towards to conference room.  But the  conference room had not yet been equipped
with a VCR that we needed to play our into video. [ The  topic of our speech
was _Low Class Scams: How to live for free_  Our introduction video was
spliced  footage of big guns, people getting shot, and explosions.  I'm not
really sure how it related but it was  entertaining.] The con organizers then
moved our speech back to 12:00 PM Saturday.  We met up  with Tradeser and some
other people who are down and managed to snag a $75/night sweet in about  15
minutes, this is after we were informed that there we no rooms left. After
tired and hungry from the  car ride we went downstairs to get a bite at the
diner on the first floor of the hotel.  After eating a nice  meal of whatever
it was we decided to skip out on the bill, all 5 of us.  We get up and run out
of the  door and all the way up to the elevator where we giggled up to our
hotel room.  After about 5 minutes  we get a call to our room asking if we had
just eaten at the diner.  We told them that we hadn't and  then they said
something that scared whomever was talking on the phone.  We got Atari to get
out his  money and go down and pay the bill.  Atari said that he was scared of
elevators and wanted me to walk  down there with him.  We go down there and
tell our waitress that we had forgotten our wallets in our  suitcases and gone
up to get the money.  Relieved, she laughed it off and got a big tip.  There
ARE  security cameras inside the diner and they do go up to the front desk.

Later that night I found some guy who wanted to make a beer run so we left the
con and started  walking around  Detroit's inner city looking for a liquor
store.  This was probably the scariest 20  minutes of my life.  We found some
corner store that the entire cast of _Boyz in the_Hood_ was  standing in front
of.  Next to them was a whole busload of Jesus freaks that were trying to stop
people  from going into the liquor store.  While the guy I was with went in to
buy beer I stood outside and  tried to mess with the Jesus freaks.  It is not
possible to convince them there maybe be different ways  on interpreting the
Bible.  He will come up to me and say something and I'll respond _yeah,
that's  one way to look at it, but couldn't you also interpret it this way?_
And he'll give me an astonished  look and say What?! But it says it right here!
as he points out some bible passage that he just quoted.   It is a good way to
waste time, my friend was out in a jiffy with the beer.  On our way back to the
hotel  the Jesus freak gave me a book so that I may be saved.  It's story line
is that a guy is in purgatory and  is looking back on all of the bad things he
did in his life.  One page was him looking back to when he  asked his other
teenage friends if they had 'heard the latest dirty joke?'.  These books are
funny as H  _ E _ double hockey sticks when your drunk.  After we got back to
the hotel there was some panel  discussion that sodium and I took part in.  I
forget the topic, all I know is that I sat next to Rick Forno  and he kept
making fun of NFF under his breath.  Somehow, during the panel discussion I
convinced  NFF to give me his key card to his room.  What the FUCK were you
thinking?  He sent me up there  to fetch a bottle of Barcadi Limon for his to
sip.  Now I was already really drunk and sending me up  to a room that isn't
mine to fetch liquor that isn't mine is not the smartest thing to do.  Most all
that I  can recall is that I found someone's (hoping that it was NFF_s) camera
and  used it to take pictures of  my genitalia. I'm so grade school.  Then I
grabbed as much liquor as I could carry and went and it in  my room.  I went
back downstairs with the Barcardi and filled up some cups for sodium and I.  I
gave  the rest to NFF.  I can't remember what happened after that.  The next
thing I can recall is that I was  back in NFF_s room drinking more of his
alcohol when a whole shitload of people bust in pushing a  luggage rack into
the room with NFF passed out on it with his eyes rolled up in the back of his
head.   I quickly snapped a picture  [ available at www.mobsters.net/misc/ ] ,
grabbed some more of his liquor  and ran back to my room. Later on I heard that
he had to go the to hospital and had a 1.xx % alcohol  level. For those of you
who don't know NFF is one of the people who throw the convention. For the 
parents whose kids talked them into letting them go, NFF would be one of the
role models at the con.  After getting Casper really drunk we take him outside
and duct tape him to a pole.  We then write  _mobsters.net owned me_ on him and
leave.  While we were taping him to the pole a bus drivers  comes up and starts
talking to us.  Apparently he drives of Nelly, who is staying at our hotel. 
Then  sodium and I just ran around the con telling people to come to our room
to party.  After a little bit  there were a bunch of people chilling in our
room drinking all of NFF_s liquor and getting wasted.   Some guy was trying to
convince us that he could sell us a bunch of used Sparcs, sparcbooks, and  SGIs
full of government docs for like $20 a piece.  I think he ended up sleeping on
our couch.  At,  or around the time of our party, sod and I met these guys
Andreas and Dave.  Adreas is a Norwegian  import and Dave is a slimmed down
version of a talking silent bob.  But them to together and give  them alcohol
and it's a recipe for a good time.  We ended up chilling in our room, making
fun of the  drunk guy who kept trying to sell us stuff, and then going to get
something to eat at the diner and then  going to bed.  I think. I can't really
separate the two of either nights that we were there, so give me  some slack as
to whether something happened on either Friday or Saturday night.  In fact, I
have some  trouble remembering what even happened Saturday day...but I'll
try.  We wake up around 11:30 so  that we have time to prepare for our
speech.  We wake up, drink some shots, and go down to the  conference room. 
Mr. Richard. I-think-I-am-a
hotshot-because-I-am-so-old-and-still-get-invited-to- hacker-cons Theime had
figured that since he saw that there was an empty slot on the schedule behind 
his slot that he could carry over for an extra half hour.  Our talk got pushed
back until 4:00 that day.   Sodium and I made plans to stink-palm him but never
saw him again that con.  One of the k1dd1ez  must have leaked our 0-day.  Then I
think we just bullshitted around in the network room and got  drunk[er].  While
chilling in the con some guy comes up to me and starts asking me questions
about  what the con is about.  And offering to become a sponsor for next years
con.  He then goes on more  about how he is looking for someone to do some
security for his business and needs my docs.  About  this time I got informed
that our talk had been moved up to 2:00, which happened to be in about, oh, 
about 5 minutes. I tell him to go talk to sodium while I brainstorm for my
speech.  Sod and I meet in  the conference room and apparently that guy was a
hip-hop producer and wanted to put fly us, and the  rest of the
www.mobsters.net crew, up to NYC, put us up in a hotel, and consult with him
about his  business.  Sodium quoted him a price of $10,000.00 - $15,000.00 to
which the guy sounded pleased.   Later on during the con we talk to a hacker
who had been approached by the same guy and offered  $5,000.00 to break into
the DMV.  We have his docs if anyone wants them.  Our talk KICKED ASS!   Well,
it probably didn't, but we were really drunk and we got to show our big gun
video TWICE!!!   We talked a bunch about some scams and got the audience to
participate by throwing various state  drivers licenses at us while we were
trying to talk.  I think sometime during the speech some old guy  with a
moustache had an amendment to one of our scams that included picking up a bunch
of little  kids and driving them around in our car to foreign neighborhoods. 
After the talk we hang out around  the conference room for a bit and I run into
Dave.  I ask him if he and Andreas want to get beer and  party tonight _ they
do.  We all go back to our room and watch some Chris Farley movie while 
sodium's girl friend drink a whole bottle of gin.  A WHOLE BOTTLE OF GIN!! 
Shit, I can't even  drink an ounce of gin even if its buried under a 2 liter of
coke.  She was drinking is straight from the  bottle, NFF style.  After she
downed the bottle she got funny drunk.  You know, the kind of funny  you get
right before you're about to throw up for 5 hours.  A fight broke out and she
started beating  the crap out of sodium because he said he hated her or
something.  Always the reliable shoulder to  lean on, I run and grab my camera
and snap a picture.  Now that's some funny shit.  About 2 minutes  later she is
in the bathroom puking and Dave and Andreas arrive.  They had already bought
the  alcohol and we started drinking. 

Now the entire length of this con Atari and Casper (the girlfriend's brother
and best friend) were  following us around the whole time.  Doing immense
damage to our mobsters.net reputation [ like we  actually a reputation ].  I
swear, these kids were raised by homing pigeons.  They were impossible to 
shake.  Earlier this con I sold Casper a walk-a-bout for $40 that I had picked
up at PhreakNIC.  I  doubt that he ever got off the air for a second after he
bought that.  So here we are sitting in our room  drinking and Casper picked up
something about a party on the 18th floor where there are lots of easy  girls. 
We tell him to go up there and see what he can do.  We stay and tend to
sodium's girlfriend.   She then passes out in the bathroom, against the door,
so that it cannot be opened.  About five minutes  later Casper returns holding
two beers and has a cigar in his mouth.  No girls but lots of beer.  He  begs
us to come back up with him.  Sodium, Dave, Andreas and I walk upstairs and
knock on the  door.  After introducing ourselves they let us in and start
giving out beer.  Someone downstairs is  throwing trashcans of water out the
window, which is the coolest thing in the world one can possibly  do if they
want to amuse drunk hackers. Now the people who were having the party pick up
some  people on their talk-a-bouts and tell them that there is a party on the
4th floor.  The beers runs out so  Dave, Andreas, and I decide to go play in
the service elevators.  We get into the elevators and we wind  up on floor 4.  

Seriously I don't remember pushing the button.  We get out and find a door that
is chained  shut.  Taking the hint, we pull the doors open and climb under the
chain.  The 4th flood is  abandoned and is nothing but broken windows and
mattresses laying on empty floors.  We  meet some people who we had just been
drinking with on the 18th floor down here and  decided to explore it
together.  I find a hole in the floor and convince Dave to climb down in  it
with only a laser pointer for light.  He must have balls of concrete, or lots
and lots of  alcohol.  Then some girl from the 18th floors starts breaking
shit. Throwing chairs at  windows and reckless crap like that.  Somebody heard
the elevators stopping and we rush to  get Dave out of the hole.  We run up the
stairs as the elevator stopped.  Now apparently  sodium was down on the fourth
floor and got chased off by a huge black cop.  The rest of  us run up the
stairs and get off on the 7th floor.  As soon as we get out there some
tattooed  old lady wearing a green shirt starts screaming _What the fuck are
you doing on this  floor?1 Get the fuck off!!_  and threatened one guy with a
baseball bat.  She then said that  she'd be checking the 4th floor to make sure
there wasn't anybody there.  [ Later on in the  con we find out that the fourth
floor used to be the personal bar for Jimmy Hoffa and that it  has been closed
ever since ]  We then get back on the main elevator and go down to the 
lobby.  Adreas, Dave, Casper and I exit the elevator.  Almost immediately
big-bald-rubi con  security (Matrix?) grabs Casper by the shirt and pulls him
into the network room.  Thinking  that we'd been busted the rest of us escape
to the parking lot.  After a few minutes we return  to the 18th floor and found
Casper and everybody else.  Everybody else had gotten off on  the 8th floor and
Casper was pulled aside for a different reason.  Apparently earlier during  the
con Casper was instructed to unplug a cat 5 cable from our friend Rich's room. 
Not  understanding the basic way a phone jack works, Casper pushes the cable
instead of trying  to pull it.  In the process he knocked a blender off of the
table.  Which was a damn shame  because rich and Simon9x were making some kick
ass strawberry drinks.  And that is what he was  pulled aside for.  So we are
chilling on the 18th floor partying in with a bunch of people  when it some
little kid starts asking for weed.  It just so happens that one of the people
at the party  was a resident at the hotel, who had lived there for 9 years and
grew his own weed in his bathtub.  He  agrees to take everybody over to his
place next door to smoke.  We [sodium and myself] go over to  his place to
smoke, He puts the Pink Panther song on his stereo and starts smiling at us and
not  saying anything so we leave, after getting a hit or two.  We return to our
room where we go in to get  some beer.  Soon after that Andreas and Dave stop
by and we starting drinking more.  Casper comes  back and hides in our room. 
He starts saying all this shit about how he is in danger and how Fuck  Mobsters
was written in the elevator.  He goes on about how everyone at the con wants to
kick the  entire mobsters.net  crew because we hack hacked www.rubi-con.org,
stole a bunch of NIC cards,  stolen the talk-a-bout that Casper was on, and had
stolen the prizes from the Win NNF's  T-Shirts  contest.  Sodium, Andreas, Dave
and I just stare at each other in wonderment. 

Although none of us said anything we all were wondering, _Oh man...did I really
do all of  that?_  Hell, I wish I was that busy during the con.  About 80% of my
time spent there was  in some room drinking with Andreas and Dave.  Also while I
was gone I got a message that  someone called and tried to drop my docs.  They
dropped like two of the names I was using  there  and said where I was from [
like that hasn't been said in every file I've ever written ].  We  continue to
drink more beer and chill.  We continue to get drunk as Casper is talking more
shit over the  talk-a-bout.  Since he was staying in our room [ yes he paid for
it, and yes we made him sleep on the  couch] whatever he did got associated with
the mobsters.net name, like "oh, there goes that little  mobsters.net bastard,"
and etc. so the people on the other end are talking all of this shit about us
and  going on and on about how tough they are because they live in Detroit or
some shit.  Drunk on liquid  courage we tell them our room number and say
something along the lines of You know where we are.   Come on up and say that
shit to our face you cowardly pussies.  Or something to that effect.  They 
talk on and on, and we just eventually turn off the radio.  We drink more. 
Then there is a knock at the  door.  We're like 'oh shit' as we get up and open
the door.  It's the big guy who pulled Casper aside.   He walks in and pushed
sodium and I back into our room.  Standing behind him is his legion of 90lb 
nerds who came along for the ride.  We ask them if they were the ones talking
all the shit on the radio  and they bust out laughing, acting all buddy-buddy
with us.  The big guy walks in with his exact copy  who is only 1/4th his size
[I shall call him 'mini-me ] and the nerd patrol. Everyone besides the big  guy
seemed scared as fuck and I had to talk them into coming into our room.  They
start saying how  this whole mess has gotten out of hand and how Casper
shouldn't have broken the blender.  It just so  happened that the guy who owned
the blender that got broken is down with the mobsters.net crew.   More down with
us than the kid who broke it, and more down in fact than the guys who were
trying to  seek revenge for his broken blender.  He got on the talk-a-bouts and
told everyone to stop fucking  around and that he didn't care about the
blender.   I can't remember what happen next, so I'll just  assume that we
drank more.  The next thing I know Dave, Adreas and I go down to see the
social  engineering contest.  This had the potential to be really cool but the
fact of the matter is that you aren't  going to get a lot of people on the
phone at 3:00am.  They called up a few places and got answering  machines.  We
get up and leave to go to one of the Goth clubs located in the hotel.  Rumor
had it that  the famed "naked girl", wearing only a thong and strategically
placed electrical duct tape, was going to  be there.  We walk up to the
entrance and find that there is a $4 cover charge and that the club closes  is
1/2 hour.  We go to the diner to get something to eat and it takes forever. 
After falling asleep and  waking up at the table a few time we decide its time
for bed.  On my way back up I stop the  conference room and peek in to see how
darkcube's "rave" is turning out.  Sodium and I were  supposed to break  dance
this year, but he was passed out and I was on my way.  There are maybe 7 
people in the room, all of them sitting is chairs. I say goodnight and go to
bed.

We wake up Sunday at who-knows-when.  All I remember is that when I wake up I
am informed that  everything in our room was, at some point in time, covered in
vomit the night before.  Hrmm...even  me?  We load up our gear and laugh about
how much it must suck to be the hotel crew who has to  clean up after people
like us.  We load up our car and then go to the closing ceremony. We end up 
waiting out in the hallway for the ceremony to start and out of boredom start
making up some stories  about the night before.  We had Casper absolutely
convinced that we got a picture of him passed out  in the hallway sucking
darkcube's dick.  It worked so well because we had darkcube and a bunch of 
other random people confirm it.  We almost cried.  So did we - only from
laughing.  Then we go the  ceremony and some bald guy who had a sword won the
scavenger contest.  The night before he asked  us to show him where the PBX
was, so, like, umm....can I claim partial credit?  Then some lady threw  candy
at us.  We get up to leave and I'm able to scam myself a free a t-shirt.  We
then get in the car  and start the drive home.  The drive is pretty much the
same going up, a little slower because we don't  have a deadline this time.  We
manage to pick up some people from ohio on our talk-a-bout and it just  so
happens that they had a car full of radar/laser/etc.... detection.  Fear the
geekempire crew.  That was  fun, until Casper complains how he can't pick up
trucker's CB on it. We laugh at him more.  We stop  by Columbus for a bit and
end up helping some crazy lady mulch her street.  I don't really know how it 
happened, I must have been hungover and agreed to do it.  I then saw sodium
pull off the greatest  social engineer of all time.  He convinced this lady
that he was a runner.  If anyone knows sodium,  they'll know why this is
funny.  We go back to Atari/Sod's girlfriend house so that Atari can pick up 
some stuff.  I'm still hungover sitting at his kitchen table when Atari starts
cussing out his dad and  screaming from his room.  Next thing I know, Casper is
screaming like a school girl because  apparently Atari threw a trashcan at his
head [ ?!!].  Casper runs out of Atari's room with a red  rectangle on his
forehead that's swelled up almost 1/2 inch high.  We then convince Atari that
his best  friend Casper, both of whom I've only known for 2 days, has AIDS. 
Atari freaks out and scrubs the  fuck out of the trashcan to get the AIDS virus
off it while his friend bleeds in the kitchen.  We get in  the car and drive
some more and Atari gets all paranoid and starts asking all kinds of crap about
his  friend and about AIDS.  During our conversation Casper offers Atari a sip
of his drink and he just  flips out, whispering shit like "that's all you
man.  I ain't touching that".  It was all really funny.   Then I doze off to
the sound of sodium schooling these kids on some aspect of H/P.  I get back to
my  house around 11:30 pm and start on my homework for class tomorrow.

Highlights from the con:
- Sodium and I getting around 3-4 job offers [ let's see...I got one in
chicago, columbus, NYC, and  a remote one ].
- Convincing Casper that he had sucked dick, and convincing his best friend
that he had AIDS. [ Never underestimate the potential for entertainment that
two gullible teenagers carry. ] 
- The image that I had in my head of the "naked girl" after about 72 hours on
continuous drinking. 
- Chilling with Adreas and Dave, those two just cracked me up the whole con. 
- Having virtually everyone there know who I was, and what crew I was with
[sure they were all  looking to kick my ass and smash all of my hardware, but
in a sick way, it was refreshing ].
- Writing the longest con review in the history of the world.