Posts about travel

I wrote this list of tips for networking just after I visited my first conference, where networking was supereasy! And it was FUN! Although Troopers 2017 was an industry conference, the tips should work fine for academic conferences too.

I talked to so many interesting people, people working in infosec from all over the globe. I even managed to help some of them, by answering questions on social media, introducing people to each other, and pointing people to good self-education resources on the internet. I love to help people, so that made the networking activity feel very natural for me. It was not like the picture I had in my head at all (people in suits loudly talking about themselves while scattering business cards at random). I also loved to exchange horror stories about employers or infosec-gone-wrong. And the most fun thing is to form a spontaneous group of conference-friends and explore the local cuisine.

A list of my favorite spots in Nijmegen, where I lived for seven years.

By popular demand, another conference report! Please note that this report is very biased towards the topics that are relevant for my PhD research, i.e. text generation and procedural content generation for games.

Between August 24 and August 27 2019 I visited the IEEE Conference On Games (COG) in London, UK.

This is a short report of my visit to ICCC, or the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2019, in Charlotte, NC. It's not meant as a summary, but as an overview of the things I found interesting during the conference. If you want more information about the talks, check the conference program, or read the live-tweets from Matthew Guzdial, Christoph Salge and me.

I lived in the Hague for two years. These are some of my favorite spots for lunch, dinner, coffee and drinks.

Bijenkorf City Café

These are the places I enjoyed when I was visiting Rotterdam. Note that this list is nowhere near complete, as it focuses on the things that I like (coffee, tacos, books).

New Fork (lunchroom)

When I was in university, I didn't have a lot of money for traveling. Lucky for me, I had an adventurous friend who wasn't afraid of traveling on a budget. We had a lot of fun adventures together throughout Europe, buying the cheap train tickets and sleeping at CouchSurfing hosts to save money on accommodation. I found that the art of slow travel can give an extra dimension to traveling, which makes it a lot more enjoyable. This is what I learned during those trips.

Traveling light means you have more energy left to enjoy your travels. Also: checking in and out of airports becomes a matter of minutes.

Last month, I visited TROOPERS17, a conference in Heidelberg, Germany. It was the first infosec conference I've attended, so I didn't really know what to expect. The website showed photos of geeky people in hoodies, a soldering table, lots of club mate and weird LED badges. I figured I could fit right in, and when I saw the training program I was even more motivated to register.

In the two days before the conference, I followed a training about network forensics. Earlier this week I wrote about the Rinse and Repeat technique I learned there, which can help you find the interesting network activity in a large PCAP-file.

Tiny but cosy restaurant with lots of obscure great beers. I had a Saison Dupont draft beer with the "Lamsballekes" (meat balls of lamb in tomatosauce with goat cheese with fries and a light salad). Beautiful room with high ceiliings, wood work, an antigue mirror and large fin de siecle window has you eating bistrofood in style.

Burger bar with relaxed atmosphere. Slightly alternative. They also have really good tonic and the burgers are huge. Their walls are covered in graffiti art that depicts the history of Belgium.