Lighting the 1st cigar of the year

Dan-ell Morales & Jonn Nubian cover Ray Dawson’s Nocturnal Peacock Cigar launch party held at the prestigious Cigar Inn located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The festivities included Brazillian Jazz music by the Sandro Albert Quartet,
Belly Dancing, Great Foods for the world over and of course the Nocturnal Peacock Cigar.

Yesterday I launched a new side project:

www.pocketsquaremafia.com

Essentially it celebrates the handkerchief, pocketsquare and haberdashery

“for the Made or Mad Man”

follow it on twitter @pocketSQmafia let me know what you think-

and if you happen to be wearing a pocketsquare-submit a pic-

Last weekend I attended The Next Hope (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference, held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. It is held every 2 years and this is the 4th time I attended since 1998.

This is the badge-

this is the schematic for the badge designed by Travis Goodspeed-

“These badges are active RFID tags which beacon the position of each attendee a few times a second, so that the god damned devil army of lies–by which I mean the Next HOPE badge committee–can track each attendee around the Hotel Pennsylvania.”

There were alot of other cool things to check out such as this USB Typewriter setup and a working EASY button

Here are some topics to some of the talks I attended-

• Circuitbending
• Keeping Your Job While Being a Hacker
• Examining Costs, Benefits, and Economics in Malware and Carding Markets
• Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself
• How Hacking is Both the Death and Future of Traditional and Interactive Publishing, Journalism, and the Media
• Reach Out And Touch Face: A Rant About Failing
• Sita Sings the Blues: A Free Culture Success Story

A keynote was scheduled to be given by Julian Assange of Wikileaks , he did not show for obvious reasons, but his partner Jacob Appelbaum and developer of TOR gave a great talk,cover past, present and future developments of the project and showed the much talked about a videotape showing a U.S. Army Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. for more information check out CollateralMurder.com

I got to ride a Segway (video on that later) and got put on to Etherape!-is a packet sniffer/network traffic monitoring tool, developed for Unix (thank you AngelXIII!)

I met threat analyst and journalist, known as a former grey hat hacker, Adrian Lamo  (we now follow each other on foursquare)

He also informed the authorities of the identity of a US Army Intelligence Specialist who is alleged to be the source of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike video leak to Wikileaks.

Which shows guts and balls and I am in his corner no matter what his reputation may now be in the hacker community.

I also enjoyed 2 greats talk and got a pic with Johannes Grenzfurthner

(No-I do not work for @cafebustelo)

He is the founder of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group.

I shot an interview with a teacher from The Hacktory, a Philidelphia-based group that promotes the use of technolog in the arts.

(look for that video to be posted soon)

Overall, it was a good time of learning and unlearning.

Note: Most of the videos of the talks can be downloaded at Hattorents.com

On Monday June 21, 2010 I did yoga practice in Times Square-It was held by Times Square Alliance as a search for peace and tranquility in the midst of the urban energy of the world’s most frenetic place.

The exact location was held on Duffy Square at the intersection of Broadway and 7th Avenue at 46th Street.

The is my view when everything concluded-Namaste!

After that I sttod in line for the Key to the City Project-

Its a citywide public art project that allows every New Yorker and visitor to open spaces in all five boroughs.

There is even a pretty cool free Iphone App that contains information about the project and artist, an interactive list of lock sites with photos and descriptions of what your key will unlock, and a location-based map to help guide you on an exploration of public and private space across all five boroughs.

Download it for free from the App store.

Presented by Creative Time in cooperation with the City of New York.

Kiosk open June 3 to 27, 2010
Times Square, Broadway
Between 43rd & 44th Sts
Open M–F 2p–8p; Sa–Su 12p–8p

Here is a video of the Key Exchange ceremony with the project creator/artist Paul Ramirez Jonas

Later that night I screened GOLDFINGER in Bryant Park as part of HBO’s summer film festival

After the film-I used my Key to the City to unlock a lamp in Bryant Park