BrumHV 5/5/07
From HV Meetings
Well, This was the first of what hopes to be a fairly regular thing.
In my opinion it went really well with alot of the HV Londoners attending.
Contents |
[edit] Attendees
Vesalius (Redditch)
Belial (London)
Naxxtor (London)
Hyper (London)
Shaman (London)
JoJo (Manchester)
SHAGGSTaRR (Manchester)
Adiboy (Stoke on Trent)
Wolfman (Stoke on Trent)
Zer0 (Stoke on Trent)
Locus (Stoke on Trent)
Sherman (Stoke on Trent)
Reverand Rat (London)
Bob_Plonker (London)
BOfH (London)
Mr6 (Birmingham)
[edit] Locations
Pallasades StarBucks
Pidgeon Park
Coffee Republic
OldStockJoint
PizzaHut
Birmingham Backpackers
KFC
Selfridges
sittaracvart
[edit] Activities
Eating Pizza
Intercepting Radio transmissions purley by accident
Some small amounts of Urban Exploration
Rescuing distressed hardware
Waking hyper up
Drinking
Being loud
Coffee
Blackjack
Streaming
IRC'n
[edit] The Day
The day started off when myself (Vesalius) entered the New Street train station in search of the UNPLUGGED crew. As I passed the ticket checkers I saw a group of people with a sign that I could not make out and as I searched around I noticed someone with a video camera, so being paranoid I went and hid only to recieve a call saying that they were waiting for me with a sign that reads "LEET HAXOR".
We left in search of Fried Chicken and ended up in the downstairs section of the KFC on Lower Bull Street where Sherman and Zer0 decided to use the wall sockets to charge their camera and laptop. Locus and Wolfman went upstairs and informed a member of the staff of a certain indivduals suspicous behaviour, after the member of staff asked Sherman to unplug his equipment we promptly exited.
I took the group to Selfridge as I thought it was the kind of place they would enjoy. Everyone dived for the display machines in hope of breaking something, Wolfman was the only person to sucessfully cause some harm by executing some shell code on a few laptops which infinatley spawns command prompt windows, the security were drawn over by the group of us laughing (not to mention Zer0 stood there with the camera) to be turned away as easily as they were drawn in.
We eventually retired to the Starbucks and enjoyed a rather amusing game of Blackjack while waiting on our London friends. Myself and Zer0 and left in search of toilets to come back to see we had been invaded by the traveling londoners. We soon departed in search of an area where the 3G Wireless access point could be best used, which lead us to the top floor of the Coffee Republic. We streamed for a good half an hour before a rather intimidated staff member came up and subtley hinted us to go, so we left in search of a pub as hyper had been demanding for around an hour by that point.
On our way to a pub we discovered a Maplins which brought a considerable amount of joy to most of us. Belial purchased some PMR's in the spirit of fun, meanwhile I had discovered a scrolling LED display and after five minutes of playing around I finally managed to get it to scroll Hacker Voice across the screen which allowed me to cross off an item on my "Todo before I die" list. After some rummaging around around by Naxxtor and myself we left for a pub.
After around 5 minutes of being in the pub we had no doubtidly agrovated all the customers and employees with the PMR's little ring function being activated every 5 to 10 seconds not to mention lots of noise, camera flashes and rat just being, well rat.
We left the pub to find the Brum2600 group, only to find out they were infact going back to the pub that we had just left. Unfortunatley the layout of the tables upstairs split us all up into individual groups and we decided to not rearrange as a rather enthusiastic glass collector had already came up and complained to us for sitting on the chairs at the tables where they had been layed out. Unfortunatley not everyone could come in due to their age so after much discussion on the matter, a breif meeting with Mr6 and Shaman installing Crapwae..I mean Slackware on Belials laptop we decided to go fetch the others and head for food.
Not long after leaving the pub the PMR's started intercepting various radio signals that were very distorted. As we got closer to Pizza Hut we noticed we were picking up more and more signals but much clearer, after playing with a phonebox for a while we noticed that the people on the radios were infact discussing a group of kids not far from us that we could clearly see. Upon entering Pizza Hut we met a very nice employee who told us to tell the member of staff at the desk that he said that we can eat in (noting that it was too late to eat in), we got our seats and figured out what we were going to have when the nice gentleman appeared again and informed us of our the various powerpoints so that we could charge our rather large assortmant of equipment. During the meal the radios were picking up small amounts of conversation until we all heard "IC1Male" which lit everyons eyes up as we glanced across the street to see some police officers broadcasting the message we were hearing, they attempted to change channels due to "interferance" (IE: us replying with random messages).
We left the Pizza Hut in search of a taxi ride to the hostel. After several attempts at phoning a taxi firm we decided to try another as the receptionist appeared to just answer the phone and breath heavily at us. We eventually got in a taxi and headed towards the hostel soon to realise not even the driver knew where we were going.
So finally we arrived at the hostel to find what appeared to be a random person sleeping in one of the beds, so as to not disturb him we left in the direction of the door labeled "Smokers Lounge" which turned out to be a door to the roof (In my opinion, much better than a room) which had some rather old weathered furniture out there. Everything there to be climbed up or down was climbed up or down untill I managed to drop a PMR off the very top and almost follow it. As I was about to leap off the roof into the courtyard in search of the PMR we noticed a fire exit stair case which appeared to be some guys home. We recovered the PMR only to notice that there was a machine that appeared to be in distress lay in the middle of the courtyard, so being a group of hackers we immediatley dispatched a sucessful rescue mission for this machine that had quite obviously had some sort of "fall".
The staircase man appeared and asked us to leave the roof, so we headed for the main lounge type room to do some streaming, only to find that there was a porn channel on the TV which lead to a pretty unanimous dicision that it was infact the best hostel ever.
At around 2am I finally dropped off to sleep and left Naxxtor, Belial and Shaman talking to each other via IRC.
In conclusion I would say that I thoroughly enjoyed myself and i'm almost certain that the others feel the same way.
[edit] Thank You
A big thank you goes out to those of you that attended and made this one of the most enjoyable weekeneds ever. Also a thank you to the Brum2600 crew for putting up with us.
[edit] Future Meetings
7/7/2007 Shall be our next one. Check the main HVBrum page.
[edit] Extra
At some ungodly hour, naxxtor made a website.
[edit] Pictures
Pictures of the event taken by the memebers can be found in the following places
Shamans camera took these shaman's pics of brumhv
Naxxtors also added his to Flickr naxx's pics of brumhv
Belial's photos are up on Flickr too! Belials pics soon to be in the main brumhv pool
