was today. For those who don't know, EuroCrypt is one of the 3 biggest cryptography conferences, this year being held in Tallinn, and rump session is an informal session for short talks (2-5 min) in which entertainment is valued over serious scientific content.
I was in charge of making sure people stay in their alotted time span. The standard solution is to start turning up volume of background music if the time is up, thus slowly drowning out the speaker. Thankfully, I was allowed to be a bit more creative about it.
I invited one of my friend from the Limping Wolves (my medieval society) to join me. Half an hour before the event, we hauled our arms and armor backstage and started setting up and got into armor just as the session chair was beginning his introduction.
Thankfully, noone had noticed what we brought in, so crowd was visibly surprised upon seeing us enter the stage and putting a sword to the neck of the professor who had just gone overtime. Surprised in a good way, though :)
The next guy to go overtime tried to fight back with a toy pistol... which was, of course, ineffective against two men in medieval battle armor. That guy actually had to be escorted away twice - and second time we actually had to carry him off. The nerve of some people :D
Next guy who had to be chased off the stage was... well, me. When it was my turn to speak, I went to the podium, took off my helmet, leaned my sword against a nearby table and started giving the presentation with the most serious face I could muster. Crowd had a laugh, of course, but quickly quieted down to hear what I had to say. But my presentation was abruptly ended by the session chair just when I was starting to explain my last slide... so I had to defend myself from my friend as I was saying the last few sentences...
The first part ended with me having a tug-of-war over a spear with Whitfield Diffie - one of the fathers of public-key cryptography - as he was trying to stop me from using it on on Andy Clark, the former president of IACR.
Still, the favorite part of the evening was when we pulled a sheet over the head of Peter, my former office-mate from Denmark a year ago. Just as he had finished talking about performance results of a a competing system to the one that my talk was about.
I think I have not worn my full suit of armor for over two years. So I was quite rusty -- figuratively more than literally. All in all, it was a good evening, and more fun than I have had in quite a while.
I mean, how often do you get to scare world-famous cryptographers?
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