With both of us working in different companies now, and especially with Randy's constant travel, it's getting harder to meet up these days.

Yesterday, thanks to Sunbelt Software and the company, there was an opportunity for both of us to attend a free seminar "Winning the War on the Spyware Battlefield" that was presented by Eric Howes, the renowned antispyware researcher, and the Director of Malware Research at Sunbelt.

Here's a snapshot of Eric doing his presentation, taken off a smartphone camera.

The overall presentation of the seminar was great, and Eric shared his insights into the antispyware space and its challenges, and the attendees' participation helped in raising valid points about the state of the industry. Though i will not probably have the chance to use the enterprise management tool that was mentioned and demo-ed in the presentation, the apparent ease of use and managability of such a tool did give me some points to ponder about future enhancements to the system i'm managing.

As in all the AV conferences that i have been in, it's the hallway discussions, where the inputs from people of different companies that provided the most value out of these events. Members in the PIRT effort did a inpromptu gathering and just exchanged hellos/online nicks with one another, and we also discussed about the Spycar project, as well as the Consumer Reports report on the antispyware testing that they have conducted.

Afterwards, Randy and I had a good lunch at the Azteca right next to my office, after spending about 20 mins in the building with some of his former colleagues in my group.

It's always great to spend time this way, and he advised me to start doing some blogging that kinda perform a sharing of knowledge and experience that i've gotten through this job that i have. Perhaps i should start doing that 8).  The first thing that i've done is to add a few more of the Antivirus and antispyware blogs that i'm reading regularly on the right side of the blog. Let's see how this goes.