The nice lady from hotel management (who sticks out like a sore thumb in her corporate mini-suit and heels) keeps popping in. She tells me nobody's too pleased this group is here; someone in Convention Sales booked the gig without doing much checking around. Def Con is in its 5th year and at its 5th Vegas hotel You do the math.

Dave and I are figuring we'll shoot the early rounds of Hacker Jeopardy and then keep an eye on the late-night carousing as the crowd builds. We keep hearing stories about this bunch that had been out to the edge of the notorious Area 51 the night before, and launched helium-filled trash bags until the F-16's appeared and they all dashed for cover.

Then, suddenly, we get an invitation. If we want, we can go along on tonight's Area 51 expedition.

We round up the photographer from the San Jose Mercury News and pile into the Volvo. Nobody seems to know exactly how far it is to our destination, but "2 hours" seems to be the median estimate. Perfect. We can get out there in daylight, and still make it back in time for the late-night revelry at the hotel.

But we didn't know about the radio shop. Turns out most all of this crowd is into 2-way radios. Fancy little gizmos, about the size of your pager. The radio shop turns into a 90-minute stop while everyone shops and buys.

Our mission, it seems, is to follow the guy in the Hummer. He's an electronics entrepreneur from Florida. Rumors swirl about the Hummer: He has two of them. He has three of them. He gets a new one every year. Can't confirm, but I do know he runs them hard. We blow out toward Area 51, averaging about 80 MPH.

Last couple of miles are hard. The Volvo reaches its limit, and we pile into the back of the Hummer to bounce up to the launch site. By now, it's pitch black outside, and we're thinking we'll need to fire up the Hummer's big light bar to shoot any video.

But a fire gets built, and helium hisses into trash bags, and they start launching. They launch aluminum foil streamers, they launch Cyalume lightsticks, they launch a little strobe light (very nice UFO impression), and finally, perhaps in desperation because the F-16's never showed up, they launch a highway flare. A lighted one. Fortunately, it flies high. If it comes down, I'm thinking "brushfire". We shoot plenty of video by the firelight.

I check my watch. It's 11:30 PM, and we're still 150 miles from Vegas. The Hummer gets us back down to the Volvo, and we set out at a hard pace. (Aside to would-be buyers: The Volvo S70, without turbo, rolls very nicely at about 95 MPH. We know because we held it there for over an hour, only slowing for a pack of what we think were wolves that had appropriated the highway.)

Back at the hotel, there's word of a rooftop hack that resulted in the liberation of one of the hotel's satellite dishes. We spot it in a hallway.

Next morning, we dine on more of that special breed of food that you can only find at casinos: Cheap, tolerable, and fast. They don't want you off that casino floor for long. But I don't think the Aladdin gets much gaming revenue out of this bunch. They're too busy trying to figure how to hack the slot machines.

The convention rolls on, with the start of the annual game of "Spot the Fed", where attendees can win a T-shirt by unmasking any of the lawmen who try to fit into the crowd. Meanwhile, three burly guys are now handling doorman duties, badgering people for their badges. It's 40 bucks to get in, and even hackers don't cotton to being ripped off.

We fill up our last tape shooting a rousing game of "Capture the Flag". This isn't the version you played at summer camp. This involves logging into a network with your laptop and trying way deep inside where the goodies are kept. Many of the players are very familiar with the concept.

As we head for the airport, Dave and I realize we now see the world in a new way. We start categorizing people we walking along the Strip as either "Def Con people" or "not Def Con people". It's not a hard game to play.

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