Ok … so my own Top 5 lessons learned didn’t even help me. 
Anyway, I tried to buy tickets at work this time and a very slow proxy definitely hindered my changes of getting anything this round. I was lucky enough to get a ticket last time … but nothing yet for NovaInfosecPortal.com contributor @nathiet.
Here’s a time line of my 10 minutes on the ShmooCon site…
12:00: They started up right on time … and guess what … the link to the reservation page is at the bottom again. I clicked the link and patiently waited for the page to load. The response wasn’t fast however after a minute the page finally came up and I filled everything in. There was still one field left though … the fateful Captcha .. but the image was no where to be found. Looking up I found the browser still chugging away downloading a few more items.
12:03: After another 2 minutes the Catpcha finally decided to appear. So I quickly entered and rechecked it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure if the thing that looks like an “i” between the “m” and “n” in the image below was something I was supposed to enter or not. I guessed it was an “i” and decided to include it. The site squirmed away for another 2 minutes.
12:05: I finally got a response I didn’t want to get as you can see below. So I went back to the registration page to try again and waited…
12:08: After a few minutes the website informed me that all tickets were reserved. So what does any good ShmooCon ticket-buying fool do … rinse and repeat.
12:10: After a few more tries I was still getting a message that all the tickets were reserved. At this point I went back to main registration page and got the fateful message. A ShmooCon blog post and tweet confirmed everything.
Lessons Learned #6: Never, Never, Never Buy ShmooCon Tickets Through a Hungry Work Proxy
Of course the saddest news of all is that @nathiet wasn’t able to snag a ticket either. Well, there is still one more round left at least. And guess what… it’s on January 1 — a non-work day! No slow lunchtime company proxy to minimize my chances next time. 
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No ‘i’ in the captcha.. that sucks man.
I know struggling for tickets is one of the quirks that in retrospect one appreciates about Shmoocon. Usually I’m pretty good about getting tickets, but the absolute crushing nightmare that was the registration server is too much this year. Can’t we register for Shmoo like every other conference?
IMO the quirky feature that worked for a small conference is a hinderance as Shmoo draws quite a crowd now.