It was 2003, it was Vegas, and Johnny Long was a rock star.
He slung the blue speaker badge around his neck - careful to make sure everyone could see it - and strutted through the DEF CON hacker convention with his nose in the air and his ears set to whisper mode, listening for the buzz.
Too cool to make eye contact, the 32-year-old cut a path through the crowd, which was mostly made up of men wearing some variation of a black T-shirt, the unofficial uniform for the three-day conference.
Johnny, the Maryland kid who once networked computers in his backyard for fun, had grown up to become a professional hacker, joining an elite team of cyber superheroes - called "StrikeForce" - that was paid to break into computer systems.
And that, along with his knack for using Google to help break into cyber security systems, had just won him a coveted speaking slot at the world's biggest underground hacker convention.
The platform at the conference was easily the highlight of his career, the big payoff for all those late nights staring into a computer screen, the missed time with his wife and kids, and even the high school years when the popular kids ignored him.
Johnny (or j0hnny, as he was known online) had arrived.
And yet, in the wake of this much-anticipated triumph, he was surprised to realize that the only thing he felt was emptiness.
It wasn't that he didn't kill during his talk (he did), and it wasn't that the August conference was a dud (it wasn't). It was just that after it was all over, Johnny felt nothing. He was hollow.
How could that be?
He had fantasized about reaching this point for years, sacrificed most everything for it. Now that it was here, where was the euphoria? Where was the high? After all this time, all this effort, he couldn't help feeling - there was no other way of putting it - cheated.
And just like that, Johnny Long - to all the world, a man on a rocket ship bound for the top of his field - found himself smack in the middle of a midlife crisis, years before midlife.
He returned to his home outside Baltimore where he stewed for a couple of months, envying all those others who had what he didn't: a purpose in life, a meaning to day-to-day existence and pursuits.
He decided he had to shake things up.
And so, as the summer gave way to the fall, he sat before his computer one day, and let his fingers tap out the most explosive thing he could think of to say about himself on his Web site. Under the heading, "Who is this johnny guy?" he typed out this description: "a hacker and a follower of Jesus."
