Reading (For Dummies)

The Bull & Bear

Thursday went to the Bull & Bear pub with Doug and Dave. We went and watched Joe Driscoll playing some kind of raggae show with entirely too much looping. It reminded me a lot of Caryn Lin. Lots of simple melodies and beats that mingle. Not exactly hard stuff to play, just hard to time and record and even think of.

Joe, the man himself

Pretty neat bar, if a little crowded and a bit too much of hanging out with people that I don't really know. I give all the wrong impressions these days because I'm tired of trying.

Fark this one, please

The above picture was taken of some random fly-girl. She asked me not to cut and paste her head onto a porn picture. So I'll have for fark-like entries of her head superimposed on naked bodies. I'll even post the winning photo retroactively to this entry. Good luck.

Happy 1 year anniversary

It's been a year since I started using professional blogging software to keep track of my life. What a fun year. To celebrate, I decided to bore myself with a tale of car repair.

I love my new Subaru (well, it's a car so I hate it, but it's an okay car for a car). It didn't have a working fan though, which meant no heat and no air conditioning. Until I fixed it.

Taking apart the dash

Yep, I gutted out part of my vehicle's dash to replace the fan.

Pretty isn't it?

Better than the old one anyway

Notice the heavily pitted commutator on the old motor. No wonder it wouldn't spin...

Whoah

The last few days have been hunting and begging for work. I found not one but two jobs to do for the summer. One developing SE Linux for the CSA (so finally that bit on my resume will be legit), and one documenting and fixing up the SAI's Trusted Time doohickey. It's right up my alley.

I saw the Matrix with some pals tonight (Keisuke, Yukiko, Norka, and Christian). 'Twas so-so. Okay action flick, but a little too much action. Annoying as hell "Architect," although computer scientists, logicians, and determinists can understand the big words.

What I did love about it was the hacking scene, perhaps the first "real" demo of how hacking actually works, represented in a Hollywood movie. Even cooler? I worked with that particular exploit at my previous stay with CSA. I was trying to get a general-version of the 'sploit to work. It's hard to to do a buffer overflow because you have to know where in memory on the target machine the server is running, and do a relative offset jump. To do it, you really need to set up an identical server, and watch the server with a debugger. Even then it will take a few attempts. There are methods to guess (or randomly guess, running up the risk of getting caught) the correct offset.

Supposedly someone succeeded and wrote a generic version (what Trinity runs as "sshnuke"), but if so it isn't widely known/available, and it doesn't work on any modern system because we use (or should use) newer versions of SSH that don't allow the old crappy SSH1 protocol anymore. But damn I feel like such a cool nerd for knowing all about it.

Other than that, there's this.

The Situation with High Schools

It's something we college and post-college folk probably don't think about much, especially since we didn't have to sit in post-Columbine high school. High Schools suck these days. I went to visit my mommy and fix her computer (giving her access to her NT network shares on her Mac, which her network administrator swore couldn't be done. I guess he never heard of Samba).

I had to sign in to the school to get past the main office, despite the fact that I am balding and bearded. I then walked through many corridors with those wonderful black-domed cameras.

It's not World Sousveillance Day but I'll work anyway

I like how people don't get it. We have a violence problem in high schools. Let's not figure out what the problem is, let's just make everyone feel safe by taking away all their rights. No big deal that constant surveillance has been shown to have very negative psychological effects.

When good software goes bad

When did Tiny Personal Firewall begin to suck? I decided to install it on my dad's computer since he's been getting a bunch of winpopups. Tiny Firewall used to rock. It was 1.0MB, had a dummy mode (a check box "only allow requested connections"), it was free, and it had a very easy advanced mode that let you block certain ports by typing in the number. Version 4.5 sucks. The download is 25 megs, the interface is confusing and uses their own custom widgets (no excuse for that in a Windows product), and it only works for 28 days before you have to pay for it.

It's rotten to ask for money for a product that you used to give away free, it's even worse when that product now sucks.

Ohwell. Anybody know a good firewall package for win2k that allows ip connection sharing?

Old People Are Cool (and other revelations)

I finally made it to Kat's house last night. Alan showed up. And Shippy was there. It's really strange because they only come to Kat's house when I'm around, and every time I come there, they show up. It's some kind of wavelength thing.

Alan and his pet raven

So Kat and gang eventually came home and we made a fire in her fire pit to celebrate the lunar eclipse. Actually, I was the only one there that knew it was the eclipse. I tried to take moon photos with a tripod, but they came out far worse than any moon photo I've taken *without* a tripod, so I won't share them. I did get a few snaps of the fire though.

Kind of reminds me of those D&D photos

Then I spent Friday afternoon with my grandparents, talking of pasts and futures. They're pretty cool grandparents, and have been to a lot of places and seen and done a lot of things. People in the US never seem to appreciate their elders, but I definitely do.

My grandparents

I guess I feel like Milhouse when Grandpa Simpson comes over to tell the kids about the lemon tree. I consider myself a lucky lucky dude for being 23 years and having them around to chat with on Friday afternoons. Few of my friends have that privelege...

Google me

I got a bunch of comments about one of my posts, so I decided to google myself. I come up as the top search for rude germans. Definitely weird.

Vanity Plates

I'm thinking about vanity plates since I have to register and insure my car in New York. While I can't fit "READINGFORDUMMIESCOM" on a plate (and thus lose the cool as Doug award), and I won't manage something as amazingly funny as this guy, I did make the amazing connection that PGP fingerprints are 8 characters long (and fit on a license plate nicely). If only they made PGP specialized plates with the class "lock" icon on the left (or lower right).

Graduacion and Pregnant Brides

The obligatory bike riding photos

So I went riding on my Trek. It feels a little better to ride actually, since it's bigger (and probably because its fork didn't explode...). Also this weekend was a little cock festival at Ted's house.

Emily on (Pete's) deck

And of course, there was a graduation. I missed commencement (I was going to scream something very loud in Japanese for Takiguchi-san). Luckily her dad made it over.

Takiguchi-sama (L) and Yukiko

Laurie and Ted looking a little surprised at the spontaneous photo

It should be noted that Yukiko is the only adult. After all, the "age of adulthood" is 26 years old now. What I find most interesting about this statistic is that the average age of marriage is 25.7. Average age of first child is 26.2. A little math shows there's only 6 months between marriage and first kid being born (on average).

Thanks for the memories

Picture of the Day

Astronomy Picture of the Day. 'Nuff said. (Thanks, Chris!).

Nobel prizes

Come again? While the chances of Bush or Blair winning a Nobel Peace Prize are small, the fact that the committee is entertaining the idea at all says that the Peace Prize ain't what it used to be.

I should be considered for the prize. Let's consider it. Number of people killed by Bush's / Blair's orders: 9,282 (not counting Hussein and his sons). Number of people killed by my orders: 0 (whenever I had a problem with some company, I found a diplomatic solution).

The only question left is, when can I pick it up?

Back to our regularly scheduled updates

I'm back in the United States, and the surprise worked. Thanks to all my friends for keeping it under wraps that I've been in the United States for the last few weeks.

I'll have a picture of the shocked Annie and me popping up out of a box soon.

In the meantime, enjoy a few.

All my stuff packed up in Dresden, 04.21.2003

Over US airspace on the flight

Familiar Scenes...

I posted a few entries that I saved as drafts and never posted because of references that would give things away. For the rest of the entries, notice that I never specifically mention I am still in Germany. Maybe that will make me into a slippery (aka good) politician some day.

Enjoy the backposts, I will have more regular updates from now on.

How long indeed

Do I win the bet?

I thought the Iraq war would end April 25th, it looks like it ended one week later.

I'll be waiting for Bush's official announcement later today (er, tomorrow in Germany, probably).

Drag, though. I don't even have the $20 to match Doug's right now.

Coffee

Never drink coffee at night. Bad Reid.

I had a large cup before I went to bed last night, and ended up not sleeping. Nasty experience.