Reading (For Dummies)

Snow Falling on Tamarack Pine

We're in the middle of our first real snowfall of the season. In town, we might get three or four inches. Moscow Mountain is just a 20 mile drive from here, and goes up about 2500 feet above the town's elevation. That short distance makes all the difference in the world where winter weather is concerned.

Laura, Jeff (a caving/rock climbing/mountain biking/backpacking all-star, and professor at the U. of I.) hiked up Moscow Mountain. It started as a stroll up a fire road near Cabin Trail, where I often mountain bike. A ways up, the snow started getting deeper, the wind started howling, and the snow started dumping. We walked across the "main face" of the mountain (it can often be seen as a big white field from Moscow and Pullman) where the snow was 2-3 feet deep in most places, the wind blowing ice pellets in our eyes at 20-30mph. We took a little respite from the wind in an abandoned mine, maybe 30 feet below the very top of the mountain.

The mine entrance, with mostly white-out outside

The top was pretty snazzy, with some tattered and torn mountain flags. I'm told it would have a hell of a view, except that we couldn't see much more than 30 feet in front of us. The way down was also fairly harsh -- easier to hike without glasses on then with them (my glasses kept fogging, and then icing up, making it pretty hard to see). I can't say that I've done such a fun hike in a while. Soon, I've promised myself a set of backcountry skis, so I can hike up this local mountain and have a ball coming down it on something besides a mountain bike.

The Land of Real Beer

A couple of weeks ago, a brewery opened up in Pullman. When I first moved to this town, I would argue that what it really needed was a Brewery. I had not yet learned an important fact: all retail on the Palouse sucks.

The beer isn't terrible, it's just formulaic. It's hard to be so critical of a brand new brewery, but I did get a chance to talk with the owners. Neither of them are 'into' beer. They just thought a brewery would be a good business. Jeff admitted that he doesn't homebrew as a hobby and never did. Linda struggled to pour a good glass, and had the kegs set to 20psi (far too high for pouring beer unless you like a glass full of head). It felt odd. I've only brewed four batches of homemade beer and felt like I had a better mastery of the craft.

Rogue Smoke Ale and a wood-fired pizza

Nate and I decided to head to Portland, which is home to somewhere around 35 breweries. Portland knows it beer, and has convenient public transportation all over the downtown area for tourists to stumble around on. Every brewery has the standards, sure, but most also have 20 or so 'whacky' beers on tap. We had a six mile run in the morning and were starved by the time we hit our first brewery (not to mention drunk after our first beer). I sort of wish that this area had the population to sustain such activities...

Vegan Cupcakes

I bought Laura the greatest book ever some time ago. It is called "Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World."

You can imagine what it's about

Tonight, we dined on coconut-lime cupcakes. They are both vegan and delicious...

Joel Scambray

Work, somewhere along my career, became a confusing and convoluted series of cool discoveries non-disclosure agreements that have left me a bit frustrated lately. I love my job, but I can't say much about it.

It did give me a fun opportunity recently. Joel Scambray (yeah, that Joel Scambray) came to our ISSA group to give a presentation. I somehow got voted to be the Vice President of our ISSA chapter (this, in spite of not having a CISSP). I'm apparently not very good at introducing famous people. Alas.

Joel: The man, the legend

Joel gave a great talk on the future of infosec-stuffs. I have spent a fair amount of time in my life as a vulnerability analyzer/pen tester (not a very great one, or you would have heard of me), and I was interested to hear what a guy who has had a successful career doing that sort of work had to say about it. "We have to stop admiring the problem," apparently.

He's a pretty smart guy, and he has been saying things that I have been thinking lately. I was, for a long time, too heavy-handed with security stuff. "That ain't the right way to do it, it sucks and it will get p0wn3d. Here's why," was my usual assessment. It still is sometimes, though I've been trying to temper such analyses with more practical advice. I guess the profession is succumbing to the Almighty Metric. This isn't a bad thing, although I will miss the Wild, Wild West. Oh, and I do lament the fact that I will probably be doing math in base 10 more often...

I still disagree with Linus' assessment of security testing and discovery. Security is a pretty different ballgame than normal bugs. A bug that affects security means that someone can turn my coffee cup into a missile and use it to blow up my car and kill my dog (and maybe even kill me). Any other kind of bug will probably just give me cold coffee, or maybe make my cup leak so I can't have any caffeine this morning. And this paragraph sums up why I hate physical-world analogies when it comes to security...if in the physical world my coffee cup could be turned into a missile by a kid in Ukraine, then maybe the analogies would make sense.