Siren's call

In the last few weeks, we've rented a number of movies. So I will succumb to the Internet's siren-like call to publish my opinion so that all who care to read it might find something with which they disagree. In alphabetical order:

• Blood Rayne - Vampires. We gave it the MST3K treatment and got our two bucks worth.


• The Ice Harvest - My executive summary: "John Cusack and Billybob Thornton steal some money. People die. There are breasts." Might be a decent movie iff you like film noir.


• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - A good detective film with assorted twists. I was on the edge of my seat for much of this movie and laughing the rest of the time (Val Kilmer's character is called "Gay Perry"). Great movie with a solid cast, entertaining plot and funny dialogue. Highly recommended.


• RV - This was billed as a slightly ridiculous comedy and it definitely lives up to that description. But it's not retarded like, say, anything Will Ferrell has ever done.


• Unleashed - From the cover and the back-of-the-case description, this is your standard martial arts movie. Do not let that fool you; in addition to his incredible physical abilities, Jet Li is quite an actor and Unleashed is a phenomenal movie.

Defcon 0x0E

Defcon was a blast. I met a bunch of cool people and got to hang out with some old friends. fednaught, a Capture the Flag team, got second place despite my help.

My favorite talks were Hacking Malware: Offence is the New Defence by Danny Quist and Valsmith and Exploit Writing Using Injectable Virtual Machines by Wes Brown and another fellow from the same organization. The latter because James and I were discussing what we would need in order to be prepared for next year's CtF only moments before going into this presentation and hearing that it had already been written.

Highly Sceintific Random Internet Tests

Apparently I'm in the 93rd percentile for nerdiness based on this Highly Scientific Random Internet Test. This is a dubious honor but one that I felt was worth sharing.

Hello, I must be going

We've been in Idaho Falls for about three weeks now. My job is interesting and I'm enjoying my work. I haven't learned all the ropes yet; I just figured out how to fill in time cards yesterday. We're just about settled into our new house but there are still a bunch of boxes that haven't been unpacked. And now I'm going on travel for two weeks. That's not really a bad thing; it will be fun and interesting and I will probably learn a ton on my first outing. But there are a lot of things I need to do here in Idaho Falls. Mostly paperwork things but important things nonetheless, like finding out where my paycheck goes and making sure it gets deposited before our first month's bills come due.

Hurray for IBM

I bought a refurbished Thinkpad T40 in March with a 90-day manufacturer's warranty. After having it for about two months, the USB ports died and the video card started flaking out everytime I pressed the machine in the wrong spot. This was about the time when finals were approching fast and I could not live without my laptop, so I sucked it up and decided I would just pay to get it fixed out of warranty after the end of the semester. This afternoon I found the invoice and called IBM. It turns out that in IBM-land a 90-day warranty that started in March expires in October so they are going fix it for free.

Additionally, in the past I have told Dell customer support representatives that the machine I'm calling about does not have Windows installed. Their response has pretty much universally been, "Then it's your problem, not ours." I told the IBM tech support guy the same thing and he said, "We don't care about that."

Hurray for IBM!

Mmm... Socorro...

The closer I get to moving, the more I wish it wasn't so near.

I've been in Socorro for just shy of six years, now. For the first 4, I didn't care at all about the town. But in the last two years, I've made some really great friends and I've come to enjoy many elements of Socorro and New Mexico Tech. I think a lot of it is the college-town aspect of this place. I enjoy walking around campus in the middle of the night for no particular reason and running into a bunch of other caffeinated people doing the same thing. I find it hilarious when I'm talking to a towny and they ask if I "go to the tech". I like writing code at El Camino til 4 in the morning. I like having conversations with random people I've never seen before who laugh at my stupid jokes about big-O notation.

I'll miss you guys. And El Camino's green chile cheese fries.

New to blogging.

Not really new to blogging... but new to automated blogging. My previous blog management software was vim. Don't get me wrong, vim rocks. But every time I made a post, which happend quite infrequently because it was a pain in the ass, I thought, "Man, I should really write some code to automate this process."

In the fine CS tradition of not reinventing the wheel I decided to use someone else's code instead. As an added bonus, I'm using someone else's server and someone else's bandwidth as well. =)

Repost of my ramblings which spurred me to get a blogger account:

I'm about to graduate a week from today so 'the real world', as it is often called, has been on my mind a lot recently. It really bugs me when I tell people I'm going to graduate and they say something like: "Well I guess you'll soon find out how much the real world sucks. Have to get up earlier and work longer."

I did some math. I'm studying, working at my student job, doing homework or sitting in class for 60-70 hours per week. That 40 hour/week job with no homework everyone complains about so much sounds pretty sweet.

I think the 'real world' that you're talking about does suck. I wouldn't want to do something meaningless everyday for eight hours. But a large percentage of my friends and acquantainces who don't have a degree seem to think that college is a breeze and that we just screw around for 4 years (well, 6 for me) until we get a job like theirs that we hate like they do.

So in conclusion, no, college is not like the 'real world'. But in two month's time, I'm going to be working with some of the best hackers in the world securing some of the country's most important assets. I'm not sure if that's the real world, either...