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Simple Nomad's Blog

sep 2005 | oct 2005 | nov 2005 | dec 2005

31Oct2005 - Scary Lights

It's Halloween, or Samhain for us pagans. An interesting time when the veil between worlds is the thinnest, heightening our ability to communicate with those that have departed this realm. It is also the end of the pagan calendar -- our equivalent to New Year's Eve. And how do I plan to spend my day on this most important of days whose roots pre-date Christianity? Arguing with electricians.

In addition to the kitchen remodeling, we've had this asspain of a problem that has been plaguing us. There is one electrical circuit in the house that all of the sudden drops. It controls the ceiling fans in three rooms, two lights in the garage, the hallway light, and about four outlets in the house. Everything goes off except the lights in the garage. Without warning the lights will just come back on and work fine for a few days.

So before the kitchen work had started, I had an electrician out to work on it since I couldn't figure it out. I was charged a couple hundred bucks and it worked -- for about a week. Called the guy to come back out, and a new guy came out. Seems the lights came back on before he arrived, so naturally this new guy (supposedly more competent guy) couldn't find anything wrong. They go out again, and they come back out. Wham, another $200 later (and me bitching), and we are in business. This was a week or so ago.

My guess is you can see where this is heading. Over this past weekend, the same lights go out again. I am livid. I called this morning and am expecting a supervisor or manager to call me back later this morning so I can ask the question of why I keep giving these guys $200 a pop and still have the exact same problem.

I am beginning to hate contractors. Oh the guys working on my kitchen are okay, at least the subcontractors are. The jury is still out on the main guys, who obviously spread themselves way too thin over several jobs at once to maximize their income. I just can't see making a living in such an incompetent way. What is wrong with just saying a) it costs X amount, b) it will take Y days, and c) I will start this day work until completion? I'd rather deal with that than put everything else in my life on hold while I sit at home all day because some guy is going to show up to work for an hour, or come in and measure something and then leave for a week.

Since we originally thought the kitchen would be complete and that we were going to be having a Halloween party (now we will be lucky to eat Thanksgiving dinner at home), I am very pissed off. May the electricians who can't seem to solve my light problem pray tirelessly to their god, because I am just about ready for a human sacrifice. These guys will probably get the full brunt of my anger against their entire...well ALL contractors. Fuckers. This better be resolved today, so I can focus my angst on the kitchen guys, who need to fix my wall so they can re-fucking-attach the desk/bar to the wall.

27Oct2005 - The Money Pit

There was this stupid movie in 1986 called The Money Pit. I always thought it was a stupid movie up until the past couple of weeks. We are in the middle of this huge kitchen remodeling, and it seems every time I turn around I hear "well that will be extra" usually followed by "and the guy that does that can't come out until next week". We originally planned on having a big Halloween party to celebrate, but now it looks like we will be lucky to use the new kitchen for Thanksgiving.

Now we've managed to get creative at times, which has motivated the workers. When faced with a week's delay on getting the waterline for the new refrigerator moved, we said to take that off the list and we'll go call our own plumber (which we did). When you start chipping away at their bottom line, they get motivated. Of course, every one of these little "changes" is costing an average of around $500, with the highest one so far being the discovery of mold behind the old sink which cost us $1500 (again, we went outside of the contractors with our own choice to save time). Fortunately the wife decided when we got the loan we needed to fudge in some extra, and that has saved our bacon so far.

Between that and a busy work schedule, I've barely had time to look at doing research stuff. Oh I did find a non-exploitable integer overflow in the patch for Snort (and I did point it out to Marty via silc, and gave props to HD Moore who found the bug at the same time), but I've yet to find time to write an exploit for the 2.4.2 win32 version, which should be fairly straight forward. Besides, I want to write it as a Metasploit Framework module to learn more about the Framework. *sigh*, so much to do, so little time...

08Oct2005 - InterZone West

So here I sit in the middle of InterZone West, which has been a fun con so far. Very small, maybe 40 paying folk yesterday on Friday. Richard Lindberg has opened it up to some hacker types in the bay area for free, so maybe today (Saturday) things will pick up.

I'm speaking later today on Practical Encryption, which is half rant, half useful info. Since a number of the attendees are kind of more entry level, I've had to tone the talk down technically. No problem, more rant time, which can always be fun. And I've had great conversations with people, like close friends Richard Thieme and Jennifer Granick. So all in all a very decent con so far.

I found out yesterday my talk for ShmooCon 2006 was accepted, which I am pumped about since it is a little more technical and certainly more hackerish than the talks I've done over the past year or so at what cons will have me. Bitchin. And the talk contains some info that was controversial enough I ran some of the elements in it by Jennifer just for my own sanity. I won't be the next Mike Lynn, but at least I'll feel decent that I'm actually trying to make a bit of a dent.

WTF? I can't reach www.nmrc.org from the conference network! I get redirected to Securing Computing's SmartFilter web page! The Man is keeping me down with my "Criminal Content" web site! Can't reach Phrack either, but I can reach 2600. Guess that says something about content, eh? Popular pr0n sites are also blocked! Bastards! Must see naked Asians during the con!

05Oct2005 - What a Fucking Week

Where do I start? My "conference" last week in Chicago sucked. There were more speakers than attendees. 8 attendees. Jesus H Christ on a stick. What a waste of time. The kicker? The stupid demo failed during the rootkit installation process. Balls.

So I was back late Tuesday, and Thursday morning Weasel and I are off to Houston. We are going there for me to quit and him to "transition", which involves me telling him how fucked he is because he gets to go to the 8 people conferences. Thursday night is my drinking-with-BindView-friends night, but before I go I get a last minute counter-offer. From the CEO and the President. Think about it, don't make a decision until Monday. I mention the counteroffer to someone else, they say, yes think about it for a day, maybe until Monday. Hmm.

Monday is supposed to be my first day at my new job at Vernier, so this could jeapardize getting the new job. I can't wait, but whatever. Friday morning I turn it down, even though it is a very nice incentive offer to stay, and I head back to Arlington, TX with Weasel. Come Monday morning, the NEXT FUCKING DAY AFTER I LEAVE, good ol' BindView up and sells the company to Symantec. Well at least a small part of my options will be worth something, but hardly the huge payoff I expected or hoped for.

So Monday morning I started at Vernier, and I flew out Tuesday and made it official. So all of that first couple days on the job excitement, plus a million emails and messages on SILC servers asking me about the BindView thing.

Now to top it off, two freeware projects make major announcements. First, Tenable announces that Nessus is now in two flavors -- the old 2.x maintainance-mode GPL version (patches only, no major updates) and the new and improved 3.x binary-only closed source version. Then Checkpoint (they're still around?) buys Sourcefire, the guys that do Snort. WTF?

So I've had a busy week, and I am still taking it all in. The good news in all this is I have a new kick-ass job working for Vernier's Threat Labs as a researcher, and we FINALLY started work on getting the kitchen remodeled (as in the contractors started Tuesday, the day I'm out of town). Hopefully that will go smooth at least, although I doubt it. They've already found mold which has to be removed, which is an extra charge, but at least we should have a kitchen by Thanksgiving.