What we did on our summer vacation

Well, on at least one. We're theoretically going to the Colorado Ren Fest the second to last weekend of July, followed by me going to Phoenix for a game convention, then Russet flies to Virginia to work with some people building a new instrument for her telescope, and then theoretically I might meet her in Atlanta for DragonCon.

Gonna be a busy summer!

Well, on to some stuff about the trip that we just completed.


I’m not going to do a day-by-day recap of our recently completed vacation, but I do have some things to write about.

First off, it’s REALLY different driving in the east along I-40 than it is driving in the southwest. Bear in mind that I’d lived in Phoenix for 43 years, and with the exception of one driving trip back in ’91 up to Portland, all of my driving has been to San Diego, LA, New Mexico, Texas, and Vegas. We took a big family drive back to the eastern seaboard then up to Niagra Falls and back in the early 70’s, but I really don’t remember much about the drive.

A couple of things struck me. First, green. Everywhere I’ve driven in the past has been desert. Even coming back from Portland, once you start heading south from the Columbia river down to Idaho, it’s largely identical to Arizona desert. So once we started hitting Arkansas and points east, I was kind of struck silly by the amount of green on the ground. I mean, is that legal? They’re actually allowed to have all that? Then later, most notably in North Carolina and heading north into Virginia, the corridors of trees and bushes lining the interstate. It actually felt kinda strange.


I saw a few interesting things along the way. One, pretty much only of significance to Phoenicians, was we drove by the Harkins Cine Capri movie theatre in Oklahoma City. It would have been cool to stop and see a flic, but there wasn’t time. We ran in to two nasty stretches of construction, the last day in Colorado Springs, but early when we crossed the Mississippi into Memphis. Their freeways were really torn up, it took a while to get through it, and to make matters worse it was at rush hour. But we saw the giant pyramid of Memphis, which I’m convinced is the landing platform for a space ship from the early seasons of Stargate One. So that was cool.

One of the really cool things that I saw was a truck. Yippee, he saw a truck. Well, it wasn’t just any truck. I first saw these trucks on Modern Marvels, they did a show on the storage and transportation of dangerous materials, I think it’s actually a two-parter. There is a company somewhere back east that specializes on transporting dangerous items. In particular, they transport bad things for the government, including old and decaying explosives. Their trucks are sort of a pea green color, and if you know what you’re looking for, not difficult to spot. They have custom trucks that have cargo areas designed to hold these unstable explosives as they move them to an incinerator facility for destruction. These trucks don’t have trailers, they’re a single unit. They also have tons of security features, the ones they showed on the program were pretty cool.

Unfortunately I can’t get at the Modern Marvels web site right now, so I can’t track down the company and post a pic.


We also saw a huge flock of Fed Ex trucks going to and from Memphis, it’s one of their central breeding grounds IIRC.


More later.

More on my laptop getting hacked

I ran A LOT of software on it, looking for bad things installed. This includes software specifically designed to detect and deal with root kits and their ilk. Came up totally blank.

I think what happened was someone noticed that I was running a remote control program called Real VNC, it allows me to lie on my chair and control my desktop in the other room. A few weeks ago it was announced on Slashdot and other sources that there was a flaw that allowed people to bypass set passwords for the program and control computers remotely that they shouldn't have access to.

This seems to be the most reasonable explanation as to what happened to me. I was running the flawed version on my laptop full-time. I didn't need it loaded all the time, I was just lazy about installing it. So that's been removed. I've downloaded the new version, but I don't see me needing it anytime soon, so it's not loaded to be resident.

I also had let my firewall subscription expire January of '05. I should have renewed it right away, but I was a lazy bum. I've since upgraded it. And I downloaded the new version of Spybot S&D.

But my biggest mistake was a classic rookie error: running your computer all the time as administrator. If I had been running as a user, they wouldn't have been able to uninstall my anti-virus and go after my firewall as you can only do those functions as an admin. So I've renamed my admin account with a stronger password (it was strong before, I toughened it up a bit) and created a user account with a strong password.

This is another Joy of Microsoft. They make it difficult to use a home computer and not be in admin mode. I quite like Apple's take on this with OS-X: they ask you for the admin password then let you continue installing or doing whatever, much more civilized.


Anyway, I think I'm probably safe from a re-appearance of whoever it was that wanted to control my laptop. The problem that I had in Virginia was probably two-fold and definitely had nothing to do with Debora's network since I never tied directly into it, it was just a wireless configuration to get to the internet. First, I really need more memory in my laptop, more memory can take care of a world of problems. Second, I don't think my wireless card's software was cooperating very well with the HP printer driver that I had to install to work with her printer. I have a really sucky wireless card (it was cheap and on sale, that's my only excuse) that will be replaced in the near future as it is literally falling apart.


So I think that's about all there is to say on my little "PWN3D" incident. Hopefully nothing more will happen, but I'll definitely be keeping a closer eye on things.

Anniversary #1: Brunch in Bed

Yep, we made it to our first anniversary! I made this for sort of a brunch: eggs with gomashio (roasted sesame seeds and sea salt), bacon, apple/chicken sausage, and orange slices. The fruit bowl is strawberries, grapes, cantelope, and honeydew on top of Breyer's vanilla/orange sherbet. Not pictured: mega-chocolate Ghirardelli brownies and buttered wheat toast.

It was quite yummy. It occurred to me later that some warm pita bread would have been perfect for scooping up the eggs/etc mix.



And what we had for afters is not subject to public discussion. :-)