Technology orgasm

Alright. Right now, I'm in a big ass SUV, barreling down the road towards Las Vegas. I've got my faithful companions, and more technology than you could shake a geek dick at. A really big geek dick. We're heading to Defcon, and we're doing it in style.

You see, Gulkis has a cellular modem. Said cellular modem is connected to the internet. I am connected to Gulkis through wireless, thus I have net access. So you have two online nerds typing while driving at 90 MPH down I-5.

Add to this the fact that we have a GPS unit telling us exactly where to turn and how to get to Vegas, and we have an IPod playing music through our stereo, and you have a big nerd-a-thon. At the moment, Gulkis is online grabbing a copy of Viva Las Vegas by the King, so we can play it. I have my digital camera, and we could take live shots out the window, upload them, and give you blog readers a view of the desolation of I-5 south.

And tonight, after we check into the hotel, we're heading to Quark's bar to sexually molest some Klingons and consume a Warp Core Breach or two. Life is good when you're a geek.

Oh the nostalgia

Okay, this rules, a lot. Thanks to Drew, I now know about the Minibosses, a band that covers video game songs.

This is such a good cover of the Castlevania 2 song, one of my favorite games of all time:

http://www.hour13.com/mirrors/minibosses/(Minibosses)%20-%20castlevania%202.mp3

Listen!

The sleeping giant awakes... again.

This article is an interesting counterpoint to the currently popular claims of a new American imperialism.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030804-471194,00.html

"The fact is that since 9/11, when America awoke from its post — cold war end-of-history illusions, the U.S. has not, as most believe, been expanding. It has been moving — lightening its footprint, rationalizing its deployments, rearranging its forces, waking from a decade of slumber during which it sat on its Great Wall, oblivious to its immobility and utter obsolescence. "

Filler post

Alright, for some reason it appears that at the beginning of July, when blogger.com decided to revamp everything, lots of stuff got messed up. Not only was the commenting broken, but I just also found out that the XML hasn't been piping out. I think I have this fixed, which I'll be testing right now, but that means that the people reading this over on Livejournal are probably going to get blasted with about 20 of my posts at once. Oops.

Just to make this not completely boring, I'll relate a story that happened to me a few days ago that amused me greatly. I was at La Victoria, the best Mexican food in all of San Jose, waiting for my food. Two black businessmen, very professional, middle aged, wealthy looking, were sitting at a table, talking very loudly. I didn't really pay attention until I started hearing words that piqued my interest, like "conspiracy". Here is what I overheard: "There's a group of men, super-industrialists, who own Burger King, the LA Times, Citibank, Jack in the Box, and Snapple (I shit you not, they said snapple), who have been quietly organizing and conspiring for years. Their STATED GOAL is RACIAL PURITY." At this point, my food arrived, and I couldn't just stand there and stare at the crazies, but I really wanted to ask the guy what his sources were.

That's one of my favorite things about conspiracy theories. They're always incredibly SPECIFIC, because that makes them more believable. It's kind of like the conspiracy people who use scientific words that they don't understand very well, like the guy on Art Bell the other night who was convinced that we were all doomed because Mars was coming so close to the earth that it was going to pull us into an "elliptical orbit". OH NO! Not an ELIPTICAL ORBIT! We're DOOOOMED!

oh... my god...

Okay, this movie made my god damn day.

You seriously have to see this.

http://www.ifilm.com/filmdetail?ifilmid=68895&cch=1

I'm still in shock. I can't tell you anything about it or I'll spoil it. You have to be stunned too.

Keep me informed, people

Someone just told me today that the comments on my blog didn't work. Lo and behold, they've been broken for almost two weeks. Then I mention this to some of my other friends, who said "oh yeah, I tried to comment and I didn't work, that pissed me off".

For future reference, right there at the top of the blog is a link called "contact". If you click on that, it sends an email to me, so I can FIX the damn problems. Tell me when shit's broke, so I can bust out the duct tape and dental floss and get it back in working order.

guhhhhhh...

Wow, I just had a complete pathetic geek moment.

It's not entirely my fault, though, because I'm still confused as to exactly what happened.

I was wandering down the hallway to get coffee, and suddenly my brain stopped functioning, my jaw dropped, and my legs refused to move. Only in retrospect am I able to piece together the events that occured.

My office is full of mostly 40 year old chubby engineer men, wandering around in old free tshirts, making nerdy jokes, and drinking coffee. There are maybe 10% women in the office, all of them middle aged, all of them unattractive.

In our coffee nook was a 20-something goddess of a woman, almost as tall as I am, fit enough to be playing volleyball on a beach, and apparently dressed for it. She had a little athletic half shirt on that showed her belly, sandals, and I shit you not, little athletic shorts that were about five inches long, leaving the bottom of her ass cheeks sticking out. People at my work wouldn't DREAM of dressing like this. She was dressed like sex, pure and simple. Her entire body was covered with about the same amount of fabric that was used to make my socks and underwear.

I picked myself up off the floor and wandered back to my office, blinking the spots from my eyes. I still have no idea what just happened to me, or where that girl went or came from. Nothing makes sense anymore.

RIP Mr. Entertainment

Damn, even Bob Hope has to die sometime. Still, making it to 100 ain't too shabby. I know a lot of people my age have never really seen much Bob Hope, but if you go back and watch some of his early TV specials or USO shows, the man damn near invented the style of comedy that we all appreciate so much today. Quick, sardonic, self effacing, witty, Hope was all of these things, and his performances for our troops during wartime make him a real patriot.

And, being who I am, I have to put up a picture of him with Nixon, because that's funny.

1-800 shut the HELL UP

Riddle me this, internet community. When's the last time that a single goddamn one of you made a collect call? I've never made one in my entire life. Ever. The ad campaigns behind collect call programs is tens of millions of dollars. Who is making these calls? Who is justifying this horrendous cultural assault?

Ding fries are done

http://www.comicore.com/~tobin/movies/friesaredone.avi

Cracking windows passwords in 5 seconds

"As opposed to unix, windows password hashes can be calculated in advance because no salt or other random information is involved. This makes so called time-memory trade-off attacks possible. This vulnerability is not new but we think that we have the first tool to exploit this.

At LASEC (lasecwww.epfl.ch) we have developed an advanced time-memory trade-off method. It is based on original work which was done in 1980 but has never been applied to windows passwords. It works by calculating all possible hashes in advance and storing some of them in an organized table. The more information you keep in the table, the faster the cracking will be.

We have implemented an online demo of this method which cracks alphanumerical passwords in 5 seconds average (see http://lasecpc13.epfl.ch/ntcrack). With the help of 0.95GB of data we can find the password after an average of 4 million hash operation. A brute force cracker would need to calculate an average of 50% of all hashes, which amounts to about 40 billion hases for alphanumerical passwords (lanman hash).

More info about the method can be found at in a paper at http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/php_code/publications/search.php?ref=Oech03"

Ding dong, the witch is dead

Okay, not really, but the recall vote for Gray Davis has been set. October 7th, we get to toss his sorry, socialist, tax raising ass out of office.

In my wildest dreams, we elect Aaaaahnold as our new Governor, and California officially becomes even more absurd than it already is. Besides, we could elect a chimp to office and he'll do better than this asshole.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/24/davis.recall/index.html

Ladder Theory

This is a hilarious, bitter, offensive site about the interaction between men and women.

Women probably won't like it much, but those of you with a sense of humor will see that there's a lot of truth in it.

http://ladder.politicals.com/

This rules.

I think this is going in my office at work.

If this is illegal, don't sue me or anything.



Foxtrot is so good with the geek references.

BEST VIDEO EVER

Oh man. This video has been on repeat in my apartment for like an hour. It's the funniest thing ever. And the song! It's so simple, yet so catchy! I can't get it out of my goddamn head!

CAN'T STOP! CAN'T STOP THE BEAT!
WON'T STOP! WON'T STOP THE BEAT!

http://www.shynola.com/j_s/j_s_download.htm

BINGO!

This is pretty damn funny.

Hipster Bingo!

Hunting naked women

Now really, is anything more fun than this?

Or more ridiculous?

http://www.hunt-naked-women.com/

It's even more insane than you'd think at first glance. Look under the rules. You're basically guaranteed one hour of sex with a Russian girl after you shoot her.

The power of Pat Robertson

Granted, this entire article is pretty funny, Pat Robertson being crazy as usual, and asking people to pray for our Supreme Court to retire.

But at the end, it gets really good. This is my favorite part:

"I prayed for the downfall of the Soviet Union. I thought that communism, the tyranny of communism, was an abomination and I beseeched God to bring that terrible evil down and he did."

That's right! Pat Robertson asked God to get rid of the Soviet Union, and he did. Bwaaahaha.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/07/17/cnna.robertson/index.html

stop the madness

This fake web meme is being passed around. Notice that the URLs that they send you to, on "mtv.com" and "metallica.com" are both on scoopthis.com.

Regardless, it's a funny prank. People will believe anything of Metallica these days.

http://www1.scoopthis.com/411/met_uf/stc_met_uf_mtv.htm

http://www1.scoopthis.com/411/met_uf/stc_met_uf.htm

YAAARRRRRRR

I be drinking rum and coke out of a goddamn pirate's head.

I love the Hasslehoff

Nina found this, but I had to share it with all of you.

http://www.hellonetwork.com/demo/toysclub/video.asp?speed=hook300

I mean, seriously. What the bleeding hell.

Pain

I've gotten back from my two week trip to a world of pain.

First, Netscape has decided that it sucks balls, and has eaten all my work email. I've been wrestling with it for about five hours now, and I have about six copies of all my emails, all my filters are broken, and I have several undeletable folders. I also tried Evolution, which decided that every folder in my home directory was email. That was nice. Now I'm trying mozilla, which is looking promising.

You'd think I'd get home to relax with a bottle of beer and some good TV... except over my trip, my fucking Tivo broke too. It just sits on the "Your tivo is booting" screen, even if I unplug it. I'm going to see if Tivo can take a look at it for me, but the warranty was invalidated when I had a larger hard drive put into it, so they're probably going to tell me to piss off, which means I'm out about $500. That's just charming.

And now my mom calls me and tells me that my childhood dog Pokey is a total wreck and will probably have to be put to sleep. Granted, he's 15 years old, but that really sucks.

Oh, and I have to get three fillings put in on wednesday.

Normally I wouldn't bitch and whine like this, but A) this is a lot of shitty stuff and I felt like ranting, and B) I'm quitting smoking, so I have a very short fuse, am extremely irritable, and feel like punching things a lot.

My last two weeks

San Jose to Phoenix to Tucson to Los Angeles to Tucson to Phoenix to Dallas to Orlando to Key West to Orlando to Dallas to Phoenix to Tucson to San Jose.

My entire soul is tired. I need to sleep for about three days.

Trip status

I'm off to bed soon, but I just wanted to share a story - Today I went to an indian casino with my brother, and I got a freaking double blackjack. I got two aces, and split them, and then got blackjack on both of them. I won $40, that was sweet. The story would be nice if it stopped there, but I ended up leaving down $60, and my rat bastard brother, as usual, was up $75. I swear to god, I act as the "bad luck magnet" when I go gambling with him, and he makes out like a bandit.

Tomorrow I'm off to LA for two days for a Bengali conference with my buddy Soup, where I'll be drinking heavily with a bunch of indians, and scaring all the parents by making eyes at their daughters who are there to find nice safe husbands. Then I'm back here to Tucson, driving to Phoenix, and catching a flight to Key West. I heard about a bar in Key West called Garden of Eden, where it's apparently clothing optional. I'm all over it. I love vacations.