Juggling 30 is well, 10 times as hard?..

It’s actually not as bad as it seems sometimes.  Things usually have a way of working through their cycles regardless of your input.  Obviously if you care about the results you want, there will be participation on your behalf though.

SecuraBit is getting larger, but the cool thing is that we have an amazing selection of people behind it, and that really helps because no single person has to think of everything, run everything.  It’s a group effort, which makes for less pressure on each individual.  We’ll be doing our bi-weekly shows as usual, but also some spontaneous shows whenever we get the itch, such as the show Rob and Anthony ran the other night to get some timely comments in on the whole DNS fiasco that’s gone public.  If you haven’t heard about it, and you’re in some way or another involved with IT, I would highly suggest doing some quick reading on the matter and either patching your stuff, or getting the word out to your staff to do it.

Hak5 is about to start hitting full force again.  I’m looking forward to participating in creating some more technolust for all who are interested to enjoy.  We have some pretty good ideas kicking around so far, one of which involves possibly stomping all over the warranty on my 2008 highlander, and boy do I ever love voiding warranties on things.

I’m torn between staying in the area, and moving a few hours away.  There are some pretty kickass jobs up towards DC that would be VERY rewarding professionally, yet I hate the idea of being so far from the people who make life fun, my friends.  I’ll know more in a few weeks as I edge closer to the time in which I must make an absolute decision.  Either way, I already drive at minimum an hour each way on most weekends, so 3 hours wouldn’t be that much more painful.

     Christine and I returned last night from our weekend up in Western NY.  We left Friday morning at 5am and amazingly, hit no major traffic.  After arriving at my sister’s place in Springville, NY we went out to dinner with a good portion of the family and then saw the town’s display of fireworks near my old elementary school.

The following day a whole bunch of us went up to my uncle’s cottage by Java Lake, where we cooked out over the campfire, went fishing and paddle boating as well as swimming.  Later that night Christine and I were left with the cottage to ourself, and we were able to see a few different displays of fireworks over the treeline on the other side of the lake.  The cottage itself is very beautiful, something I wouldn’t mind owning someday myself.

Sunday brought a bit of sleeping in, and after a power outage in the area around the cottage we departed for my sister’s place to pickup some things we had left there.  On the way we stopped and picked our own strawberries in a field, 1 quart cost us $2 which is pretty cheap.  After that we randomly stumbled across an annual festival that the village of Sardinia has, which had some carnival rides, games, a horse show, chicken bbq, and a small park.  We had a great time in the few hours we spent there, and then departed for my grandmother’s house out in the country.  We swam in her pool, had bbq ribs for dinner, and then headed up to Buffalo, NY where my sister and her boyfriend took us, along with my Mom up to see Niagra Falls.

We took the pedestrian walkway and didn’t realize we needed our passports, but the canadian border patrol guy was nice, and believed we were U.S. Citizens so he let us enter.  A short walk past the Hard Rock Cafe led us to a small town center-ish area where a bunch of people were gathered.  Christine inquired about what was going on and we found out that there were going to be fireworks, which promptly started 5 minutes later and were quite amazing, shooting right over the falls, which were lit up and very colorful.  Returning to the US was a cinch, as they didn’t even ask us for passports, although we weren’t pointed to the correct exit so we had one last run-in with border patrol at the bus exit, and were allowed to go about our business and return home.

The drive was about 11 hours each way, and we returned last night at about 12:30am, just in time to get some sleep and get back to work!  Pictures will be included in this post later tonight.

  We recorded Ep 5 last night, and will hopefully have it out faster than last time.  I experimented with using logmein.com to remotely connect to my desktop at home, and using an alternate Skype name added into our conference call, recorded a backup steam with MX Skype Recorder.  I stopped the recording at around 1 hour 40 mins (the show isn’t that long.. haha) and the file was around 1 gig.  The quality blew away my expectations, if after editing it sounds good enough we might forego having folks record on their end (although it may be a good backup plan should the world explode), and may result in faster turnaround.

I had the crew down last weekend and we did the traditional Rock Band stuff, but also spent awhile at the beach, as well as Jillian’s arcade at the Waterside in Norfolk.  I hope to always have friends like these throughout my life.

In other news, Christine’s moving in this weekend, I’ll be driving up tomorrow and after a farewell party at her apartment we’ll be packing every last thing she owns into both of our vehicles.  Some would say it’ll be an interesting change, but I can’t really say that considering how much time we’ve spent together over the last 10+ months.  I’m very much looking forward to not having to drive 4-5 hours every other weekend, at least, alone.

Here are some recent pictures:

Head on over to http://www.securabit.com to listen to episode 4.  We had a few audio hiccups, but overall I think it came out great.

We have forums/IRC up as well, and hope the community starts building up.

I’ll try not to go weeks without updating again :).  I’ve been pretty busy with my job hunt, the SecuraBit show, and with Christine lately.  This past weekend we headed up to Richmond to see Robert Schimmel perform at the Funny Bone there, and it was a pretty decent show.  Saturday night a bunch of us went out to a new place on the oceanfront, where Christine lost her purse/phone/everything (well, stolen would be my assumption) and I got the high score on the Mrs. Pac Man machine there, although I neglected to take a picture, most likely because my score was only about 35,000ish and nothing to boast about for me.

Season 4 of Hak5 is looming and I have some ideas written down in our little brainstorming area.  I’m going to add a couple of more once I’m done writing this, and hopefully I’ll be able to deliver better quality stuff this season.

Last night we watched the movie “Funny Games”, which I thought was good, but entirely too slow for my taste.  I think I’m too americanized where I need explosions and plot twists every 3 seconds, vice every hour.  I do recommend watching it, however.

I’m pretty happy with what we’ve managed to do with the SecuraBit show so far.  Other than some audio issues and getting too drunk, I think we’re on the right track.  For the next show I plan on changing the format slightly to have a better flow to things.  I think the correct mix of alcohol to show was Ep 2 though.

I do still manage to jump on Tabula Rasa here and there, although my subscription will be ending soon and I won’t be renewing.  Another MMO bites the dust for me, I can never actually keep playing the things for any length of time, and when I do it’s an hour a week if I am lucky.

The job search is on.  I think one of the more important things for me when I look at companies is what sort of management structure is in place for what they are doing, how well communication flows up and down, and whether there’s been any thought put into the actual environment people work in.  I wouldn’t mind getting into something with a lot of R&D-esque work, provided there was a proper setup for it, space/equipment/etc.

Christine will be moving down soon, which should make the summer a lot more fun, and probably less costly on gas as well. :) 

I’m roughly 50% in GTA 4 now, and showing signs of slowing down.  This is by far the furthest I have ever gotten in the GTA series in terms of story, and I do plan to eventually finish every mission available to me.  I think I am finally ready to start playing it online in a halfway serious manner now that there isn’t much left in terms of spoilers.

Rock Band is still at weekly staple for me.  I did finally finish Green Grass and High Tides, although it was in the practice mode so it doesn’t count to anyone but me, seeing as there’s really no way I am ever going to get any further than around 85% through the song.  I’m able to play many songs on Expert on the drums now, although the kick drumming really kills me as my body just isn’t wired for my feet and arms to be on a different beat from each other, so I know there’s a ceiling I will hit there. 

This weekend Christine and I are going to a wedding, which we’re baking the cake for.  That should be an interesting experience as I have never really baked anything before.  Hopefully I am relegated to measuring stuff out and handing it over.

I think our next SecuraBit show (and last with all of us in the same room) will be next Wednesday evening.  We’re going to try to make certain that our audio is all on the same level this time around.

Head on over to http://www.securabit.com to check out episode 2 of our show.  It should be quite the riot, and far more entertaining than the first.

Please leave feedback if you have any. 

I won’t spoil anything, so I will talk about some of the technical merits of the game so far.

At 42% in, I can say the story is simply amazing.  I feel like I am sitting in front of a highly interactive movie, and the script is stellar.  The choices you are allowed to make and the way those choices can impact the way the game flows have me torn at times, yet are probably one of the most amazing parts of the game.

The only major gripe I have so far is that there’s a constant feel of annoyance from your ‘friends’ in the game.  They always want to hang out at the worst times, and what kills me is that I can’t just take 2 hours and cruise around the city without losing some like/respect points from a friend or two simply because (and I really love the way the latest zero punctuation put this) I have to pick their ass up, pretend to enjoy whatever we’re doing (for the 999th time) and then take their ass home.  There’s only so much enjoyment I can derive from playing Darts with Little Jacob, mabye if they let me throw darts at his face.

We’re recording Ep 2 tonight, slight possiblity of live streaming, and we’ll get that out to everyone if we do.  We have some interesting topics lined up, and if we’ve figured out our audio like I think we have, Chris Mills will be able to join us.

There’s also a contest we have going on to come up with a good slogan for which we’re giving away a yubikey.  Head over to http://www.securabit.com!