Chris Gerling

Yeah sorry about that.  I just sort of left the site go while I was having issues getting it migrated to a VPS.

It shouldn’t be going down again anytime soon.

Yeah I haven’t blogged in a bit.. haha.  I’ll get around to some updates this weekend.

I just got up after sleeping a good bit of the day.  I had to red-eye it and fly all night to get home last night.

If you didn’t know, I was up in Portland, OR this week for e-fense’s E103 Live Forensics & Incident Response course.  I had a hell of a time actually getting there, it seemed the travel gods just wanted me to suffer, so after an unexpected overnight stay in Dallas on Monday, I made it into the class at 2pm pacific on Tuesday.  I didn’t miss much, and the fact that I had recently attended the SANS GCFA course made this more of a refresher course with the bonus of getting some goodies.

I was a bit skeptical before about Helix going commercial, but I see who the target audience was with the move, and honestly it looks like the stuff that will be in Pro (due out in May) is worth the subscription cost.  If I recall correctly, dc3dd is the default imaging tool when utilizing the Windows Live Acquisition part of the CD.

Eric Smith was a great facilitator, and the learning environment was great.  I loved the classroom they had setup, there were very few glitches, and the workstations were configured correctly, so diving right into some hands on was very very easy.

Portland is a pretty cool place.  I lucked out and @Jerod on twitter showed me around town Tuesday night.  McMenamins had great beer, and Papa Haydn’s had the best cake I have ever eaten.

Now to get some more sleep.

~16 minutes left in January.

It’s amazing how fast the first month of a new year goes by.  Those older than me probably recognize this better, but it’s definitely becoming more noticible as I get older.  One minute you’re toasting some champagne with your friends and the next, well… you’re on the fast track to the next year.

In any event, this month was pretty interesting.  We started the new year off near Baltimore with friends, and then I went out to Vegas to cover CES with Hak5.  I got the plague while I was there, and unfortunately didn’t get to do any partying with all the awesome people I met out there.

After recovering from the plague and spending a couple of weekends just enjoying Richmond, I went back down to the HakHouse last night and recorded a segment on USB device tracking, which I owe a great deal of thanks to Harlan Carvey for both his book, and his help in my understanding of the windows registry.

February’s looking to be a very interesting month.  Shmoocon this coming Friday, and my birthday 6 days later.  Valentine’s Day, and then a pretty busy rest of the month.  Looking forward to seeing everyone at Shmoocon and hopefully seeing some new faces.

Peace

I love my crazy titles.

Now that I have been out of the Navy 3 months, I have learned precisely how bad my time management skills really are. It’s a funny thing really, but something I now know about and aim to fix, though not this week, here’s the lineup from now till the end of the month:

- Tonight at 9:30pm EST I will be doing a quick SecuraByte with Rob Fuller (aka mubix), Tom Eston (aka agent0×0 from Security Justice) and geekgrrl (whose name I have just learned is Melissa), and perhaps some others.

- Wednesday is a normal SecuraBit show, with another one likely coming next Wed as well to make up for the holidays.

- Thurs-Sun is CES, which is going to be a very crazy fun time.

- I’m taking my GCFA exam hopefully a week from Saturday if we can crash at our friends’ place in Norfolk.

- More Hak5 segments, though my next one likely won’t be filmed until one of the last 2 weekends of the month due to the schedule.

I’m definitely going to be looking at some time management books, and perhaps trying some of the GTD (Getting Things Done) type stuff. I waste a lot of my time and although I am firmly a hedonistic creature, there is a point where some goals and tracking them are good for more than work related things.

I want to thank everyone who reads this blog, as seldom as I do update.

If you happen to IM me on the digsby widget on this site, and I don’t respond, make sure you use the contact page or email feedback at hak5 dot org.

Thanks!

Sorry guys.

With this move and the new job, I have been far busier than I ever thought I could be.  Now that I actually have my computers all up and running expect something in the next week to catch up for what I haven’t done.

This took me a little while to get around to.  Hopefully it helps anyone who is planning on going down there, but the main goal is just to tell you a bit about what we did while we were there.

Christine and I booked a trip to the Luperon Beach Resort in the Dominican Republic about 6 months ago.  We used the Armed Forces Vacation Club and waited as long as we could for cheaper plane tickets.  I’ll have a total cost breakdown at the end of the post.

We partied at the Hak5 house the night before we flew out, and well, we partied a little too hard.  I was approximately 1 second late in putting my credit card into the e-ticket checkin thing at the airport, and thus we had to be standby for the next flight to Atlanta.  Luckily for us everyone thought we were married and on our honeymoon, because we got some sort of special tags put on our standby tickets, which allowed us to bypass everyone.  Sorry to anyone we screwed over on that, we had no idea what was going on.

The flights to the Dominican weren’t that bad, obviously I hate flying so I just had to deal with it.  We landed in the early afternoon, and after a $90 cab ride, got to the resort at 5pm or so.  It then promptly started raining, and kept raining until late into that evening.  Luckily for us though, we only had to deal with rain twice during the entire time we were there, and left right in time to avoid the recent tropical storms and hurricanes that have made their way through the Caribbean.

Some of the events we did included horseback riding, dance lessons (which I was horrible at), crazy games (usually some sort of watersport that you won some rum or viagra for.. yes, viagra!), kayaking and more!  Each night there were also shows and events on at least 2 different parts of the resort.  We did karaoke one of the nights, and participated in some of the games they had on stage another night, where we danced in front of over 100 people and they judged which couple was the best.  There was ALWAYS something going on, other than during 2 siesta periods during the day, and obviously after the “disco” (dance club type thing, not exactly like we have in america, but close) shut down at 2am.

The place was pretty much a 2.5-3 star resort, so if you go, don’t expect to be living like a god there.  It’s nice, but you can tell they make their profit by everything being as cheaply done as possible while still remaining of a quality that won’t piss too many people off.  Prime example of this was the tennis/basketball/archery area.  The courts looked good, and there was equipment for it, but it looked like a bunch of used stuff from a high school that went out of business.  On the other end of the resort there were some water activities you could partake in, such as a mini-sailing lesson on a pretty mucy one-man boat type thing with a sail on it, which was very primitive and not something my clumsy self could pull off very well.  You could also take out ocean kayaks probably a few hundred yards out before they came out to pull you back in (guess their insurance is picky).

The food was about what you’d expect out of a 3 star facility.  Good, but not godly.  One weird thing about the resort (and this ties in with the subject of food) was how everything was setup according to a schedule during the day.  We conveniently forgot my watch, and refused to spend 20 bucks on one that we’d only use a few days, so we were constantly asking everyone what time it is, so we didn’t miss something.  There were BBQ type food places that had random stuff each day, sometimes fish fries, and always some pizza to go along with whatever the main option was.  Those were only open from noon-ish to about 4:30 in the afternoon.  The main buffet which served as the place to go for every mean was open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and usually had some great food mixed in with some average food.  There was always at least one cook making some kind of custom something for each meal, whether it was omelets, lobster, steak, burgers, fish, or even pasta.

If you reserved ahead of time (typically the first morning you were there), you could book the “el restaurante” dinner which was in a different building, and required dressing up a little to go in (mainly closed toed shoes and long pants for men, women were pretty much able to wear whatever they wanted as long as it was classy).  I only brought 1 pair of jeans and some sneakers, so I looked like an idiot the 4 times we went.  Our first night was Italian, and boy that was amazing.  The mozarella stick was better than any other i’ve had in my life, and was probably 4x the size, and you could tell it had not been frozen beforehand.  Brazil night was the worst of the 4, they simply didn’t have enough waiters to pull off going around to everyone constantly with kabob sticks full of steak/chicken/veggies/shrimp/etc.  What we did get was few and far between.

Spanish night was a not as distant 3rd, the problem being that we were eating food that was more american than spanish.  I guess they didn’t know what spanish people ate.  Mexican night was a close 2nd to Italian, but obviously couldn’t touch it.  One thing I noticed a distinct lack of was hot sauce and bbq sauce.  The only place we found even one of them was at the restaurant, and their hot sauce wasn’t really that great.  I guess these people just don’t have our tastes.

Although our stay on the resort was very nice, the best time we had during the entire vacation was when we spent $49 each to go on a Catamaran trip.  There were a bunch of other similar trips going on throughout the week, but none were as cheap, and as it turns out, none were as good.

We left at appoximately 8:30am and I think after all of our flip flops were in a bin, roughly 20 of us piled onto the catamaran boat.  With plenty of sunscreen on (yes, note for anyone who heads down that way, bring a TON of sunscreen, you WILL run out, trust me, bring lots, lots lots lots) we were on our way into the middle of the ocean, it seemed.  40 minutes into our voyage, we arrived at a buoy, which was a marker for where schools of fish passed through often I’m guessing, because they threw some sort of fish food into the water and told everyone they could put on snorkel gear to see the fish/coral up close if they wanted.  Christine did this, but I was feeling very seasick (a first for me) so I didn’t get to do this.

After a short while, we continued our trip, and were joined by a school of dolphins who swam with our boat for awhile.  Christine and I were sitting on the front of the catamaran with our legs hanging over, and some of the dolphins swam right underneath our feet, keeping up remarkably well.  Our next stop was a beach on what looked like a small uninhabited island, where we all had some rum, broke open some coconuts, and made a bonfire.  We partied there for a little while, and then headed out to sea again, this time our destination was an inhabited island.

Once we anchored and swam to shore, we were greeted by the locals there, who immediately wanted us to buy ice cream.  We politely declined, and a short time later we were directed to some tables that were setup to eat some lunch.  The food was very good, although I could tell it had been brought there, most likely by the resort, probably for health reasons.  We then went over to another part of the village where there were a whole bunch of tables setup with wares on them.  Haggling with the locals was fun, and we managed to come away with a pretty even amount of goods for what we spent.  I bought a tobacco pipe, some rum and a bottle of “mamajuana” which had bark from some local tree, and was said to give any liquor put into it and cured for 2 weeks healing properties.  Ironically, I think it helped us out, as we took a couple shots out of it during our bout with a rotavirus we could later come down with after we got home, and our recovery was rapid after that.

Once everyone had spent all their money, we were taken through the village and got to see various buildings, chickens, people, and a little pig farm.  Further down the path was the enrance to another beach, in which we had some more fun with the locals.  Christine taught some of the kids the game “tag” and there was much laughter.

Finally our time there was at an end, and we gathered our things, went back to our catamaran, and headed back to the resort.  We departed a day and a half later, taking with us memories that we will have the rest of our lives.

For anyone interested in just how much this cost us:

Resort cost:  $329 for the week through the AFV Club
All-inclusive fees:  $560 for both of us ($40 per person per day)
Plane tickets:  $992 for both of us.
Cab rides to/from resort:  $180 total.
Goodies bought:  $60 + trading an old beat-up digital camera, and cd player.
Airport food to/from:  $40
Gas to/from airport:  $35ish

So about $2200 for 2 people for a week at a resort in the Caribbean.  If you’ve done better, great, we’re not trying to show off, just trying to help people gauge realistic costs.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!

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: