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.

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 going to be meeting up with my friend Anthony this week to do a pilot show for the security oriented “podcast” I want to fool around with.  We’re still trying to nail down a format that will be unique enough for me to be satisfied, as well as the length, but I think that will all come together soon.  He has some hosting for the site I want to put together for it, but there are some issues to iron out with that before we can go public with the site/show.  Regardless of whether or not that gets figured out there will be a site/forums to go along with the show when we launch it.

This past weekend I did the visiting Christine routine up in MD.  We did the 105 degree variant of Yoga on Friday, and that was sure something.  90 minutes of sweating, stretching, and slurping down water so you don’t pass out.  I probably wasn’t the best candidate for it because I am a bit out of shape, but I did feel pretty damn good afterwards.  The teacher could’ve been a little nicer, as we had a totalitarian dominatrix it felt like.  You can find a yoga mat/towel for under 40 bucks combined in most places.  It was $8 per person for the actual session where we went.  A gym membership is still a better deal for general workouts.

While I was up there we went to the Orioles vs Yankees game on Saturday, where Baltimore triumphed 6-0.  There was nearly a fight in front of us where about 25-30 people got ejected from the game after at least 5 cops showed up.  It would’ve been 5 vs 20ish though, which would not have been very pretty.  I guess it’s quite a rivalry, although I wouldn’t know as I don’t really follow baseball.

If there’s filming this coming weekend for Hak5 3×10 I will most likely be doing some more reverse engineering type stuff.  I’m going to see if I can’t get what I have in mind working. 

So the live show was interesting Sat.  Thanks for all that tuned in.  I need a better way to manage the incoming callers and stuff

I’m listening to dubstep, an offshoot of my buddy Greg’s freshsets site that has listeners this time around.  Really good music.  Check em out at http://www.dubterrain.net/

In other news, I won’t be able to go to Defcon this year.  So I will likely see all the security types at Shmoocon once again next year.

 There will be a Hak5 Live show this Saturday the 12th, at 7pm EST.  Details will be on http://www.hak5.org and probably hak5live.org too.  I’ve got a couple of goodies to talk about and hopefully announce something pretty awesome.

I can consistently make it to 81% in Green Grass and High Tides by The Outlaws in Rock Band now.  I have to learn how to correctly play those sets of 3 notes which just go up and down the frets during that part.  It’s pretty ridiculous.  I’m very happy though, it’s a tough, tough song and gives me a really fun challenge.

I submitted my CPE’s for the Intrusion Detection Systems training I gave at work the last 2 weeks, which brings me up to a pretty decent number so far since I obtained the CISSP.  I may convert some of my material into a format I can put up on the site here.

The upgrade to WordPress 2.5 went very smoothly, all I did was backup my database and files, deactivate all the plugins except my InstantUpgrade plugin, and then ran that.  After enabling the same plugins I was running before, everything was fine.  Easily the most hassle-free upgrade I have ever done on any platform.

I disabled the Twitter Tools updates, I thought there was a weekly digest option but there wasn’t, and it was spamming the Hak5 feed.

We filmed segments for Hak5 3×09 yesterday, and it was a lot of fun.  I stood in for Darren’s segment, Matt stood in for mine.  Christine and I both did short tips and then we headed back home.  It was definitely weird being up there for the first time since December.  Hopefully we get another live show going soon.

Today I will be fixing up my garden to look nice, which is a project inspired by Christine.  I’ll put up pictures later.

I’ll be talking about the knoppix-based forensic live CD called Helix on the next Hak5 episode which we’re shooting this coming weekend.  It’s been out there for quite awhile, and as a security guy I have gotten the opportunity to use it in an incident response role a couple of times.  I believe a 2.0 release is coming in the next couple of months, but no official word yet.

I need some geek roommates so I can delegate some of this network stuff to them :).  I’ll eventually get things online, I just stay fairly busy.  Sorry!

Yeah the Hakme project isn’t dead, good things take time folks.  The garage is finally networked, and i’ll be getting stuff online this week.  Main priority is figuring out what to use for a firewall box.  I’m going to give a bunch of stuff a try, from pfSense to m0n0wall, and others.  Once I am confident that I can expose a server to be attacked without too much fear of someone breaking into my personal computers, things will start rolling a bit smoother.  Obviously I am not going to be able to protect against the most elite hackers out there, but hopefully they’ll have better fish to fry.

Hak5 Live will be up at http://www.hak5.org at 9pm EST.  Tune in and enjoy!

I purchased a few months at Slicehost just to muck about with them.  I don’t have the bandwidth at home to run a fully fledged server like this, and at $20/mo it’s probably cheaper than the electricity I would use at the house.

Test for hak5 feed.