Monday, October 30, 2006

Double Thai Lunch

Ate a double lunch from the Thai Restaurant. Work was really dull. Got some nice emails from several friends which cheered me up quite a bit. Also had a nice chat with my friend Takako.

Ate some stupid food when I got home then listened to Phone Losers Of America calls most of the evening. The PLA save me again and again and again. Phonelosers.org

Thursday, October 26, 2006

New 2600



Got the new issue of 2600. It's dire. I really ought to write some articles for it soon.

Applied for a job online. The web form was completely fucking broken so my application looked pretty dumb. I was very, very close to giving up halfway through on the grounds that I wouldn't want to work for an organisation that was unable to create a simple web form.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Exam Sham

Took the i-Net+ exam after work. It was very straight forward, I only got a couple of questions wrong. I'm getting tired of exams. I ought to take a few more before the end of the year but I'm not sure I will.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Pizza Party, Crumbled Apple

Some friends came over for a party. I made pizza. You could call it a "Pizza Party". Maybe they'll catch on. Some of the guests brought sushi and yaki-tori. Keiko made an apple crumble. I had pleaded with her to use a recipe but it was no good, she wouldn't listen. The result was, unsurprisingly, a disaster. When it was getting late and half the people had left, we watched some Japanese anime, projected onto the wall in my living room.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Work And Play At Google

Gave a friend of the company a quick introduction to Powerpoint, which took up most of the morning. This is the kind of work I like. Sadly there's very little of it in my job. I could go further and say that very little of my life consists of stuff I like, but I won't say that, regardless of how true it is.

Been reading about working conditions at Google. Looks like fun. I half-wish I was working in that kind of environment. I'd probably get tired of true happiness and job satisfaction after a while, but it would be nice to experience it once in my lifetime.

Played around with Facebook. It's crap. There is an SDF group on Facebook, started by Hapiworm, an SDF user in the US. Hapiworm is cool, but Facebook is still crap.

Remembered a great comic strip that I used to read.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

The History Boys.

Went over to Keiko's house to have dinner with her and her housemate Maria. The food was quite poor.

At 8 pm we met up with Keiko's friend Hiroko before meeting Edward Pacman and Richard at the cinema. Richard had just shaved his head, which made it look like an egg. I waited for Ed to produce a spoon and try to eat the egg, but it didn't happen. Ed was very tempted.

The film we watched was "The History Boys", an adapation of an Alan Bennet play. I enjoyed it greatly and the others seemed to enjoy it too.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Days Of Our Lives

Went to library. All the books I wanted were in. This is an unusual situation as the library only has a handful of books anyway.

A friend of mine was in the library. We went to a church to talk and then went to the park to fight. We'll look back on these days as the best we've ever known.

Rushed home to wash and sing.

Went back to the city centre to meet some friends for dinner at the Thai restaurant. Takako, her husband and two other students were there. The food was great and the Thai dancing was wonderful.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Sunday BrumDay

Richard and I searched for somewhere to eat breakfast. There was nowhere. Birmingham on a Sunday morning is not good place to be. We ended up in a Tesco supermarket coffee shop. Resisting the temptation to kill myself, I ate some breakfast and watched Richard try to eat his.

Bal joined us, and we visited the Birmingham Museum And Art Gallery. The museum and art gallery is full of crap. It has the largest collection of bad paintings outside the US, and the staff are double-fucking dumb. The only thing it has to recommend it is the fact that it is free.

We took afternoon tea and looked for wifi networks. After about an hour Lylah and her boyfriend joined us, and we went to China Town for food. We chose Cafe Soya again.

On the train home Richard and I watched Appleseed on my laptop, followed by Sneakers. Sneakers is a terrible film. The people who made Sneakers are all very bad people. Fortunately we didn't watch all of it.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Old Man Time

BrumCon time again. Another year has passed. I've learnt a great deal of tech stuff, but it feels pathetic. I'm still looking at a far mountain, unsure of how I can even start to move towards it.

Woke at 4:30 am. Met Richard at the station. 4 hours from Norwich to Birmingham. I finished off my presentation on the train and read up on my subject.

We met PHM and Bal at the hotel. Bal is an old friend, PHM is a fellow SDFer.

My talk was scheduled for 2 pm, before a break so I could overrun a bit. The room was the same one as last year, and it got hot as it started to fill up.

The first talk was "IPv "what?": yeah what !!!" by Zipser. Zipser usually talks about remote telemetry systems so it was a bit strange hearing him talk about TCP/IP. The talk consisted of an overview of IPv6 packet structure, and little else.

My talk, "What's On The Cards: Security Issues Surrounding Card-based Authentication" went quite well. Everyone got the jokes, and the video I showed about ID cards went down very well.

There was a very short talk called "Mobile Java programming: For fun, profit and voyeurism" by LSL. It lacked any real content.

"All Your Email Belong To Us: The meat and guts" described SMTP email headers. Nothing more.

"Your Games 0wn U: Please Update Me." pointed out that online games contain spyware and automatically install updates...

Sneaky Russian gave an eye-opening talk called "UPnP NAT Manipulation: Yeah that's (U)n(P)rotected (N)etwork (P)hun" all about the UPnP standard for remotely configuring low-end network devices. The content was good, but by this point I was passing in and out of consciousness due to the heat and the fact that I had been up since 4 am.

The hacker panel was a bit disappointing as the audience were too tired to come up with many questions. Still, I'm glad we had a panel as it was my idea.

After BrumCon I went to China-town for dinner with Bal, Richard, Lionfish, PHM and a mystery hacker. We ate at a cafe I used to go to years ago called Cafe Soya. The food was first class and reasonably priced.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Thai Friday

Spent the day preparing my talk for BrumCon. Still a lot of work to be done. Unsurprisingly, I'm learning loads, so even if the talk turns out to be crap, it will still have been a very productive experience.

In the evening I went to the Thai restaurant that I frequent. There was amazing Thai dancing while I was there. I should probably buy a decent camera soon and start taking lots of photos to make my blog more interesting. I should also make more time for blogging, even if it means giving up my job and not talking to any of my friends anymore.