You never expect to choke to death on a croissant… but then one day, there you are, behind a starbuck’s, unable to breathe…

So, yesterday I went with jbarros and Travis up Throop Peak from Islap Saddle in the Angeles Forest. 9138′ above sea level and a 12 mile round trip from Travis’ truck (which was around 6100′ above sea level, IIRC). I discovered that I have altitude issues above 8000′ or so, and am pretty much useless above 9000′.

The last two hundred feet took like an hour and a half, as I staggered slowly up the hill, collapsing in the shade of each tree I reached for a few minutes of determined breathing and attempting to rid myself of breakfast.

Once I reached the top, I was beyond all ability to function. I managed most of a cup of tea and a couple small chunks of bread with hummus, but it was work… So, they packed up quickly and we made it back down that 200′ in 15 minutes and I was already feeling much better.

some REALLY big pics

Sort of a scary tip from the kaspersky guys about spam unsub links.

Viruslist.com – Analyst’s Diary

Today I ran across an interesting piece of spam. The ending contained an offer to unsubscribe by clicking “here”. Naturally, I clicked and landed on a web page (HTML) that supposedly checked my name against a database. The page then showed me the following message: “your address has been removed from the mailing list”.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But … the end of the HTML file contains Exploit.HTML.Mht which uses the MHTML URL Processing Vulnerability to download malware: in my case it was Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Small.gr and Trojan-Spy.Win32.Banker.s.

Good reminder – never, ever unsubscribe from spam. At best you let the spammer know your address is live, and at worst you end up with an infected computer.

So, I’m liking gentoo on the desktop. Thinks are actually much faster than they were on windows, and I’m able to do pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do… Linux for the desktop has come a long way.

I toggled parallel startup scripts and timed my system… 48 seconds from hitting enter at the grub prompt to the appearance of a gdm login screen… I’m sure that can be improved upon. ntp causes some unnecessary lag

The one thing giving me problems is the bootsplash/splashutils/gensplash/fbsplash genre of splashy-splash stuff… It works on the gentoo livecd, so I know its possible… Maybe I can less the cd or something and figure out what config they’re using. Bleh.

Edit: Heh, yeah, that sorta worked… did strings not less, though.

Yeah, I’ll automate this later… For now it just creates something to be cut/pasted.

find . -iname ‘._cfg????_*’ | awk -F”0000_” ‘{ print “mv ” $0 ” ” $2 }’

I’m done with Fedora. Up until now the beta nature of the OS hasn’t been an issue for me, but what the hell am I going to do with a friggin samba server where samba doesn’t work?

No, that’s not entirely true… it kinda works… Just enough to make me start hunting around all over trying to figure out what the issue is… Is it my vpn config? Is it the new (refub) switch?

Finally, google comes through with a thread from mid-May discussing the issue, with the coder saying that a beta version would be ready for testing but not for a while…

Too late. I’ve had to put off plans for my desktop because I can’t back crap up to the network over this issue. I’m done. Gentoo it is.

Will people ever learn to make proper analogies with computer crimes? Or to stop making them at all?

“Theft” of unencrypted wireless network services is not equivalent to stealing a bicycle or walking through someone’s unlocked front door. If “I” use your wireless network that doesn’t deny you the use of it. And if your access point broadcasts its availability into my home, then that is no less of a trespass than for me to take advantage of the service you are offering.

Now, things change when there is some attempt to block access to the network. If you turn off AP broadcasts or enable WEP, then there is a reasonable assumption of privacy for you.

The really sad thing is that these crappy analogies are coming from a mailing list of supposed computer professionals and enthusiasts.

On the Hackers 3 “soundtrack”, there’s a song “Quiet Then” by the band Cloak. I cannot, for the life of me, find anything else by them… which really friggin sucks as that is one of the favorite tracks in my entire ginormous playlist.

On the bright side, I have discovered that I apparently do have a musical genre preference and it is Trip-Hop… I just had no idea that that was what all those chicks in my playlist were playing.

Nothing celebrates american independance like mexican food and a James Bond marathon.

I’ve been having issues lately with broken contact forms for webmasters. Not awe-inspiring, ya know…

For example, I was trying to let the webmaster for www.governor.ca.gov that one of the press releases has the phone number for “Governor Gray Davis” listed… but the contact form is broke.

Then there was the problem I had a few days back with wired… These people should have a clue. What’s the deal? I mean, its one thing for joe schmoe’s web site to have a 500 error, but Wired?!