innismir.net

I just finished watching the the season finale of the TNT show Leverage on the DVR. Knowing TNT, there will be repeats galore, plus it’s available online so you should invest some time and watch it also.

I’m not a huge TV fan, many of the shows I “like” I could easily drop, but Leverage has easily come into competition with Burn Notice as my favorite show. I’ve always been amused by Social Engineering in practice. Back in my “grey hat” days I would be amazed when record themselves calling up some business and get information about a customer. So Leverage is relevant to my interests as most of the plot deals with scamming people who richly deserve it. Some of the plots are slightly far-fetched from a technical standpoint, but I can suspend my disbelief well enough only to emit a light chuckle. The characters are great and the show has some great lines:

I’m a functioning alcoholic; the trick is not to get hung up on the ‘alcoholic,’ but celebrate the ‘functioning’ part of the sentence.

The show is up there with (Clooney) Oceans 11 for writing and plot. I would highly recommend it to anyone within the InfoSec crowd or anyone who enjoys good “heist” style plots.

Since everyone else is talking about K5D, I might as well also. I’ve only been monitoring K5D, since they have always been working split and my humble equipment can’t do such things. Although, this weekend I saw them doing something strange, they were transmitting voice on 14.140 and listening on 14.130 in order to work Japanese stations. I documented the K5D portion of this:

What is making me scratch my head is how K5D is legally operating phone on 14.140. As far as I can tell Desecheo is under FCC jurisdiction, so operating voice below 14.150 should be a no-no. Am I missing something?

Since she’s the one with the liberal arts degree, and it pretty sums up my thoughts exactly, I’ll let my sister, @mcwonthelottery, speak for me:

My mom had surgery today.  Got her knee replaced for the second time.

AND HOW HARDCORE IS MY MOM? The surgeon went in only to discover that she had BROKEN her old metal knee. TITANIUM. SHE BROKE TITANIUM. The doctor had never seen it happen before. He’s sending it to engineers at Dartmouth University. Amazing. Way to go, mom!

To be fair, I’m pretty sure these knees are only supposed to last ten years, but my mom will never throw something out until it’s completely useless, so she had hers for sixteen. I’m pretty sure that shit got worn through.

She is doing well, though a bit out of it.  But she’s got her magic morphine, so life is good.

Yup, that’s about it.

It’s official. After thoroughly consuming my Gordon West Extra Class Study Guide that I recieved for Christmas, Steve and I went to the SEMARA VE session today with Steve, KB1MEH and we both emerged victorious. Steve upgraded from Technician to General, and I upgraded from General to Extra. While they don’t tell you how you did besides whether you passed or failed, judging from watching them grading my exam, I seemed to get 9 wrong out of 50, which is the low end of what I was pulling on the practice exams (40-45). However, a pass is a pass and I am quite please.

I’ve always seen getting your license as the starting point, not the destination. Now that I have my Extra, while it’s a very big milestone, I can’t help but think “OK, what’s next?”