1. I was the host of a weekly “hacker” podcast for about a year. It was a lot of work, but I do miss it. It was fun to rant and rave for a few hours a week.
2. I did not go to any dances or proms in High School
3. I am a published author. Another one of those things that was a lot of work but it was a lot of fun at the same time.
4. My wife and I met on the Internet before it was “trendy”. For a long time we would skirt the question “How did you meet?” because of the looks we would get. During our wedding, the priest mentioned it in his sermon and we were sure that this was the first time a few people in the audience found out.
5. I flunked out of Computer Science in college (Calculus) and transferred to Computer Engineering Technology (“Computer Engineering lite” as I called it) which I graduated from.

I will not, however, “tag” anyone else. I can’t stand being “tagged” and therefore will not “tag” anyone myself.

Goodbye Crash, Goodbye Burn. You have been faithful lab servers for the past two-plus years, but I must send you into that big beowulf cluster in the sky. I still remember when you were the only two servers we had, jammed full of VMWare images, utilities, and malware for analysis. But your age has finally caught up to you and your Pentium III processors and limited RAM are showing their age.

Good night you princes of the rack, you kings of the lab!

Hardware: B-, Sleek, great size, and a nice form factor. However, the device can feel rather flimsy at times. I am afraid that the device will fall with the keyboard open and my Pre will do some kind of morbid Oreo Twist to itself. Also, when shut, the device has some give where the two halves meet. In addition to this, Palm: MicroUSB port? Come on. Doesn’t every geek have a ton of accessories for Mini USB connectors? Are we seeing the connector conspiracy rear it’s ugly head again? Finally, the little gasket over the connector is annoying to get off, makes charging it annoying.

Battery Life: C+, I’m pleased how long it lasts, but considering my MDA could last about 2 days under fairly heavy use and how I can blow through about 1/5th my Pre battery in an hour under similar conditions? Not good. I think a car charger and a MicroUSB cable for USB charging are required accessories for any Pre user.

WebOS: A-, Wow. WebOS is nice. That’s not to say it has some very rough spots: Want to have one notification sound for an SMS message and another for an e-Mail? Tough noogies.  Navigate to a specific spot in a text field? We may be here for a while. However, all the rough spots can be buffed out in future updates. Overall, it’s zippy, the app store is filling up with goodies regularly, and the UI is great. Multitasking is awesome too, the lack of which is one of the things that turned me off about the iPhone. Overall, you can tell that WebOS is still a 1.X operating system, but with a little work by Palm it can easily take over the iPhone OS.

Network coverage: D, In a word: Bleh. THIS is the one drawback to the device: Sprint ‘Now” network. I think the “now” means that “You’ll be checking if you have coverage now.” I’ve heard mixed reports that it’s a Pre problem versus that it’s a Sprint problem, but I have seen it fluctuate between 1 and 5 bars in specific spots while staying stationary. I also seem to flip over to “roaming” (thankfully, free) at random spots, which means while I can still get voice, I can’t get a data connection. While T-Mobile was not without dead spots, I seemed to get better coverage with them. I’m hoping this is more of a problem with WebOS then Sprint as I can probably wait for Palm to work the kinks out of it’s transceiver rather then wait for Sprint to add additional cell sites.

Accessories: C, Come on, no holster? Just a stupid pouch? Geez. Also, the fact that the USB cable also doubles as the charging cable by plugging into the wall adapter? Lame. Palm, come on, give me two cables so I can keep one around in case I need to do an emergency charge off a USB port. It can’t be that expensive. As a side not, while I make no endorsement of it, the web store over at Treonauts seems to have lower prices for Pre accessories then Sprint.

Overall: B/B-, I am pleased and the Pre is a great device. I keep finding myself pleasantly surprised that it does something with ease that my old Windows Mobile device couldn’t (Like… say… delete e-mail messages from my mail server! Amazing!).  That’s not to say that there are some chinks in its armor, but I think it’s a worthy competitor to the iPhone. It’s still very much a 1st generation device and has the issues thereof, however if you’re looking for an iPhone alternative, I’d recommend giving the Pre more then a casual look.

It’s the end of an era! Today, the FCC has mandated that analog TV transmissions cease by midnight and stations broadcast only in digital format.

Confirmed Boston Area station cut-over times are:

• WBZ-4 ending regular programming at 12:30 PM, then starting nightlight programming
• WSBK-38 shutting down analog completely at 1:00 PM
• WHDH-7 shutting down analog completely at 11:59 PM, then moving their DT signal from the current 42 to actual 7
• WLVI-56 shutting down analog completely at 11:59 PM

Still Unknown:

• WCVB-5 (Cutting over to nightlight service)
• WGBH-2 (Cutting over to nightlight service)

Brady and Dad

Mom did great and the entire process too less then 6 hours. That was the easy part. Needless to say, these past few weeks have been all baby all the time. This leaves very little time to play InfoSec and Radio. I have started to leverage the 3AM feeding into catching up on RSS feeds and I still occasionally post to Twitter. I am also looking forward to go to NEARFest (sans Brady) at the beginning of May. However, there has been quite a shift of priorities for the forseeable future.

I’ll leave it with another quote from Jeff Atwood, whose own son was born about two week prior to mine:

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, I’m sure you know I will approach our new parenting adventure the same way I do programming — with absolutely no freaking idea what I’m doing. And often hilarious results.

Yup.

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.

LaRouche Supporter: “Sir, what would rather have, a sack full of cash or a clear conscience?”

Me: “I find sacks full of cash a very spiritual experience!”

Him: “Corporate Whore!”

Me: “You know it!”

Is it a bad sign that making a LaRouchie angry made me chuckle?

I’m going to be a father.

We’ve known since July, but we decided to wait until we got out of the first trimester before telling anyone outside of our close family. The due date is mid/late March, the gender is unknown (and unimportant), and Mom is doing well.

Jeff Atwood, who also recently announced that he’s going to be a father turned me on to this quote from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which sums up my thoughts exactly:

His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me. He is mine, and you cannot stop me, cannot stop us. Try to stop us, you pu**y! You can’t stop us from singing, and you can’t stop us from making fart sounds, from putting our hands out the window to test the aerodynamics of different hand formations, from wiping the contents of our noses under the front of our seats.

We cannot be stopped from looking with pity upon all the world’s sorry inhabitants, they unblessed by our charms, unchallenged by our trials, unscarred and thus weak, gelatinous. You cannot stop me from telling Toph to make comments about and faces at the people in the next lane.

It’s unfair. The matchups, Us. v. Them (or you) are unfair. We are dangerous. We are daring and immortal. Fog whips up from under the cliffs and billows over the highway. Blue breaks from beyond the fog and sun suddenly screams from the blue.

My wife says we may be doing the headphones-on-the-stomach thing. If so, I’m starting on the above early and totally playing PSW, SolderSmoke, and tuning around 20 Meters. BWHAHAHAHA…