Giant Ginkgo

A number of friends of mine who aren't even older than 35 have already begun to complain about how old and decrepit they are. If they don't change their attitudes, they are going to have some issues later on:

Imagine a ball of Uranium 5 miles in diameter at the center of the Earth, outputting immense amounts of energy. Perhaps we should send our nuclear waste down even further underground!

A few years ago my sister and I came across a really cool exhibition at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana. It consisted of these special squeeze chairs, which were based off of the research by Temple Grandin. You could sit in the chair and use an air pump to inflate them. It was a very odd sensation...

Perhaps these chairs activate some of the same nerves as the article below.

I'm quite intrigued by the fact that there is a second nervous system for detecting light touches in the bodies of people and animals. I wonder how differently species that lack this system behave, are they less social?

The Nigerian scam is alive and well, considering that I just got an email solicitation a few hours ago...

What a sweet deal!

Meetup.com is definitely a hot thing in the geek and blogging communities. I ended up going to the Slashdot meetup event last night, and I had a pretty good time. Around 20 people showed up at Iggy's, a martini bar located near 94. There is nothing quite like a room filled with alpha geeks who are drinking.

I'll probably try out a few of the other local meetings if enough people decide to attend them.

I saw Men in Black II this week, and it was definitely not as good as the first one. The previews for the movie had most of the really good scenes in it, which left a lot of time waiting for the next funny bit. It wasn't horrible, it was just completely unmemorable.

After Jello's presentation Saturday night, I ended up going out to the Irish bar across the street, which was filled to the brim with conference attendees and speakers. I met a whole bunch of new people, the two most interesting out of the group were Jennifer a designer who is moving to NYC, and Robert Steele, an old spook who lectured at the con.

After the bar closed a large group of us went back to the hotel and eventually found a room to continue our late night party in. After a few more drinks (and the security guy who was hanging around with us left) a plan was devised to liberate the large H2K2 metal logo from the mezzanine area. A classic plan of distraction was devised so that security would be too busy to notice the letters walking off. Needless to say, the plan worked perfectly.

The letters and a banner that was borrowed. The t-shirts hanging on the letters were from security.

The security guy called us about 20 minutes later, and told us that the H2K2 sign had been stolen. Supposedly the police had caught the perpetrators and were planning on holding them until Tuesday! We decided that it would be a good idea to return the letters before he came back to the room. The sign was placed at the entrance to conference room 'A' and rearranged to spell KISS.

We started talking about the security badges that had been provided for the conference, and how easy it was to fake them. It was decided that we needed new and improved 'KISS' badges, so I ended up taking a snapshot of one and used Photoshop to make the changes. Around 8am Jenn, Mike Glasser and I went to Kinkos and printed the badges and a photo of the stolen letters.

The last session that I saw was easily one of the best, known nationally because of an AT&T memo that gained attention from the media. It was the infamous Social Engineering event. Unfortunately it got off to a bad start because Verizon had 'accidentally' stopped the line from being able to call out to anything but toll-free numbers. While they were trying to gain dialing capabilities some wicked stories were told about some classic pranks. A workaround was made with some calling cards, and the show got rolling. The AT&T memo was the first thing to be discussed, so they called up an operator to see if they could get help from them reconnecting the line. She was very guarded and wouldn't provide any usefull information.

The next phone call was to a local Manhattan Starbucks, and it went perfectly. Emmanuel Goldstein pretended to be a network repairman from Starbucks Headquarters. The poor worker on the phone told him that they were having problems with the credit card uploads... So he slowly worked the guy over until he had him reading credit card numbers over the phone. (He stopped him before he had actually read the first one fully off.) The last call was to the Russian Tea Room, a well known New York restaurant. Playing a befuddled husband, he managed to change the reservations of a completely random dinner party, plus he got their actual name and phone number. So he called them up afterwards and left a message telling them that their reservations had been pushed back a half hour. (After the session ended they changed the reservations back.)

After staying up intil a few minutes before 5 on Friday night, I slept pretty late and missed the first sessions. I took it pretty easy in the morning and the first real session I caught was Aaron McGruder's keynote. He is the creator of the Boondocks, a comic strip that is currently running in some 260 or so newspapers. During the few years that I have read the strip I have seen it censored a fair number of times by my local bastion of openness, the Chicago Tribune. It is one of the few current comics that I actually find intelligent, funny, and worth reading. I see it as being well grounded in the tradition brought about by Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes, even if it doesn't quite reach the level of This Modern World.

The most amusing part of the speech happened at the end, during the question and answer section. Jello Biafra showed up, and grilled the poor guy about his belief in different conspiracies. Aaron was pretty much dissected by Jello. (Quite interestingly nobody else that I have seen or talked to seemed to notice that.)

After the session, I took the elevator down with Jello Biafra. After he stepped out, a women behind him did a little happy dance. I visited the network room for a while and watched what was floating through the air around me on the networks, before heading out for a long walk and a tasty pasta lunch at a little restaurant/greenhouse that had a live jazz band.

The Cult of the Dead Cow show was tragically terrible. I think they decided on what to do at about 4 in the morning after a solid drinking binge. Nothing worked right, the show started 40 minutes late and was just horrible. If that was their intention, it was a true work of art. They did have one interesting device that they didn't really show, though. It was a portable black box that could read standard building security cards from several feet away. Now that is an interesting piece of kit if it works as advertised. The best part was after the show, when I got to see them pay off the slinky girls and performers that they had hired. There was something particularly pathetic about that.

The last session was a blast. Jello Biafra was invited at the last minute to return and give a talk. He started off by telling the crowd about a recent conference he had been a keynote speaker at. It was a recording industry convention, and they had hired him because the normal big name artists they had come out and speak were apparently quite sleep inducing. I don't think his speech had the same effect as the others, because he stood up and reemed them for an hour about all of the shit they have been pulling on all of us. (He has his own indie label btw, Alternative Tentacles which has been through hell.)

The rights to the Dead Kennedys has been taken away from Alternative Tentacles and Jello. Back in 1998 he was given an offer from Levi's to use his favorite song, "Holiday in Cambodia" for a jeans commercial. He refused to accept it, keeping with the principles of the group and of punk in general. Unfortunately his former band members could only see green, and took him to court, where for the time being he has lost all control of his work.

Jello proceeded to talk about almost everything under the sun. The best part of it came at the end, when he played some of his latest records that he had recently started collecting. Apparently there is a small industry of albums produced for Corporate Conventions. Imagine the horror of musicals made for and about Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Exxon, General Electric and other fine and upstanding citizens. There were songs about how wonderful it would be for Coke if there wasn't any FDA, EPA, or other governmental institutions. A fine Pepsi number was imagining a 'Pepsi Universe,' where water had been replaced by Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Exxon sang about their wives, and how they were 'full service stations' for their men.

I woke up pretty late and wandered over to the Network area after breakfast (which was hideously expensive!). A huge number of old computers had been assembled for people's use and exploration. Rows of old terminals, wintel boxes, and Mac classics were joined by an amazingly diverse assortment of old machines and gaming consoles. I pulled out my Powerbook, and discovered that there were several wireless access points available for my usage. I did my normal morning round of news sites, there wasn't anything particularly newsworthy going on Friday morning.

I went up to the main conference area, on the 18th floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania and checked out the view from the wrap around windows in the main room. It was pretty cool, with an odd painting visible from one side of the room and the Empire State Building looming a few blocks away on the other.

The first session that I attended was on the Cryptome/Cartome web site, an information clearing house on the internet. They started off talking about the history of the Hotel Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Station next door and its links to the underground and 'hacking' going back many decades. The original station was truly beautiful and was unfortunately torn down in 1966 and replaced with an ugly modern piece of trash. Among the wide variety of materials posted on the site are some pictures taken at Ground Zero of the WTC. The photographer who had taken the pictures was caught on the grounds, and the police thoughtfully erased the shots that he had taken. Fortunately they were retrieved off of the smartcard later by knowledgable people on one of their mailing lists. Perhaps the amazing thing about the Cryptome web site is the fact that it is still available and accessible even though they are regularly watched by the government and other interested parties; the owners of it are not web people, but architects.

After the first session that I attended I figured that it would be a good time to go out and see the Met. I took the 'C' Subway to 81st and discovered that it let me off right at the entrance to the Rose Planetarium. I had been wanting to visit it ever since I had first read about it several years ago during its opening... So I walked over and got in line for a ticket. The building that it is housed in is spectacular. I had no idea that it would be so beautiful and well thought out. The show itself was quite impressive as well. There were times when the planets and nebula looked like they were hanging in space directly overhead instead of just being a projection. I can't imagine how much cpu went into creating the feature.

After that I wandered through Central Park and visited my old friend, the Met. It was as amazing as the last time that I saw it. I visited the Asian section and admired their large collection of Hokusai prints, which includes the view of Mt. Fuji and the Great Wave. Unforunately, the perfect head of Buddha had gone missing since the last time that I saw it (which was one of the main reasons why I had retread old ground there.) But I did get to see the lovely zen rock/fountain sculpture.

Back at the conference I attended the 802.11 B session. It was quite entertaining. They went over the different cards and attenaes that are available and showed different sniffing and wardriver tools. Everybody brought their wireless laptops with them and set up ad-hoc networks with silly names/commentary during the speech which could be read on the large projection behind the speakers. By the end of the talk, their software had recorded over 500 networks in the room.

The next session was pretty boring, "Tracking Criminals on the Internet." While the speaker had done some impressive sluething historically there wasn't too much meat to his presentation. It doesn't help when he starts pointing out obvious tracking methods repeatedly.

After that speech I went down to the network area, and had a blast hanging out with a whole bunch of different people. I learned a lot about just how open the internet is to being monitored. Unfortunately the script kiddies were out in force, they managed to basically halt the network traffic because of the flood of packets they were sending out to take it down.

I had a great flight to New York this evening, I managed to catch an earlier flight to the big city which gave me more time to get out and do a little bit of exploring after I got unpacked and settled into my hotel room. The coolest part of the trip occurred when the guy I was sitting next to swapped seats with me so that I could view our flyby of downtown. The plane flew directly over Manhattan, and the sight was truly amazing. We came in over the financial district, the blank space where the World Trade Center was flooded with light and stood out more than anything else. All of the wreckage was clearly gone leaving an oddly empty space in anotherwise solidly vertical area. I'm glad that I saw it even though I didn't have any plans to visit the location. After that, we passed by the canyons of skyscrapers... Past the Chrysler building, past the Empire State and other easily recognizable landmarks. I forgot how big this city feels...

I decided that I wanted some REAL pizza while I was in town, so I walked up 7th to John's Pizzeria on 44th. I didn't think about the fact that it would be right in the middle of Broadway and Times Square. The streets went from being almost empty to packed with tourists, and street 'artists' providing cheesy 'name art.' The pizzaria was a beautiful old restaurant with a large dome with stain glass windows and huge murals. Oh yeah, the pizza was fantastic, with a fresh tasty crust - something that just can't be found in Chicago.

Yesterday I went and picked up a cheap ($149) and fast (32x10x40) AcomData Firewire CD-RW drive from CompUSA. When I got home, I took out the drive, plugged it into my Mac, turned it on and inserted a blank CD. OS X asked me if and how did I want to format the disc. I made my choice, it took a few seconds to initialize it and I then copied a bunch of files onto the disk and burned it. It just worked with no installation of any additional software.

As for CompUSA's service, it can leave a good bit to be desired. The first 'salesman' I talked to adamantly told me that they didn't carry that brand. When I mentioned that I was sure of the existence of the drive, he led me over to the CD aisle so he could wander off. Since I had already looked there, I told him that I had seen the drive on their website about 10 minutes before (which was true) - and it was in limited stock. He looked at me like I had grown three heads, and went to the back to check. Surprisingly enough, a minute later he returns with the news that they didn't have any.

After he wandered off to 'help' somebody else, I asked another employee about the drives. He knew that they were there, and had a stockroom guy go get it for me. I couldn't help but grin as we passed the earlier rep with the drive in hand.

In Woody Allen's movie Sleeper, the cryogenically frozen health food entrepenuer wakes up in the distant future to discover that the ideal diet is a big steak and butter loaded potato. It appears that the 'truth' might not be so far off, according to this must-read giant article of the day.

Which of course led to everybody jumping on the bandwagon while putting their blinders on. As for that juicy steak you've been putting off eating:

Next thing you know, we'll all have our home Orgasmotrons installed.

I've been reading Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science and so far it has been a very interesting and pretty entertaining read. There are some interesting ideas within the book, but I'm still not convinced yet that it matches Wolfram's grandiose pronouncements regarding what he has achieved.

The New York Times is continuing its heavy coverage of Wolfram (I believe this is the 5th or 6th article) with this short interview. I want to know why they are providing such in-depth coverage of his book... Especially considering all of the stuff that they could be writing about instead that they neglect.

I thought the discovery of this factory was worth reading about.

What can you possibly say about this? This is just as terrifying as the Dancing Monkey Boy!

Now this is a grand reason why I think I should get a new Wintel machine, MS security patch EULA gives Billg admin privileges on your box.

Watch out for the Dancing Monkey Boy!