ODDREE.COM

Tired As Hell

Discount Man stopped by last night. He brought his bosses laptop with him, which happened to be a new Thinkpad. It was a lot nicer than the junkers that the State of Ohio got stuck with. For the record, the model they had was the G40. It's uber-shitty. The model DM's boss picked up is a T41. The T41 was impressive. Thin, lightweight, decent processor, etc. My only complaint? It's just as ugly as any other Thinkpad. I know that the average PC user is not concerned about appearance, but I mean ... come on. You could at least try to make a new laptop look appealing. Look at any other manufactur's laptop and it will look "sleeker" or more attractive. I am not down with the "flat black look". DM complained that his boss kept leaving 'greasy marks' on the wrist rest area. This was a complaint that the State users had too. Any kind of smudges, or greasy hand marks gleam like mad on that flat black matte colored plastic. Crap, crap, crap. I would still buy an iBook. :-) Go on, flame me.

We had a decent night of exchanging music, bullshitting, and the usual basement activities. At one point, my Pet Monster came down, and sat down with DM. They get along most of the time, but my Monster was a little grouchy from being couped up in my car all day. Some words were exchanged. I think DM said something about my Monster's mother, and they were on the floor fighting like children. Rather, DM was on the floor being beaten like a child. I snapped a few pictures of the event, and you can see them in my Monster's Blog.

I got a hold of two albums that I didn't have thanks to packetnews.com. After sampling them, I was glad I hadn't run into the record store to buy them. Robert Miles latest album was just sad. It makes me mad because his second to last album (Organik) was amazing. I also picked up an incomplete copy of Death In Vegas's latest. Horrible. Simply horrible. Thanks to file sharing, I saved a few bucks on two awful albums. :-) And so, the only good music I have picked up lately is the Daft Club album, and some "Scissor Sisters" tunes that DM gave me. This group is bizarre. You need to go download some.

I also learned something interesting about Access Points today. Every once in a while I come across a "Hidden SSID". I hear that if you are watching when a client connects (which is rare) you will see the SSID exposed over the wire. Kismet claims to pick up on the SSID probe, and report it. KisMac, aparently, also does this. The chances of being around when a client associates to the access point are slim and none, so I asked the KisMac mailing list if it were possible to spoof a "de-authenticate" frame to the Access Point, which would effectively disconnect the client and force them to reconnect (which you could then watch and pick up the SSID). It sounded a little far-fetched. But it turns out that this has all ready been thought of, and is a feature built into KisMac. So now I need to go find a hidden SSID and crack it for documentation purposes!!

Okay, I need to go clean up the mess I made making dinner for the kids, and then crash out a for a bit.