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Getting Back To 100%

Yesterday I woke up with a sore throat. The weather here has been crazy, so I fooled myself into thinking it was just sinus trouble. When evening struck I knew I had caught the "house cold". At 9:30PM I made the decision to take down a few shots of Niquil and sleep it off. Some time around 3:00AM I was suddenly awake and I didn't know why. It was like rising from the grave. I was heavily sedated. Sitting next to me, practically nudging my arm was one of our dogs. I hadn't seem him act that strange since the hamster got loose and was runing amuck in our bedroom. Then I heard a light rap on my door. It was my daughter, standing in her PJ's and making an "unhappy face". "I'm sick she said". This translates to "I puked somewhere in my room".

After shoveling the vomit away I tucked my daughter in and gave her some kids Tylenol to lower her slight fever. I think I must have been back to sleep 30 seconds after laying down. That Nyquil really works! This morning ... it was likt rising from the dead a second time. But I had to stay awak this time, and go to work. You might know, the one class I have taught in weeks and I get a cold. It was one long day. I find that once I get rolling teaching something I can practically turn off the part of my brain that says "you're sick stupid". But when lunch time came, and I sat down for a break I thought I was going to pass out.

When I came home, my daughter was bouncing off the walls. Kids don't stay sick long. Meanwhile, my wife is just starting to recover from this cold after having it pretty bad for about two solid weeks. Blah! Being a grown up sucks.

Good News Is On The Way

I e-mailed BTI this morning asking where my battery was. They responded back only ten minutes later with a tracking number. It was shipped days ago, and looking up the tracking number I could see that my battery was being delivered today! The UPS truck just stopped by a few minutes ago and dumped it off to me. So far, so good. I am at 78 percent on my replacement battery, and charging. I think I too am at 78 percent. I should be back to 100 percent in no time!

Replay It Again, Sam

Last night I learned some neat new tricks. There is a tool called "tcpreplay" which allows you to take packet logs and play them back in real time. They have to be in a generic format, such as "pcap" style (which is how Ethereal stores them). I just so happen to have three random logs from the coffee shop Friday night, so I got to work installing this replay tool. It was a bit dificult to get onto my Mac, because a few of the files it wanted to install were all ready installed as part of Ethereal. The tool I used to get it installed, Fink, would not allow it to overwrite as a security precaution. Doing some googling I found a quick solution. You can add "--force-install" to fink on the command line and replace those files. Both tools (tcpreplay, and Ethereal) work great.

For experimental purposes, I ran tcpreplay on the three log files, while running driftnet in another window. Driftnet has some really neat options that I have never really made use of. One, is to save away pictures instead of displaying them in a window. So I got driftnet going, played back the files, and then checked the directory I had specified. There I had 30 or so small images that had been "sniffed" Friday night. Neat! I wonder what else I can sniff after the fact? It never occurred to me to save my old Ethercap files for anything.

This is definitely good stuff to put in the book. I think on my next "outing" I will try some of these new tricks and produce some fresh and interesting material to share.

And now, I will rest and see if my neighbors are using their wireless network today while watching my battery charge up.

Current Mood: I'm Smiling
Musical Inspiration: I have a new Prodigy Album downloaded! Yay!