SLUG-BUG!

I was rolling down a local road this morning on my way to work. Approaching me was a large furniture truck with one of those really big windows for a front windshield. In it, I see the passenger make eye contact with my Bug, and immediately lays a punch into the driver. He just about stood up to deliver the blow. The driver jerked the wheel, and the whole truck slid about a few feet into the shared turn lane and then yanked back into his own lane again. Man, I love this car. I start fights everywhere I go.

Okay, back to teaching Security Plus. Whee!

Current Mood: Tired
Musical Inspiration: Silence

The Knee Is Damaged

My wife went for her MRI yesterday. It would be her second MRI in two days. They sent her home the first time because they said her knee was jittering too much. The solution? Dope her up on a valium! So with against her doctors wishes, they prescribed her a single valium costing us only 6 bucks. Not bad. At that price, I should have gotten a couple for myself! So the next day, one hour before the appointment, we got her doped up and sent her back for more shots. While we aren't able to gain access to the MRI photos, I can show you her knee.


The Knee. 

And here is my artists rendition of what her bad knee might look like.


Artists rendition of the knee damage. 

Aparently, from looking at the MRI they can see that she has some signigant tears in her cartlidge. It's almost certain to require surgery. But, we have to wait until Monday before her Doctor can have a look and give a next course of action.

Dishing Out A Waste Of Time

I have thought a long while about creating a parabolic dish antenna for Wardriving. Having never attemped this before, I thought I would pull together some scraps and see what I could do. A few months ago I found this ugly table ornament at a thrift shop for two bucks. I grabbed it planning on ripping it apart and using it for an antenna. So I bolted a coat hanger onto it, and then seated half a cantenna on the end of my hanger, and pointed the can into the dish. The idea here is that the dish will catch the signals and the can will pick them up. It widens your signal grabbing area! Or so it goes.


The dish-tenna in all it's worthless glory! 

My dish probably wasn't curved enough, and I'm sure the physics were way off. I walked to the window in my living room to see if I could get a stronger reading with the antenna, vs. without it. As you might have suspected, I was better off without the antenna attached. It was actually distorting my signals and making things worse. I guess I will stick to my soup can for now. Just more research to put into this book that I will someday finish.

Vioxx Is Gut, Ja?

So I scored some Vioxx for my wife today. We bought her four pills a few days ago, because the insurance company was giving me shit. They charged us $17.99 for four pills. At two pills a day, that seems pretty high. But it's really not bad. It works, and $8.00 doesn't seem like expensive pain relief to me. But ... to keep buying it at that price might put us into the poor house. After a talk with one of the brighter pharmacists, we learn that my insurance company would rather deal you larger amounts at a time to save themselves a few bucks. So their deal is, $50 for 30 pills, at one a day. These are higher dosage pills, that our old insurance company refused to fill. So that's settled. We can expect to pay about $50 a month for the meds, unless they decide to lower the price of Vioxx. It still seems odd to me that the makers of Vioxx (Medco) are partnered with my health insurance company (United Health Care), and yet they can't come to an agreement on the Vioxx coverage. Assholes!

I was indeed stood up yesterday for my morning class. So I wasn't going to cry over it. I used the time to work on "my book", for which I rambled out almost two entire sections. One section describes how to create the poor mans cantenna. Another that I decided to write up rather on the fly was "how to hide" while wardriving. I have been doing a lot of running, hiding, and lurking in my wardriving adventures. Combining that, with what I have learned about human nature I think I have become pretty good at working into an environment and not get noticed. I am pleased with the way the chapter rolled out. If nothing else, there is a speck of humor in there as well.

I am holding to the promise that this book will be entertaining first, and educational second.

And now I will go back to slaving over setting up my class. After about two full days of working on it, I am still not done. I guess it does take three days to set up this five day class. But then again, it's Security+. Probably my favorite class to teach, so I will stop bitching.

Current Mood: Content
Current Blood Pressure Level: High! What the fuck? I ate healthy all day!
Musical Inspiration: Sarah McGlaughlin - My wife is playing it, and I actually like this girlie shit ... hell, I DOWNLOADED IT!!! So bite me you Limp Bizkit fanboy! :-)

A River Runs Through It

I have been feeling very out of shape lately. My blood pressure has been running wild. So I decided to start watching what I eat. Last night I tried to get some exercise by mowing the yard at top speed. That seemed to work. When I was done, I grabbed the weed whacker and kept moving. By the time I had finished I felt I had accomplished some good moving around because I felt exhausted. That seemed to raise my blood pressure, but then it generally falls after I rest a while.

So I went to Krogers and fought with them about my wife's prescriptions that they don't want to cover. Then I hit the produce section and picked out some snack-age. Banana's, a honey-dew, and four cans of "low salt" peas to put in my salads. Yummy. I had a salad for dinner and it was good. But I was still really hungry. Not wanting to ruin my active healthy day, I ate some Cheerio's with skim milk. Man am I healthy!

Now this morning I arrived in Tiffin. I had plans of back-packing into town between classes with my laptop in search of a hotspot somewhere. So as I drove in this morning, I had KisMac running, and I slowed down when I cruised through the populated parts of town. There are several public parks in this little town that would be great to camp out in. Unfortunately, none of them are close enough to an AP for me to leech in peace. It seems all I was able to find was residential access points. In this town, the public streets are very small, and houses sit pretty far off from the main road. That's a problem when you want to camp out for an hour or more and not be noticed. I seriously think I should write a chapter in my wardriving book on "not getting noticed". The more I wardrive, the more I sharpen my skills of not looking inconspicuous.

Now as I sit up here in this vacant building, I can actually hear the Sandusky river flowing to the North out the open windows. There has been a lot of rain in this area lately, and the river is running right up to the side of the winding road that leads into this complex. With my luck, these heavy torrential storms will begin just as I try to head out of here for a wardrive. Although, I have found that rain or snow can cover your windows, and keep people from looking in at you. And if you are parked at the side of the road, waiting, while it rains ... people assume you are waiting for the weather to let up before you move on. While I might not get any exercise today, I might just gather some book material!!

Oh, and it's now 10:35AM. Class starts at 10:30AM. Are my students showing me up? That would suck considering that I don't have class again until 5:00PM this evening. I need to find a bar in this town.

Current Mood: Bored
Musical Inspiration: Country Joe and The Fish - I'm a Fixin' To Die Rag

Pain In The Knee

My wife woke up this morning with a nasty pain in her knee-cap. It's been there for about a week now, but this morning it was especially bad. Now we are in the ER awaiting X-Ray results. It's as good a time as any for blogging. I came prepared with a palm pilot since my laptop would never make it through the security here.

Wardriving Companion Wanted

Last night I really wanted to go on a wardriving expedition, but Discount Man wanted no part in it. He had homework he was supposed to be doing, but he didn't have the software he needed and my cable modem connection was fucked up as usual. So for a few hours I watched him struggle to download files of less than 100k, and I made several attempts to install OS's through Virtual PC on my Mac. I begged and pleaded to go out for coffee, or any other activity that might get us on the road. DM says he is just not up to driving me around and being my lookout. Understandible I guess, but one man wardrives just aren't much fun.

The Book

The longer I spend not working on my book, the more anxious I get to put something down. Looking at next weeks schedule it seems I will be driving out to Tiffin once again to teach A+ and MS Acess. I will of course have several hours of waiting inbetween classes, so perhaps me and Audrey (my lappy) will have to go for a spin through town. I should also be thinking about what I will say to my new boss on Friday.

My boss since the company merger put in his last day on friday, and they named his replacement that same day. My new boss, Kim, was previously the marketing and sales manager and is now the active training manager. I'm very pleased with the decision, and I think she will do much better than my old boss. In my short time working for him I watched him lose his cool on multiple occassions, and drive one staff member out of the company. Kim on the other hand seems to keep cool under crisis, and isn't afraid to bare her teeth. Seeing how she will be our mediator to upper management, I have a much greater confidence in my advancement (not to mention job security). I wasted no time asking for a meeting with her to discuss my "career path". In a very polite manner I said "give me something to teach and maybe some more money too". She was quite receptive to any ideas I might have about my 'advancement'. I meet with her next Friday to discuss the matter. Wish me luck!

Wireless Script Kiddies!

It won't be long before you will have punks screwing up your wireless networks. It was only a matter of time until someone figured out that you can jam a wireless network by sending endless frames into it. 802.11 works by process of "Collission Avoidance". Which means that one wireless card will not talk while another is speaking. So if one node "doesn't shut up", nobody can get a word in edgeways.

It's nothing technical. Nothing new. But I thought I would throw it out there anyway. You can read about it on AusCERT, that's "Australias Computer Emergency Response Team". They have rated this threat as "medium" which is one level higher than I would have rated it.

http://www.auscert.org.au/render.html?it=4091

SST-PR-1 Phenomenon

I started a KisMac scan on my iBook over lunch today. To my delight I started finding roaming beacons from the highway. It seems if you travel with your laptop open and a scanner running, you will find many of these wireless devices all with the same name.



I have never found a satisfying answer to my question of, "what the hell are these?". They pop up everywhere, with different MAC addresses, and it seems to be that they are coming from random trucks. I did some Googling and found several different running debates on just what these are. Many theorize that it's a sears repair truck/van. "SST" stands for "Sears Technician Truck", or at least that's ones guess.

Others theorize that this just happens to be the default name given to a device installed in trucks to relay information to the trucking company when they come back within range of the access point. When found, these WiFi devices are always set into Ad-Hoc mode (one wireless card to another, without an Access Point), and they always seem to have WEP enabled. It seems to me that these are not only in use by Sears.

Another guy thinks that your wireless device may be picking up these signals, and then broadcasting them back around, and keeping them in circulation. In other words, a truck might pass a Sears van and pick up the access point named "SST-PR-1". It would then make attempts to find this network, or start advertising this network itself, even though it has long lost touch with it. The idea being that one truck might be in range of the access point, while others are just outside of range. By acting as a repeater the truck could carry the signal a little further, so the other trucks could be part of this network for a data transfer. Interesting theory. Here are "Greg's" words which I copied from a Wardriving forum.

Your laptop is repeating a signal that it at one point DID come across but has since lost. In fact, case in point, if you "hibernate" your laptop you will occasionally find that pre-existing networks still show up on your laptop / handheld strong as ever... This phoenomenon can also be exhibited after powering your laptop off and back on again while it attempts to re-acquire lost signals.

All of these are good theories, but as of yet, this seems to be all they are. People keep dismissing the claims and saying "it's a Sears truck, stop investigating", but from what I have seen, there has to be other possibilities. I have chased "Yellow" trucks, as well as "Wal-Mart" trucks that emitted this same SSID. Have you all found anything interesting?