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Last night Spessa somehow inspired me to install Sirius in my car. I mounted it in the glove box and wired the power into the radio power so that it comes on automatically when I start the car. So I never even have to open the glove box unless I want to switch stations. (Speaking of glove compartments, has anyone ever actually kept gloves in their glove compartment? Isn’t there an updated name for a glove compartment?) I mounted the antenna stealthily in the dash. It’s cool having it in the car but now I miss having it in my room. I’m going to have to buy a home kit soon, hopefully cheap on Ebay. Spessa is going to give me her Sirius remote that she never uses so I can change stations without leaning into the glove box and swerving off the road. It’s an especially hard maneuver when I’m text messaging and holding a latte at the same time.  Today the kids and I went to the pool for about 3.5 hours. They’re only open for 4 hours on Saturday which is stupid. All the pools in Oregon suck like that. But yeah, it was fun. I hung out in the pool for about half of it and read for the other half. I’m really starting to like Twitter now. Maybe not to update myself so much, but it’s cool to keep tabs on everyone I know. And it actually seemed really useful at Defcon. I couldn’t get Twitter to IM me when new updates came in, so I ended up finding a completely new IM program. It’s called Digsby and supports all the major IM services, email updates, Myspace updates, Facebook updates and Twitter updates. The only thing it doesn’t do is IRC, but I’m hoping they’ll come around with that soon. I’ve been using Pidgin for most of this year, but it looks like I’ll be sticking with Digsby for awhile. (7:15:52) brad_the_carter: make a twitter account
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I went to Defcon this weekend. I left for the airport Friday morning and hung out there for a few hours. I stopped at an ATM to take out $300 for the weekend and the machine only gives me $280! I always thought it was stupid to count the money because ATM machines never make mistakes like that, right? But yeah, it kept $20 of mine. It was a U.S. Bank ATM so I called them and they told me to call PayPal since that’s the card I was using. PayPal emailed me a chargeback form, so hopefully that works. I’m not counting too much on getting my $20 back though.
We ate at Peppermill, I gambled $5.00 because Spessa ordered me to. I also have to share my winnings with her, which comes out to $0.00 each. We walked all over Vegas for an hour or two and then went back to the hotel. On Saturday I woke up around 10am and walked to 7-Eleven for breakfast. I tried Dennys first, but there was a line out the door, so I settled for Hostess cupcakes and milk. I ended up trading 2 PLA t-shirts for other shirts that were being sold in the vendor area, which has always been my way of saving a few bucks at Defcon. Set out PLA stickers, media DVDs and business cards on an empty table. I also got the guy at Sticker Nation, who had a bunch of buttons on his table, to take a bunch of PLA buttons and sell those too. I think I gave him about 30 PLA buttons. Thanks, Sticker Nation guy! At some point during the day, I was walking alone and someone passed me and yelled, “PLA!” Then someone walking behind me yelled back at him, “Cactus cactus!” As I rounded the corner into another hall, I looked back at him and told him there was no cactus here. He ended up telling me that he found the PLA when he heard it mentioned in a Nerdcore song. It was, of course, Trevelyn’s song called Blackhat Life where he mentions PLA Radio. This guy wondered what PLA Radio was, so he Googled it and seems to know a lot about us now. So thanks, Trevelyn, for bringing even more hapless people to the PLA. Met hevnsnt from i-hacked.com and a bunch of other people in their Skybox. Went with RijilV & Co. to the Star Trek ride which was a lot of fun, even though I’m not much of a Star Trek fan. Was a really great ride, though, and I can’t believe they’re going to tear it all down after this summer. Ended back up at the i-hacked.com Skybox a few more times and watched their live podcast. Hevnsnt gave me a cool badge with “RBCP” laser-etched into it which gave me a few free drinks. Drifted between the i-hacked party and the 303 party for several hours and met a ton of people that I hadn’t seen in years or that I’d never met in person before. One of those people was Skydog from Phreaknic who luckily didn’t punch me in the face for my phone stunt at the last Phreaknic I attended. He told me all about how he was on the floor, under their PBX system, trying to figure out how we’d messed up their phone service. He said I’m allowed back, but I have to be punished publicly, or something like that. I met Grey Frequency too! I didn’t even know she went to Defcon so that was unexpected. I woke up pretty early on Sunday but didn’t feel tired for some reason. So I showered and got ready to wander around the hotel. But midway through shaving, I suddenly felt really sick and wanted to pass out and/or puke. I barely made it out the bathroom and fell back to the floor to sleep for a couple more hours. I think it’s been about 5 years since I was hung over. I got up later and went to Denny’s for breakfast. Felt a lot better after that. Attended a lot of talks throughout the rest of the day, mostly just so I could rest. Rode a Limo back to the airport in the evening - between 7 of us it was $10 each. Pretty uneventful flight home. It’s always funny to see a billion hackers walking all over the airport, waiting for flights home. Got into Portland at 11:30pm and then home at 1:30am. And that was my weekend. Here’s a few pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbcp/sets/72157606674289675/
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I sat to the most talkative girl ever on the plane (really, she just went on and on and on to me.) and got into town just in time for rush-hour traffic. Arrived at the hotel and bumped into el jefe about 5 minutes later. Had drinks for awhile, then set off to find RijilV and Co. He was awesome enough to somehow get me a free badge so I didn’t even have to wait in line or pay.|
I’m going to Defcon tomorrow. If you’d like to contact me this weekend, you might try emailing MOBILE at notla.com, which will text my cell phone. You can also leave me a voice message at 541-550-2930. And Twitter will be texting me nonstop all weekend - I’ll probably think about even updating it myself occasionally. See you there!
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In 1992 I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and found a cheap apartment a couple blocks from the beach. I had 4 roommates and they were young guys, just like me, and always seemed to be getting into some kind of trouble and there was always crazy drama happening. Like when one guy got pulled over for speeding and ended up getting arrested for some reason, so we all pooled in our money to bail him out, only to find out that he actually had a different name than we knew and he’d been using some other guy’s drivers license to live under. Or the time one guy burst into my room in the middle of the night to show me that he’d stolen the fortune telling machine from Subway and needed me to help him get all the quarters out of it. Somehow we ended up with a TV in our living room. I forget where it came from - probably from someone’s trash since it was one of those giant wooden console TVs. We were sitting around the living room and trying to tune in shows, but having very little luck. We briefly talked about splitting the cost of cable, but that didn’t do anything for our need of television right now. $5.00 each was probably out of our budget ranges anyway. So that conversation turned into ways that we could steal cable. Our apartment didn’t even seem to have any cable wires running into our building. But the building across the street did. We found a few people who we guessed had active cable in their apartments, so we started making plans. My idea was to hook up a splitter to their cable line and run a new wire underground up to our building. We would have to go buy a splitter and a bunch of coax, which would cost maybe $20 or $30. But my roommates weren’t as patient as me. They wanted to watch cable TV tonight. So instead of being stealthy about it, they walked over to this other building and started ripping down their coax cable from the wall. They yanked on it until the cable came loose and we had the end that plugged into the TV. Then they pulled it from the other direction and I believe they ripped some of it from the telephone pole. In the end, we had just barely enough cable to reach over to our building, into the window and hook it up to our TV. We had to pull the TV right up to the window and there was no slack at all left on the cable. In fact, outside the cable was at a very tight angle from the ground to our 2nd story window, probably obstructing people from walking by on the sidewalk. I can just envision a guy on a bike not seeing it and getting clotheslined. There was no connection on the end of the cable since we’d apparently ripped it off while pulling the wire off the side of the building, so I used my wire cutters to lengthen the leads and get them hooked up to the TV. So we turned it on and it worked great! After the 1 minute warmup period that giant wooden consoles take to turn on, we were sitting around and happily enjoying Doogie Howser, M.D. or whatever the hell people watched in 1992. After a few hours, somebody begins knocking on our door. Guess who it was. Yeah, it’s the guy we stole cable from. Literally, stole cable from. Stealing in the sense that we actually deprived him of cable TV because we took it from him. Not only did we end up stealing his cable, but when they yanked his cable off the side of his apartment building and pulled on it until it came out of the wall, it actually pulled his TV off the shelf and it fell to the floor. There was no mention of his TV being broken, but he wasn’t a happy man. We apologized to him and handed his mangled cable TV wire back to him. I don’t remember much of the actual exchange between us and our angry neighbor that night, but I do remember that it ended with him giving us a very weak, “Well, uh, don’t do it again!” I guess we got our fix of cable that we needed, because we didn’t buy or steal any more cable for the rest of the summer.
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For the past 48 hours, day and night, I’ve been listening to Hair Nation on Sirius 23 - old 80’s and 90’s hits from bands like Dokken, Dangerous Toys, Warrant, Firehouse, Queensryche, Skid Row, Cinderella, Winger, Whitesnake, Scorpions. So many songs and bands that I’d completely forgotten about. I normally spend very little time listening to oldies, but I’ve enjoyed this station way too much these past couple days. I need to change the station before bed or I’m going to get stuck in this era forever. I’m still really enjoying Sirius, obviously. I think when I get back from Vegas I’m going to try listening to Launchcast and last.fm for awhile and see if those are comparable. Sirius is definitely worth $12/month, but $2/month would be nice too. At least Launchcast would allow me to completely block songs that I hate. I think they have more selection too - I don’t hear Jonathan Coulton and Lemon Demon on Sirius.
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I haven’t written much lately. I can’t remember much of what’s happened lately. I know yesterday the kids and I biked to downtown Albany (about 10 miles, round trip) for some kind of weird pirate fair they were having. Had lunch there, watched an eating contest, bought some pirate flags, stopped at the park for awhile. A couple weekends ago Sheila and I went to Detroit Lake and afterwards drove up a mountain to find some hiking trail. The narrow road was covered with boulders and there was a giant cliff on one side. We kept having to edge around the boulders, sometimes scraping the car on them. I was just waiting to have one fall on us or for us to fall off the edge. We passed some people on the way up who were stopped and told us that the road didn’t look good for driving so they were going back.     Yesterday Kylar’s dad stopped by because he wanted to ensure that we hadn’t accidentally kept some Xbox 360 games we’d borrowed from him. I told him sure, come on in and we’ll check. The weird thing is, Kylar doesn’t visit us anymore and we’ve never borrowed games from him. The kids all just play Halo 3 together all day instead of actually visiting each other in person. So we take a look at our games and, as expected, none of Kylar’s games are there. Then he pulls out the big guns… “Well, we looked at your online high score list (whatever it’s called) and noticed that you’ve been playing the games that we’re missing.” “Oh yeah? Which games are those?” “Well there’s Bioshock.” I remember Bioshock - it’s the first game we ever rented on the 360. He tells me that Civilization Revolution is on our online list. I’ve never even heard of this game. Emily looks and finds Dance Dance Revolution on the list. “Is this the one?” “Oh yeah, I guess it is.” It was so lame. I was nice about it, though. But he still didn’t give me a friendly, “Oh sorry about coming over here with my lame detective skills and accusing you and your family of stealing our games” on the way out.  I bought a cheap Sirius radio yesterday in an attempt to keep up with The Spessas. She was bragging to me about her new Sirius radio so I just had to run out and show her how frivolous I can be. I’m still not sure I’m going to keep it. It’s about $12/month and I’ll mostly be using it in my room. Seems like Yahoo Music might accomplish the same thing for $25/year. But I’ve been enjoying Sirius so far - it’s been playing nonstop for 24 hours now. Jammie, who rules, sent me a video of the PLA HOPE thing. I cut it down to about 10 minutes this weekend and put it on YouTube. Here it is. I mainly just kept the parts in that got the most applause and laughter to make us seem extra cool.
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Once again, the kids and I spent a couple of weeks in Illinois. They went a little something like this… July 4th: After a nutritious lunch of 7-Eleven hot dogs and Slurpees in front of the store, we took a taxi to the Albany hotel where the airport shuttle takes off from. Hung out in the lobby for about 45 minutes, playing checkers as we waited for the shuttle to arrive. The shuttle trip took about 2 hours and was slightly cheaper than an Amtrak, especially considering we didn’t have to take the Max to the airport after we arrived. Took another shuttle to our hotel and hung out in the pool area for a couple hours. Took the Max to Skidmore Fountain, walked around a bunch for about an hour and then watched the fireworks display. Was lots of fun. Went back home (actually beat the huge crowd to the Max somehow and got on the first one) and to bed by midnight. July 5th: Up at 5:30am to get ready to leave. Pretty uneventful flights. Watched a movie with Payton on the laptop for about 90 minutes of it. Read my book a lot. (Yet another Mark Twain biography) Hung out in Chicago’s airport for a nearly 2 hours for our layover. Ate at Johnny Rockets in the airport and it was an insane $40 for just 3 of us. Played on the pay phones for awhile. I was having the kids dial random things, like ANI numbers, and I noticed that they didn’t know you’re supposed to wait for the dial tone to start dialing. When I said they had to wait for the dial tone, they didn’t even know what that was. They’re so used to using cell phones. Got into Illinois at 5:15pm. July 6th: Woke up and looked at my phone - 5:30am. So I tried to fall back asleep for awhile. Then I remembered that yesterday my phone hadn’t switched time zones yet, so I called Alton’s time and temperature number to find out it was actually 7:30am. Still too early, but I got up anyway. The kids and I rode bikes for awhile and stopped at Vanpreter Park. Ate lunch at Steak N Shake with everyone. Went to see Wall-E in Edwardsville, which was great. On the way there, I glanced at Walgreens and noticed that the 254-7111 pay phone was missing! Yet another casualty in the pay phone deaths of 2008. I’ll miss that one most of all. I wonder if the Vanpreter Park pay phones are gone yet. Tonight I went to a concert at Haskel Park. Emily found a huge, unfolded pocket knife in the playground area. 6″ blade, I think. Gotta love Alton… July 7th: Went to my dentist at noon. After 2.5 years, I still don’t have a dentist in Oregon so I made an appointment with my old Illinois dentist while I was in town. Luckily I didn’t have any cavities since I probably wouldn’t be here long enough to make an appointment to come back. This evening I got to meet John Sever. Yes, the celebrity from the John Sever Fan Club. I was a little star struck, but I tried to play it cool as if I hung out with celebrities all the time. The kids and I went to his parents, ate, swam, caught up, etc. I hadn’t seen his dad in about 20 years and his mom in about 10 years. I traumatized John’s kids by forcing them into the pool against their will and he traumatized mine by hitting Emily in the face with a volleyball and picking up Payton by his ears. Good times… July 9th: Left at 3:30pm to go to John Sever’s house (without my kids), which is about an 80 minute drive from me. Had tacos for supper there, then went ditch exploring! (You should click here to read about The Ditch.) His wife and kids explored one direction of the ditch with us, then we went back home. After the kids were in bed, we headed to the ditch again and eventually ended up exploring the tunnel side of it. By this time our shoes were soaked. It was approaching dusk and it was pitch black inside. We each had a tiny LED flashlight that put out just enough light to keep us from tripping over anything, but they didn’t give us any light into the distance. Just as we were about to turn around and go back, we saw a hint of light in the distance so we kept going and ended up underneath a manhole cover with open vents on the sides. I turned on my GPS and stuck it outside the vent to find out where we were, which ended up being a couple blocks from his house. John lifted the manhole cover and we climbed out. A car parked on the side of the road with its headlights on seemed to completely ignore us and eventually drove off. John replaced the cover to keep people from falling through and we walked back to his house. John’s account of this whole thing is much more detailed and hilarious. Read it here: http://johnseverfanclub.blogspot.com/2008/07/manhole.html. July 10th: Payton and I took a bike ride and ended up at the Icee stand. Patty was working and gave us free Icees and asked if I could come by their house and fix their computers. Said she’d give us free Icees for the rest of the week if I stopped by. So that’s cool, even though I hate fixing computers. July 11th: Emily and I went for a ride this evening and ended up at Piasa Pantry (it’s a BP now) for some Slushies. Around 8:30ish I went to Mark and Patty’s to fix their wireless router issues. The kids came with me since they wanted to see the kids too. It took about an hour to get everything working. Now we have free Icees for the next week and they gave us some drive-in movie passes for some place in Belleville. I’ve never been to a drive-in movie before. Got to hear all kinds of gossip about my old neighbors. July 12th: Got up around 9 and Payton and I went to get donuts. Went to Raging Rivers for the day, which ended up being a half day since it started storming and they closed the pool. We were all pretty exhausted anyway though. We were too lazy to hang around and ensure that they were closing so we could get free passes for next week. July 13th: I’m a little sunburned today. It’s Payton’s birthday. We had a cake, tons of pizza and a pinata. And this evening we went to see Hancock at Eastgate. July 15th: Got up at 7am and left for the City Museum by 9am. The City Museum was the same as always, which is unusual. Usually there’s always something new there. We stayed until they closed, though, and had fun. Emily ended up with a bunch of free Crusin’ USA games somehow (it just kept giving her free games) and was playing forever and me and Payton tried to convince her to come and do something else with us. Once when she protested, Payton replied, “Puh-lease, this game is so easy we could play it on paper!” I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounded pretty awesome. He always says the weirdest things. When we got home, my mom told me that Paige called and would be at a game in Vanpreter Park. So we went there and met up with Paige, Gary, Richard and Shirley. Oh, and Casey. Was nice to catch up with them all. July 17th: Visited Wood River pool all day. Kids got busted several times for stopping on the waterslide so they would run into each other. I finished reading Fight Club, which was supposed to be my book to read on the plane ride home. Now I have to find something else to read. It was a good book and gave lots more detail than the movie, but I still like the movie better. I’m officially going to Defcon this year - I ordered my tickets today. July 18th: Met John, Liz and their kids at the zoo today and spent all afternoon there. Went to their house afterwards, moved a couch and a giant TV. We didn’t do anything very destructive or crazy, just had fun with all the kids. (Well, I did redirect a sprinkler into a crowd of old people.) John and Liz, you guys are awesome. I hate myself for not getting together when we all actually lived in the same area. July 19th: Time to go home. Got to the airport around 11am. I guess I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to get there because check-in was super quick and so was the security checkpoint. We had nearly 2 hours to kill before our plane left. Our layover in Denver was another 2 full hours. Emily wheelchaired all over Denver airport until some airport guy yelled at her and took her wheelchair away. I kept trying to get her to greet passing wheelchair users with, “Hello, fellow cripple!” but she wouldn’t do it. Got into Portland around 7:30pm and into Albany at 10pm, all of us completely exhausted. I spiced up the barf bags during one of our flights. The pictures are here: http://www.signhacker.com/2008/enhancing-barf-bags/ The PLA Panel at HOPE happened on the 19th too. On our shuttle ride home from the airport, I sent text messages to murd0c and RTF, hoping that I would see them check their cell phones during the presentation on the video. murd0c called me last night and told me that the panel ran about 45 minutes late, so I guess my texting was in vain. He told me the crowd liked my Rickroll. I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but doing a Rick Astley parody was extremely painful for me because of how much I hate that song. I put it up on YouTube, though, so here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGFEyxW1MsM Today I’m just recovering from the vacation. I slept in until 8am, which isn’t too bad considering it’s 10am Illinois time. Went to McDonald’s for McGriddles since there isn’t any food or milk in my house. Stopped by the post office and my mailbox at home. On the way to the post office, I passed by my old place and I noticed that my old neighbors have moved out. The ones that Warren lived with. This kind of sucks, because I liked living there and only moved because Warren’s friends kept stealing things from me. I should move back! But on the other hand, HAHA, they finally got kicked out! I’m not sure what’s in store for the rest of my day, other than I’m hoping to go pick up my cat from the people who are watching him. I wonder if he still remembers me. I’m too lazy to add accompanying pictures to this entry.
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 I tell my kids that the teens pictured in this roadside memorial are buried under the metal doors. What’s with this roadside memorial anyway? It’s been there for almost as long as I’ve lived in Albany. Don’t these kids have real graves that can be decorated with pinwheels and stuff? It used to be across the street, taking up some of the sidewalk, so I guess it was moved to this newer place to inconvenience less people. But geez, 2.5 years now. How long does a roadside memorial need to stay up?     Biked for a few hours this evening and ended up taking more pay phone pictures. It’s only been a month since I last went on a pay phone picture taking spree and already some of the phones I photographed have disappeared. The Goodwill phone disappeared just a couple weeks after my photo. And last week I noticed the 1 phone at Target was missing. Every pay phone on the community college campus has been removed. These have all been Qwest phones, so it looks like they’re tired of dealing with pay phones. (This post is dedicated to Sheila and Wenonoa, who fully understand and can both personally relate to my obsession with pay phones.)
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This thing makes me even happier than I ditched 100% of my DVD collection last year. And I’m sure the service is going to just keep getting better, especially once Blockbuster releases their own TV box later this year and they have to keep up with the competition. I’m surprised stuff like this isn’t bringing the cable TV rates down. I haven’t had anything more than the basic network cable for the past year, which I never watch. I only keep it because of the promotional thing I’m on with Comcast makes it cheaper to have cable with my phone and internet than to not have cable at all. Last week the promotional thing ran out, so I called them once again to cancel my cable TV and they set me up with another promotional thing so it’s cheaper to keep my cable. They desperately want me to have cable TV. Speaking of cable TV, look at these girls. I want to punch them both. My Netflix queue is down to 15 movies now. It’s been consistently over 100 movies ever since I had it, as I’ve been copying just about everything that’s come in. But I’m almost finished with building my collection. After that I’ll be moving to the $8.99 plan on Netflix, which will make my Roku box even more awesome because it’ll be crazy-cheap. Wonder how many months until my personal digital movie collection is rendered completely useless because the Roku box will stream everything Netflix has.
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I’ve been a Netflix subscriber for most of this year now and it’s a great service. But what’s turned it into an awesome service is that box in the picture over there. That’s the |
A few years ago I was standing in a long line at the Alton Lowes, probably buying some home renovation junk. The guy being checked out at the front of the line had a cart full of drainage PVC pipes. Expensive pipes and lots of them. The teenage cashier can’t get one of them to scan, so she picks up her phone and says, “Plumbing, call 203!” or whatever the extension for her register was. I pulled out my cell phone and called Lowes and asked for extension 203 and her phone rings. I was at the back of the line, so I turned around and hoped that the man in front of me wouldn’t hear me talking. She explains her problem and reads the barcode to me. I tell her, “Oh, that particular pipe is free as long as he’s purchasing at least $20 of other pipes of the same diameter. That’s why it won’t scan.” So the guy gets 2 of these pipes free of charge. Too bad I couldn’t do that with my own purchases. I wonder what would happen if I told that cashier of my hilarious prank on her when it was my turn in line. “Yeah, that was me on my cell phone. His pipes weren’t really free. I sure tricked you a good one!” Would she be shocked or amused? Would I get slapped? Would she call security? Thrown out of the store for life? I guess I’ll never know. Reminds me of when I was at the same Lowes buying the 4′ molds for my concrete footings for the deck. Or whatever those big cardboard cylinder things are called. I had 3 of them, costing about $8 each. And they were all inside of each other so it looked as if there was just 1 of them in the cart. The cashier scans it (just 1) and the rest of my merchandise and I begin to pay. I wasn’t trying to scam her, that’s just how they were stacked on the shelf and that’s how I put them in my cart. Just then her phone rings and she picks it up. I can hear the voice on the phone telling her that I have more mold tubes inside of the one tube she scanned. She hangs up, explains her mistake to me, and scans another $16 for me to pay. I’m guessing it was security who zoomed in on my tubes. How sneaky! Makes me wonder what kind of crazy things I could get a cashier to believe if I called her on her register phone. “This is Steven from security. The man in line has a bucket of joint compound hidden inside his coat. Ask him to open his coat for you!” “Hey Cindy, your credit card machine isn’t authorizing that card properly for some reason. You need to write down the full card number, the expiration date and the 3 digit code from the back. And just stick the paper you write it on in your pocket and we’ll just get it from you later.” “It’s employee discount day. You’re supposed to be ringing up ALL purchases at the employee discounted rate.” Or I guess I could do something like this.
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