Yearly Archives: 2010

Saturday night – fight club

Greetings from Ludlow Mass. We’re down here for a lacrosse tournement. Gabe drove us part of the way downon the interstate through pouring rain. He’s a great driver. I get to sit in the back and relax,,

Caught this goofy sentiment on a car at one of the resstops..

We got down to Amherst around 11.. It was absolutely pouring..  .. The fields were covered with water.. but the nice thing is the heat had broken..

Miraculously, the rain stopped just as the first of Gabes 3 games began and the weather behaved the rest of the day.  Photos form the gae are on the other camera.. but it went well !. Gabe had a good day as did the team.. . I do like these tournesys as folks come from all over the us to play.. and still, no one keeps score. I do like this game.

The games finished aroun 7.. then we had a 30 minute drive to the hotel. By the time we ewre cleaned up, we were all starving. We walked sown the street totto a chineese place that turned our to be a real treat.. the place was excelelnt.. there were 13 of us ..   (the french always had a batchelor frend.. a quatarsieen   they could invite at the last minute to change an unlucky 13 to 14,,,

We ended the dinner with a surprise birthday salute to almost 8 year old Belle

We dropepd the kids off t the hotel and the adults plus Belle walked a few blocks to get ice cream

In the half hour we were gone the boys had gotten into some funny mischief.. they’d created their own fight club.. They were boxing in the corridor wearing their LAX helmets and gloves… and filing it ..  One of the boys  (gabe, i think) almost knowcked out noen of the others..

By the time we got home they were watching it all on tvour hotel room     It was hilarious. 

Now watching a a scary movie in the room with Diane and Gabe… life down’t get much better,.
night folks. Nite Sam.. we’re thinking of you..
-me

Friday night – School of Rock

Nice evening.. Gabe and I stopped over at Chirs and Kims . They were havign a party to say goodbye to their rock word garden. Chirs sold the whole collection to St. Michael’s College !.. He’s goign to rebuild it.. still.. it’s kinda sad saygn good bye to the zany word puzzle that is his yard.. Here’s below are a few scraps of wizdom and madness …

BTW.. I take great pride in the fact that Gabe is helpign chris make the new words !..

We also got to see Chris new shower almost complete. .It has one pull for water, one pull string for air.. and another foot pedal for blowing an air whistle. It’s just so beutiful !.. and it’s all made out of copper and brass !

I got to see the fountain that Gabe’s been working on.. He’s done the  cutting, polishing and drilling of this.. It’s really nice !

Chris’s work space is full of the cooledst art he’s made.. .. her’s a moose rock.

Gabe just made this rock for our word garden. !

I brought my propane flame shooter over to show chris.. he’s thinking of adding flame ot the shower..

OK.. ealry start tomorrow for lacross.. so I Beteter sleep now..
nite all.. nite Sam
-me

Fri

Thursday night – the club…

Another day of record breaking heat.. no one is moving quickly..Life feels kinda like reading a Faulkner novel… everything is slow and sticky.. the air is thick.. sounds are muffled, the hills dissapear in the distance..

At least it’s air conditioned at work.. but I think they shut that down

around 4PM on hot days to save energy.. by 6 it was in the 80’s in my

office..

I went outside at 6PM to find my car thermometer reading 10 degrees.. ok.. so it WAS in the sun.. but.. 106 ?.. It was 87 inside our house when I got home..  Houston was like this all the time.. but we had AC..

THe heat put me in a peaceful and open mood.. Somehow the world new I couldn’t be bothered with much today.. so it sent me some really interesting interactions with people.. .. Lots of talk about how people were feeling …

two of the meetings were worth noting here. I made two new friends today.. and both are members of ‘the club’.. The club I mean is of guys who have had children who have died… there are no meetings, no badges, no slogans.. just a shared common tragedy. No one tells you about the club.. you just wake up one day and you’re a member.  I have one friend.. a club member who says it’s the club with the highest dues . The first guy I met was John from NY.. he’d seen an article about my science outreach work in the CMU magazine. John does similar outreach work for his company.. We’d talked for about 10 minutes when I mentioned how Sam’s passing had made my outreach work. into a life mission. He stopped me and told me about his daughter Sarah who’d died at age 4 in 1999.. She was also an organ donor.. we talked for an hour.. we’ll talk again I’m sure..   The second guy is only a friend in the facebook sense so far.. Robert, a a friend  of a friend connected us.. He’s a high level tech visionary in the government.. and he lost his oldest son in 2008. I’ reaching out to him by phoen to see if he wants to talk..

I keep running into club members I find them by accident.. or friends connect me. This club takes care of it’s own..It’s easy to talk to other guys who’ve been through loss like this.. the funny thing is.. we don’t usually talk about our loss loss..just at the begining.. then we go on to talk about other things, family, work , life..  it’s just a big piece of very regrettable common ground.   One thing that always comes up is ‘mission’.. I’m finding that loss often drives guys ot find a mission.. some way to turn work into healing.. arbeit macht frei

Anyway,, here’s to the other members of the club out there.. i think of you all every day..

night folks.. night sam
-me

Wednesday night – hazy, hot and human

It was like a hot wet blanket today.. everyone and every thing reverted to slow motion.. When it gets hot and humid like this I feel like I am crawling through some sort of primordial swamp.. I make no unnecessary movements. I think at half speed…

I stayed at work until 7 just to savor the air conditioning there.. but even that was turned off at 4PM to save power.. I got out to my car to find t was still 99 degrees.   I’ve lived in other hot places.. but no place htat’s as un airconditioned as Vermont.. Here’s the weird thing… I think I’m actually enjoying the hea for the first time in my life … .. wonder why ?

Just look at the haze..

I spent the rest of my day in  a heat induced mental haze..   My one triumph happened early in the day.. before work

I’ve been messing around with computer security  lately and it’s got my old hacker genes excited again.. I did my first WEP crack on a wireless network today just for fun (Don’t worry it was my network).. I used an off brand wifi adapter that allows monitor mode hooked to my linux machine to do a packet injection attack on our wireless router. I collected about 50,000 I/V responses then used another program to decrypt those responses to decode the 128 bit WEP key

Here’s the key

Here I am doing the injection attack and capturing responses..

Et voila !.. Hre’s the decrypted key..

And proof it works !

Tomorrow I’m going to attempt a crack of a WPA protected router using a dictionary attack.. wish me luck.. or not..

Moral of this story.. if there is one…

1) hacking is fun and wholesome entertainment.  
2) don’t lull yourself into believing your home’s wireless network is safe..

OK.. all for todonight..

nite all, nite Sam
-me