On this blog I average about 80 visits and 10,000 hits a day. Most of the hits come from image searches and hotlinked images I’ve placed on other sites.
I’ve written 244 posts including this one and have recieved 570 comments since starting this blog in June of 2004.
The only reason I keep this blog up is because I like getting comments and having a live site to test things out on my server.
Giving your two weeks notice sucks! It’s so uncomfortable to be around people when they know you are leaving soon. I can’t wait for this to be over and I can start my new job. If I didn’t have a paycheck coming on the 15th I would have already walked out.
Many soldiers have gotten sick in Iraq and the cause is believed to be depleted uranium or DU. DU is used for things like 25mm rounds that the Bradley’s (what I drove in the Army) and tanks use for some of their munitions. With DU they can pierce the shit out of another tank with just about any type of armor. This sounds great but we left a bunch of shit lying around and solders are getting sick which sucks but what sucks worse is that they aren’t doing anything about it yet. I say yet because this is exactly how the Army and government as a whole operate.
First they deny! They act like they did nothing wrong and that the soldiers are just cry babies. After enough people get sick and sue they finally admit they did something wrong. After they admit guilt and give the soldiers some cash to shut up they forget any lessons learned. Lather, rinse and repeat!
About 40% of credit card holders carry a balance of less than $1,000. About 15% are far less conservative in their use of credit cards and have total card balances in excess of $10,000. When we look at the total of all credit obligations combined (except mortgage loans), 48% of consumers carry less than $5,000 of debt. This includes all credit cards, lines of credit, and loans-everything but mortgages. Nearly 37% carry more than $10,000 of non-mortgage-related debt as reported to the credit bureaus.
This is just too fucking ridiculous! I thought my $400 bucks (which will be $0 at the end of the month) was a lot on my credit card. I have 3 credit cards and almost always have $0 at the end of each month. I’m not rich and I don’t live like I’m rich either. People need to start living within their means!
I’m starting a new job on the 21st of this month. I’ll be a Linux Administrator for Rackspace Managed Hosting. My last day for my current job is the 15th so I’m heading to the NY area for a few days. It’s been over a year so it’ll be nice to see home again.
In other news, the whole Match.com thing really didn’t work out. I signed up but canceled during the 3 day trial. I’m only 22 and everyone on the site seems to be looking for older guys and I didn’t have a whole lot of luck. I guess I’ll just wait until I find someone in a supermarket or something.
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
I just signed up for an internet dating service Match.com. I’ve met a couple people off of MySpace and another free service called HotOrNot before with varying degrees of success. This is the first time I’m actually paying for a service so hopefully it provides better results. It sucks being alone and meeting people gets harder and harder as time goes on.
This is sort of an old article (June 2006) but I just found it so here I go blogging about it. According to the article the Supreme Court is trying to decide whether they should try and regulate emissions. Does this seem stupid to anyone else but me? I can’t believe that they haven’t been doing this all long. I think they spent too much time worrying about high scoring baseball players and gay adoption.
I watched some CSPAN for a while several months ago and they were having a debate on the CAFÉ standards. Basically some people wanted to enforce tougher rules on car companies to produce better gas mileage so that all cars would need to get 27mpg or better for example. This seems pretty logical to me and they weren’t even trying to change the rules overnight either. They were to give the car companies till 2012 to comply with them. What I found interesting though as that all the Democrats were for the standards and all the Republicans were against them. I hate our party system more and more every day. What really pissed me off was that the Republicans were saying that we should drill in Alaska for oil which would reduce prices which is correct but that’s not the point.
The biggest problem with oil consumption is not price but its effect on the climate. Global warming is real and reducing the price of gas isn’t going to help that. Reducing usage and getting better mileage will help the environment and peoples wallets at the same time so I really don’t know why everyone in Washington isn’t for this sort of thing. The car companies must be paying someone off!
At my last Linux User Group meeting we had a cool discussion on passwords and what makes them strong. It was sort of divided in that some thought that complexity was more important than length or vice versa. I did a little research on my own and I basically came up with the fact that length is much stronger when it comes to straight on brute force attacks and complexity works well against dictionary style attacks.
For a word list, I concocted a 500,000 word file with words from the dictionary, common slang, computer jargon, names, and common passwords. I first did a battery of tests for dictionary attacks with a few different passwords ranging from simple to complex. The password was just ‘password’ and was broken in 32 seconds. The second was ‘passw0rd’ and was broken in 47 seconds. I then used ‘my password’ with the space and it was not broken even though the words ‘my’ and ‘password’ were in the word file. It must have something to do with the algorithm with John the Ripper. The password ‘password77’ was broken in just under 3 minutes. The following were not broken with the dictionary attack; ‘passw0rd77’, ‘bjktkrqf78’, and ‘blu3sho3s’.
After using the dictionary I used a brute force approach using passwords with 8 to 11 characters. I also told the password cracker that the password was 8-11 characters to make it easier to crack. The password ‘passw0rd’ was broken in 26 seconds; ‘password77’ was broken in just under 15 minutes; ‘passw0rd77’ was broken in 54 minutes. The passwords ‘my password’, ‘my passw0rd’, and ‘blu3sho3s’ were not broken.
These are not all the passwords I tried but are the most interesting in my opinion. I though it was funny that ‘my password’ was never broken even though both words were in the wordlist and I let the brute force attack go for almost 2 weeks.
Password crackers are pretty much garbage tools except for a few cases. As long as your password has a few numbers and maybe special characters like ‘$@#$’ and is longer than 8 characters you should be fine. Also remember to change it every few weeks especially your main email account as most accounts will let you request your login information to the email address on file so this is the most important password.
/*The password cracker used was John the Ripper and the hash was a 128bit MD5 hash. Testing was done on the same box this is hosted on with is a 3Ghz P4 with 1GB of memory.*/
This video is pretty funny but what I found more interesting were the comments on the blog where I found it. You can read those comments over at Gothamist. Some people were discussing why this may have happened without someone asking questions. Some thought that it was because he was white and “clean cut” and others though it was because there was a camera not far away. I think the main reason why no one said a thing was because he was very open about it. The best thieves don’t look like they’re doing anything wrong which technically he wasn’t since it was his bike. I think anyone in that situation with or without a camera would be fine as long as they didn’t get all twitchy and keep looking over their shoulder.
Many articles and news shows have been done on MySpace and all the “perils”. MySpace is nothing different from your local park where children go to play. Anyplace where children hang out; weirdos who are sexual predators will hang out too.
I think the biggest problem with MySpace is the same as what’s wrong with the country. The news organizations don’t give a shit about the news, the just want to get ratings and what gets ratings? Fear! Getting you scared will get you watching.
Have you ever seen those commercials for the news where they’re like “coming up at 10, why your children may be at risk from products commonly sold at the supermarket”? Of course if you have children or know someone with children then you would really want to make sure that you caught that program but when you actually watch the fuckin’ thing they tell you something totally ridiculous like “if your children drink bleach, it may be fatal” or any other stupid fact that you should already know or that isn’t likely to actually happen.
The media loves to play off fear and they will say anything to scare you into watching their program to boost ratings by even a hair. MySpace isn’t the end of the world and neither is any of the other shit they try to cram down your throats. Always remember that everyone has an agenda, even me 
.
I feel sorry for gay people in america who are saving themselves for marriage.
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