Over the course of the past month or so, I’ve been receiving a call from this 800 number (800-946-0075) every couple days or so. I always pick up with my standard ‘Hello, this is Damon’ and get nothing. Then the line goes dead. I’ve tried calling it back, but merely get a ‘the number is out of service’ message.

This has been going on for a while and it’s been starting to annoy me. So this morning, the phone rang again from that number. I picked it up and gave a very annoyed ‘Hello’. Finally somebody on the other end spoke and said “Fortino?”. Shocked into standard operating procedure, I said that no, they had a wrong number and they hung up on me.

This goes along quite nicely with the new number I just got for my work mobile phone.

It’s quite a nice number and apparently it was owned by somebody else not too long before I acquired it. How do I know that? Because I keep getting calls from people asking for Mike. When I explain that this is no longer Mike’s number, they mention that he owes a lot of people a lot of money and I should expect even more calls. Awesome. Way to go, Mike.

Update: Man, Mike musta really done a number. I just got some sort of automated call from Citibank…hehe.

Well it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, mostly because I’ve been extremely busy with work. 2006 has definitely hit hard and I’ve spent most of it on the road so far. I’ve hit up Sarasota, Miami, New Jersey, Denver, and most recently Seattle. …yea, I think that’s it.

So what do you do when you’ve been away for a while? Take a nice night out. Stacey got all dolled up and we went out to the Kinzie Chophouse for some quality steak. It was a great time. And what better to do after a full meal and a glass of red wine…pass out.

Seattle was pretty cool - definitely a nice landscape. The best part was on the way back to the airport when Mt. Rainier pretty much raised out of the mist - all 14,410 feet seemed to appear out of nowhere. It was truly amazing and makes me look forward to warmer weather when I can get out and do some camping and hiking again. Flying out of Seattle was quite scenic as well - the route took us over a portion of the Rocky Mountains that I had never really seen before. Stuff like that makes all the travel worth it, but it’s definitely not something I could do for the rest of my life.

Let the fun begin. For the second time in as many days, some OS X malware has been discovered. Is this just a couple drops in the can, or is it only the beginning? Time will tell, but as OS X gets more and more popular, one can only reason that the frequency will increase. Linux/nix viruses/maleware probably never caught on too well because there was a certain “geek factor” associated with those operating systems. But the users of OS X are probably a ripe target for such abuse.

Update: Yet another scary issue.

This one is for my father, and all you other firearm-wielding folk out there.

Ken Lunde’s Pistol Wallpaper Pages

My current favorite is the Sig-Sauer P226ST, although the Glocks are quite nice…and the .357 S&W short barrel looks mildly familiar. Too bad he doesn’t have any Rugers in there.

Winter. Perfect days to withdraw from the cold outside. Cold and gray, a time to retreat into the comfort of one one’s couch and close the shades. A time of the year to concoct reason upon reason to preclude oneself from braving the elements.

Now, take a job where you work from home a significant portion of the time, throw in a fairly significant workload, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for some cabin fever.

I’ve been doing this new job for about eight months now, and I knew working from home was going to be a challenge. I was correct. It’s tough, particularly for somebody such as myself that doesn’t easily pick up the phone and say “Hey man, let’s go shoot some pool”. (As a sidenote, even though my pool table is currently in storage there’s a swank poolhall right down the street from me…so if you ever feel the need, just give me a ring. ) Not only that, when your office is just a few steps away, it takes a lot of self-control to disconnect mentally and physically.

As such, I think the closed shades of winter hit me particularly hard this year, despite a couple weeks in Florida.

This is a reminder to myself to go outside; to call people if only to say hello; to step away from work even if I don’t have something else more important to do. This type of thing was easy when I would work with people every day, but it now requires an extra effort. That, and the MacGyver DVD set (thanks, bro!) will only last for so long.

Ameriquest has some pretty good commercials. I just saw one called Next time, use a fly swatter.

Enjoy.

I’ve oft gotten stuck in a screen terminal by hitting Ctrl+s instead of Ctrl+a. And then I would never know how to get out of it, and I’d have to re-login to get my screen back. It didn’t happen too often, but often enough the past month or so to drive me to figure out why it does this.

A quick google led me this page on what to do if you get stuck in a Unix login session. Turns out that Ctrl+s “tells the system not to send any more data to the screen until a CTRL-Q is pressed”.

Oh, of course. A quick Ctrl+q and I had my screen back. Why didn’t I look that up a long time ago??

Google Desktop, now with the ability search across remote computers.

I have one word. Scary.

Dear Google,

Did you do your due diligence when programing this “sweet new feature”? Did you have an independent third party come in and do a security analysis of this feature, from both a black box perspective as well as a source code analysis? Have you really thought this through, because damn…I see a lot of potential for abuse here.

Dear Google,

What happens when I happen to put my credit card number in a text file because I’m doing some research (or some random website happens to use HTTP instead of HTTPS for order information). What happens when that gets uploaded to your servers? What happens when someone manages to subvert your algorithm and turns your wonderful search across computers into search across all computers.

Oh wait…it’s beta. Nevermind then. That means it doesn’t really matter. Or perhaps it’s my own fault for putting that data there in the first place…I really should have known better. I didn’t expect somebody to reverse engineer your protocol and manage to gain access to my confidential information.

Google, I like and respect you, I really do. You’ve managed to do some good things in the past, but you are really starting to put me on edge. This seems like a wonderful feature in theory…but the instant the integrity of your systems gets compromised…scary. Now you not only have the information people intended to make public, you have the information people did not intend to make public as well.

OK, UPS. What the heck?!

For the past two days I have been expecting a package, which was sent “Next Day Delivery” so it’s apparently pretty urgent that I get it.

Day 1 was frustrating enough when I learned that UPS had attempted delivery at 10am in the morning. This was prior to when a doorman was present downstairs, but I was definitely home. The UPS driver did not apparently to ring my doorbell, nor did he attempt to call the number on the package. Fine, frustrating enough…but hopefully he’ll be more responsible the next day because as their customer rep said, “UPS has no ability to contact their drivers to make another attempt”.

Day 2 I was determined to be ready to receive the package as all costs, but I had my doubts as the UPS slip indicated they were going to deliver it prior to 10:30am. 9:20 rolls around and I learn that delivery had been attempted just 4 short minutes ago. Notice that this was from calling the UPS info line and hearing it as opposed to their website, which didn’t have updated tracking information.

Having received no doorbell and no call yet again, I was determined to catch up to this UPS driver and give him an earful. This was two days in a row that he decided to just roll on by when he saw no doorman. I threw on some shoes, ran out the door, and zipped out of the garage. Having no clue which way he might go, but living on a one-way street, I headed down the street looking for the familiar brown. Just a couple blocks away I thought luck was with me as I a UPS van crossing the intersection. I flew up behind him, and hopped out of my car ready to tell him just what I thought. When asked if he delivered to my address, he said “Nope…some other guy”. Darnit. I inquired about this other guy’s route and set off to see if I could find him. About a mile up the street, I saw a UPS truck pulled over so I pulled over as well, hopped out and asked him the same. Not even the right zip code this time. I figured the search was over by now. I had been driving around about 15 minutes.

I turned to head back and decided to take a different route to see if I might run into him. As luck would have it, I found yet another brown UPS van. I hopped out and waited for him to come out for about five minutes. Eventually he did, but unfortunately his route ended just one block of me. Where was this mysterious UPS driver?! I had found every other one in the area… Well after inquiring this driver of the route, I learned that I was on the northwest corner of the route. So I headed out one more time to see if I might just possibly be able to run into him again. I went to the southern corner, turned left, and there he was! I pulled up behind him, turned on my blinkers and waited about 10 minutes. Finally he came out. He was the driver, he was the guy! He went and got the package from the front of the trunk. Still feeling slightly beligerent I asked why he didn’t even bother ringing the doorbell, and all I got was some mumbled answer about “oh, that wasn’t me yesterday”. I was too worn out from driving around for 45 minutes, and just happy to have my package so I didn’t press any further.

But seriously UPS…what kind of delivery service is that? I undertand it’s probably not your usual standard of service, but this driver was completely lazy.

It’s kind of weird (and I’ll probably get laughed at)…but every now and then I feel like Neo out of the Matrix. It usually happens late at night after I’ve been coding and hacking away and learning new stuff. The sun is long gone, the mountain dew cans line the side of the desk and various consoles scroll output from sql injection hacks and binary compiles. It always reminds me of the one scene where Neo is passed out in front of his computer and is awakened by Trinity hacking into his computer.

halloween_05/DSC00091

But in reality (or the Matrix…), I’m no Neo. I’m just another hacker, striving to keep up with the endless flood of information that’s accessible to us these days. Just another hard-worker refusing to give up. Diving deeper and deeper into the systems and applications in order to understand them better, if only to take advantage of them. And no, I may not know Kung Fu…but I do know Perl Fu.