I just spent the weekend participating in the 2007 San Francisco Dance-o-Rama. I have to run to the airport now, but it was a fantastic weekend and I’m even taking home a little something! ;o)

Update: It looks like a couple people have already found my site via Google searching for info on the San Francisco Dance-o-Rama - I’m not sure what they were looking for, but allow me to post a little more info.  In addition to my day job, I spend anywhere from four to sixteen-plus hours a week taking ballroom dance lessons.  This past weekend was the Arthur Murray Area 6 Dance-o-Rama, held in the lovely Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, CA.  A dance-o-rama consists of (at least) two days of constant dancing competing against hundreds of other students from studios across the country.  I personally had 52 “entries”, plus two solo routines, and a group formation - to give a little perspective, the top instructor had 307 entries dancing with various students.  My instructor came in 2nd with 297(?) or so entries - congrats.

It was a great weekend, though.  Dancing, especially competitively, is a great rush and when we weren’t dancing we were cheering on our fellow students and teachers.  As noted above, I did pretty well taking first or second in nearly every heat I competed in.  I only recently (in the past year) took up this hobby and I am very pleased and surprised at how well I did.  I am already looking forward to the next competition I’m going to which will either be in Chicago in the fall (if I can finance it…) or Hawaii at the beginning of 2008.  I’d love to go to Chicago so I can re-unite with my original Arthur Murray studio as well as see all my old friends, but I will have to budget very stringently in the next few months in order to do so.  I also have a lot of work in front of me in order to step up to the next level in the dance world and compete at the level that I want to.

I only recently came across Google Co-op, but I have to say it looks like it could be pretty useful. I’ve already created an Information Security Search consisting of some of my favorite sites that I frequent. Conveniently, the co-op allows contributors, so if you’d like to help me flesh it out, just volunteer to contribute!

Feel free to try it out straight from here:

In other news, Google also recently announced their new history feature, which records what web pages you’ve visited and allows you to search and view the full text of them. There have been other services like this before, but for some reason having Google do it makes it a little more scary. Perhaps it’s the fact that they appear to be cataloging every aspect of my life these days. This gives me even more reason to work on that little plugin I’ve been thinking about…

Have no fear, I am actually alive…just busy as usual.  Just before Easter weekend, I had the fortune to be in Boston for some training and used that opportunity to stay on the East coast for the holiday to visit my family.  I got to meet my new nephews, who are awesome, and spend time with my sister and her kids.  The best part of the weekend was Easter.  My sister had the great idea of only telling our mother that there would be a “mystery guest” present at Easter dinner and I did not reveal that I had even left Seattle.

To further the illusion, I signed on Instant Messenger at my sister’s house on Saturday and put up an away message that I was playing soccer, which is what I typically do on the weekends when I’m home.  Finally, to complete the illusion, I utilized an instant messaging client for my phone (Octro) while we were on the road to Easter dinner and started chatting with my mother.  At the same time, my sister called to let her know that we were on the road and had been for quite a while.  The deception was complete - my mother assumed I was home in Seattle, but I’m sure she had an inkling her techno-geek son might have had some way of being tricky.

After arriving at our destination, I slinked down in the back of the car and waited a few minutes for the onlookers at the window to stop trying to see if somebody was going to get out of the car.  After waiting a short time more, I climbed out the opposite side of the car, then dashed along the woods and the side of the house up to the side door.  Eager to see my family, I burst in through the door with a giant grin on my face while my mother gave a cry of shock and surprise.  We gave each other a giant hug and I was able to sit down and eat Easter dinner with my family all the way across the country.

I’ll post some pictures soon - it was a great day! I’m back in Seattle now, but busy as usual.  I’ve got some work stuff I’m focusing on as well as a dance competition coming up in San Francisco shortly that I’m preparing for.  It’s been a busy month!

There’s been a few notable releases of some security tools recently - I’ll reference packet storm’s site.

• Nipper - nipper is a Network Infrastructure Configuration Parser. nipper takes a network infrastructure device configuration, processes the file and details security-related issues. (This sounds very similar to a tool I’m working on - I’ll have to check it out in more detail soon!
• Scapy 1.1.1 - Scapy’s an awesome tool that I’ve used in the past for messing with packets.
• Bluediving 0.7 - Bluetooth Penetration Testing Suite…time to fire up my linux box!
• Cutter - An oldie, but a goodie…something I came across via another (really) old blog entry, but very useful - allows you to kill specific connections on your linux firewall box

On that last note, I’ve come across a lot of really good security blogs lately. I’ll post them here at some point, but you can also just check out my blogroll and look under the Security folder.

It was a great night for a photo shoot recently, and I took a bunch of pics of the Seattle skyline. I still have a few to upload, but you can check out my Seattle skyline pics on flickr!

I’m coming up with a new “time to” acronym - ttaf, or Time to April Fooled: The amount of time before you get suckered in by an April Fool’s joke.  It was 46 minutes for me this year.

I was checking my RSS feeds when I saw a post titled Running Mac OS X on Virtual PC 2007. Even though I own both a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook, I was still excited to finally see the prospect of OS X running on a large virtualization platform. I read eagerly through the article, thinking “I hope Virtual Server is going to support it…” and “wow, this is too good to be true!”.  And then finally I hit the last line…

The above -experimental command line parameter will only work if the Host OS clock is set to 4-1-2007.

*sigh*

I’d been had…this is definitely an April Fool’s Day joke.  The MS Bloggers must think they’re pretty funny this year…there’s even some sort of announcement rumor going around.

In other news, I’ve decided to move to Australia…