Alot of things have happened in 2007 with my company. We completely revamped our online store to start of the year, we have added a ton of new products and we moved in to a new address located on pine in Capitol Hill. June 16th marked an entire year since I left my full time job as infosec engineer in corporate America.
So I finally got off my ass this year and joined one of the Disc Northwest ultimate leagues. Its a “hat league” which has people of varying skill levels. Some how I managed to end up the captian of the Central District team even though I probably know less about Ultimate than anyone else on the team.
The league teams are based on Seattle hoods, which is why our team is the Central District, however I am one of only two people on the team who actually live in the CD :). I am slowly but surely learning about the offensive stack, zone defense, forcing and all other sorts of good stuff.
So a while back I took over part ownership of a company. As of June 16th I left my full time Security Engineer to become part engineer, part sales person, part support person and part bean counter. Running your own business is something I would suggest everyone do at least once, even if its in a small/part time capacity. It’s very rewarding and an incredible learning experience that I would imagine never really stops teaching you things. Now that things have settled down a little from the transition, I will try and keep things a little more up to date around here.
Myself and bunch of people from DC206 are flying down to LA on Friday for LayerOne. LayerOne is whats generally referred to as a Hacker Con, with topics including things like lock picking, hardware hacking, and information security. I will be leading off the festivities on Saturday morning with a talk about Seattlewireless and Freenetworks in
general. Community Wireless/Freenetworks ( I use the terms synonmously) is a topic that generally has not gotten a ton of attention at hacker cons. I presented at Defcon 5 years ago, Adam and Xam discussed it in a couple of the Shmoo talks around the same time. Wireless in general on the other hand has obviously gotten a ton a coverage at Hacker Cons, because of all the inherent
security problems.
So I guess these are my goals for the talk:
-Reiterate to the hacker community that yes security is important, but so is building networks that benefit the greater good.
-A breif history of Seattlewireless and the Community Wireless Movement
-Some discussion on advancements in this space (mesh routing protocols, radio technology)
-Why the CWN movement is now more important than ever, some discussion on Net Neutrality
-What people can do to help our voices be heard by the FCC, Congress etc…
If anyone has any feedback on other things they would like to hear about, feel free to comment on this post or email me and I will see what I can do. Also LayerOne has a blog, I imagine they will be updating over the course of the conference.
Technorati Tags: LayerOne
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Towards the end of the summer I started working with a few other people on a book for Syngress Publishing titled OS X for Hackers at Heart. Looks like it should be going to publishing any day now. I authored one chapter for the book that focused primarily on using OS X in windows centric corporate environments. Being a newbie to writing for books, it took a while for me to get into of groove of things. But now thats all over with, I am pretty excited to work on more book projects. |
| For those of you who have not seen me in the past year or two, this what I looked like a day into my 28th year on Earth. |
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| Thanks Phil for the photo |
Meloknee’s post about her past of poetry inspired me to dig through all of my old notebooks and journals. It is always strange to revisit the things I thought about as a teenager. This is a poem I wrote about 11 years ago, I was either 16 or 17.
I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
-Jack Kerouac
Robert Johnson was thinking about a woman when he wrote Walking Blues. My Walking Blues are about my knees. Lately my sore knees have been kicking in as they seem to do every year.
My first knee pain dates back to sometime in my childhood around the age of 7 or 8. I was riding my BMX bike on one foot (both feet on one side of the bike) leaning into a turn when I wiped out underneath a parked car. I had skinned both of my knees so bad that my knee caps were completely red, with hardly any skin left on them. I remember lying in the grass on my back clenching my legs with my red knees pointed towards the sky, screaming in pain.
Since then my knee related ailments have come from various physical activities:
I have been riding a bike since a young age, and outside of wiping out, bicycles have never hurt my knees. However in the past month or so as my knee pain has come back, I come to a tail end of a summer where I have ridden my first century and in fact rode two centuries one day after another on the STP. My knees did not hurt during the ride nor have they hurt in long distance rides I have done since then, but when I walk a lot (1 mile +), they really start bothering me. To the point sometimes where I can feel them throb as I fall asleep.
Considering the lack of pain on the bike, I was skeptical it was the cause. Last summer when my knees kicked in, I started going to the Sweatbox, and the yoga seemed to remedy the pain. Well this time around I have been having trouble squeezing in time for yoga, and have been choosing to live with my bad knees.
Discussing this subject a coworker who had experienced bad knees at one point, led me to his “walking style”. Not really a *style* per say, but a way of walking that distributes load across your feet and reduces the direct impact on your knees. The basics are really simple, start on the outer edges of your heels and move to the ball of your foot. His wife had show him this walking technique, which comes from a book called Taking Root To Fly. After practicing this for a couple of days, I have noticed significant improvement, and learned a couple of key points:
I was really surprised at how much my running shoes were the source of pain. I have had them maybe six months, but in that time have managed to kill all support they provide in the outer heel which seems to have increased the pressure on my knees. What I didn’t realize was that the blown out running shoes were also causing me to walk improperly in all my other shoes, thus taking themselves out of the spotlight.
To the trash with my sneakers, to Amazon to track down a used copy of the now *out of print* “Taking Root To Fly”, so I can have a walking reference.
