The Zereps

…Okay, so maybe not the kind of hope you were thinking of, but I digress. As you may have noticed if you’ve been following Candice’s posts lately is that we’ve been without (much) power at our place for a week now. Most electricity has been restored for us here, so we can at least run our refrigerator and AC now. Apparently there are also black-outs and record-breaking temperatures going on in California as well.

The type of HOPE I’m actually talking about was the Hackers On Planet Earth conference hosted by 2600. Basically I’ve been wanting to go since they first started in 1994, (when I was only 14 years old!) but never had the funds nor means of actually getting out here.

So living in New York City came in handy this time as it was just a hope, skip, and a jump on the subway to the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. Unfortunately, I had to work on Friday, so I missed most of that days meetings/speakers. I left work and headed straight over to the hotel that day.
Here’s a short summary of my exploits during the weekend (pun intended) and a list of workshops/talks that were held:
-Friday:

“Off The Hook” – The Indecent Version – Emmanual Goldstein and friends hosted a ‘live’ version of their weekely Off The Hook radio show. The rest of the time I spent on Friday was meandering around the conf grounds, talking to people, checking out the lockpicking demonstration, and looking what that various vendors had to offer. There were lockpicking kits, RFID-blocking wallets, TV-B-Gones, DIY electronics kits, wireless/warddriving antennas/cards/accessories, a 3-DVD BBS Documentary (which was the only thing I bought) and numerous other ‘warez.’
Between meetings, I had a nice little chat with the legendary Captain Crunch about the state of the phone industry and his thoughts on things like VoIP–that was pretty cool. The guy’s getting pretty old (and losing some teeth,) but he’s still pretty active in the telecommunications sector.
-Saturday:

I left the house around 10 and got to the hotel in time for the first meeting at 11, Wireless Security Flaws. After that I went to the Phone Phreaking 101 meeting, and then the Retrocomputing forum. After those, I was ‘meetinged’-out, so I just hung out around the mezzanine area for a while. It was pretty cool how they had it set up. The actual meetings were held in seperate areas on the 18th floor of the hotel, but on the mezzanine (2nd floor) level, they had projectors showing the different speakers in different areas, so you didn’t actually have to go upstairs to listen in. In the main area, past the vendors, they had a projector screen and in front of it about 30 hammocks where people were just hanging out, sleeping, chilling with their laptops, etc. That was a pretty nice little setup.

Kevin Mitnick was supposed to give 2 talks: Hackers in Prison and Kevin Mitnick Unplugged, but unfortunately he got sick and was in a hospital in London (or so I heard.) 🙁

-Sunday:

Sunday, I also left the house around 10 to make it to the 11am meeting: Urban Exploring. Two people shared their experiences exploring the areas around New York. They outlined the laws regarding tresspassing and what to do if you get caught. 😉 That was one of the more interesting talks I went to. After that I went to Basics of Forensic Recovery and Exploring your World with GIS, which were both kinda dry. The Social Engineering meeting was probably the most packed of any that I went to. Emmanual Goldstein and a few other notables led a talk on social engineering and talked of past exploits. The perfect situation played right into their hands for getting people to release information–the power outage in Queens, so they gave us a little demo. That was pretty interesting. After all those, I still managed to squeeze in 3 more meetings: Selfness-Copyfight: From Censorship to New Business Models, Comparison of WAN Routing Protocols (dry but I learned a lot,) and of course the closing ceremonies.

After 10 years of waiting, I was not disappointed. Hopefully sometime in the future I will be able to take a trip out here again for a weekend and make it to another HOPE Conference. I wish I had taken a camera with me, but alas, I forgot. You can probably find a good number of HOPE pictures here, though: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hopenumbersix/. Enjoy!

gonna post really fast…the battery backups are having a tough time recharging on 100 volts.

nothin’ really new, just some pictures i took when i went back to the red cross emergency trucks.

here’s some of what we had to throw out (plus some really yummy tofutti icecream..we will miss you…):

here is a snap of our freezer with the conEd-supplied dry ice:

this photo is of the food line that stretches back up and around the corner. there were lots more people there than were pictured:

what does an emergency meal look and taste like? viola! rice, broccoli and chicken (jabba was a happy camper) it wasn’t bad with some soy sauce packets:

there’s still police everywhere and many conEd trucks. my theory is that the trucks are just parked there to give the appearance of more work being done. hopefully we’ll get power back up tomorrow or monday!

i’ve just been spurred on by the jakkit to write a post. 😀

right now we’re in our 4th day without power. well, technically, we have power, but only 80 volts out of 120, so everything but our energy efficient light bulbs and a heavily backed-up router is offline. we had to throw away everything in our fridge, but hopefully we’ll get reimbursed for it.

to give an accurate idea of what’s goin’ on here in astoria, i’ll give you several links…read ’em! 😉

this is a general idea of what it’s like, from a news station’s point of view.

ny1 top story

here’s an article talking about stores in our area.

local stores

and to get the real story of what we’re goin’ through, read the topic entitled brownout on astorians to get a good idea, go to pages 5-7…heh

eric brought home california pizza kitchen from manhattan for dinner, so i’m a happy camper now! 😀 he just hit the street again to scope us out some soda pop. yay! jabba and i are hangin’ low. thankfully the weather is quite nice or else we’d be riding the bus all day!

other than that, we’ve both just been workin’ and looking forward to our move. 😀 does sweating count? we’ve been sweating alot on our 15-20 minute walk to the subway….darn the humidity!

oh yeah, and alot of the daily show, the colbert report, and mind of mencia. funny. frickin’ funny.

[update!] day 5 and still no power! i’m online at work only today. maybe it will come back tonight! 😀

[update 2] it’s been a bad day. this is no longer funny. i got my lunch and dinner from a red cross disaster relief station truck. had to fight a mob to get a sandwhich, oranges, and dry ice. the severe lightening storms don’t help. this is honestly a disaster and should not be happening.

yes indeed…we had ourselves a real humdinger. hehe

tofu hotdogs, tofu burgers, a canadian beverage, and fireworks in high-def! very patriotic 😉

the glorious homemade tofu burgers…fresh off the stovetop.

and a small shot of our fireworks display. sure beat sitting outside all day in the sun with tons of people just for 20 minutes of action.

It’s been exactly one year to the day since we started this blog and took our first steps towards our final destination of New York City, where we now reside. Here’s a link to our first post and some statistics about the blog so far:

-We’ve gotten 18033 visitors

-I’ve written 158 posts and Candice, 95 for a total of 253

-9 people have commented on our posts, although we have 25 ‘subscribers’

-Posts have slowed down considerably since we first started, but we’re a lot busier now and do more every-day stuff that’s not blog-worthy.

BUT, where would Candice and I be without another adventure on the horizon (besides living in the same place for more than 2 years.) It’s pretty much official now–we’ve talked with our landlord and he’s allowed us to renew our lease for another 6 months. This means that by the end of January, Candice and I (& Jabba too!) will be making our way to Colorado by land, sea, and air–okay, maybe not by sea, but definitely by air and land. So you can definitely expect a new thread of daily posts while we are on that trip. And technology (and hosting space) has advanced enough now that we can psot from just about anywhere and be able to put up as many pictures as we like. whoo-hoo!When we moved here, we never really did plan on staying more than two years. So it was pretty advantageous for us when I was able to find a job where most of the technology team is located in a place we’d like to settle and raise a family–Boulder, CO, lovingly known as “The People’s Republic of Boulder” by some and located about 25 miles to the north-west of Denver. Granted, we probably wouldn’t have picked Boulder as a possible place to move if my company didn’t have an office there, but when Candice and I visited last November we both really took a liking to it.

I guess we’ll see what happens in the next year of blogging. OK, so it’s not an award-winning site or anything, but it is a pretty good way for us to keep friends and family on the heels of what we’re up to all the way over here on the east coast. Have a great 4th everybody!

Candice left for work this morning and when she did, little did she know the transformation the living room would take during the hours that she was absent.

The rat’s nest of cables in our living room had grown out of control; as we got new toys and electronics set up, many times wires were hastily thrown together in the easiest fashion to get devices hooked up in the fastest possible way. The cable mess wasn’t really that bad–unless of course you looked behind our couch. 😉 Today I set for with a mission; a mission to de-claw the rat and return my household to it’s former tidy state. Here are some snapshots of my work-in-progress, and a final ‘after’ shot:

I had to move the couch away from the wall in order to corner the rat where it lived:

After that I separated the wheat from the tare:

Close-up of the ‘tare’ (yes, that is Shinobi III and Altered Beast for the Sega Genesis, TYVM):

::wiping off hands:: All in a day’s work…

Man, these pictures turned out fuzzy.. I guess that’s what you get for indoors shots with no flash. =|