I get so ambitious in the morning on my days off. like, I'm going to re-organize the whole basement, then haul that pile of goodwill stuff off to goodwill, then clean the kitchen, then dust the shelves! then around this time, I'm just tired, and starting to admit that half that shit is not going to happen.

I feel pretty good today though so I've got that going for me. I went to target yesterday and bought some tylenol multi-symptom night time serious shiznit. They had to scan my ID for it so i'm being tracked for meth production now, but I took two pills before I went to bed and passed the hell out, and didn't wake up coughing like the night before.

divine ms. a and her man got us trivial pursuit for christmas... I think so they could kick our asses at it. they beat us the night we opened it, and we had them over last night and beat us again. wtf.

You could argue that trivial pursuit is inherently geeky, but I think it'd be cool to have a geek edition anyway. You'd start by getting rid of the sports category. Then dump all questions pertaining to people we don't give a damn about, like pop singers and romance comedy actors.

Proposed categories:
Blue - Movies & Television
Pink - Operating Systems
Yellow - Computer History
Brown - The Internet
Green - Science
Orange - Gaming

Sample questions:
Blue - What actor/director played the random scraggly drunk guy the hobbits notice on their way to the prancing pony in Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring?
Yellow - What year was ethernet invented?
Brown - What "effect" refers to a server crashing due to a sudden onslaught of blog-driven web traffic?
Green - Is a transistor a passive or active device?

you get the picture. I'm actually kind of shocked they haven't done it yet, you know?

nothing says the day after thanksgiving like champagne and setting up the christmas tree. in that order.

Mom said I should journal about the lights. She's read my journal long enough that she can pretty much pick out what would make a good entry. I think she should just start her own account. She's a fantastic writer, for one thing. For another thing, and this may shock some of you, I come from a woman who has a lot to say. She values privacy and worries about confidentiality, but I've come to realize that it's an issue with everyone over the age of 22. It was a tough adjustment for me to make, being a livejournaller and graduating from college. In school you can write about everything, and suddenly you get into this job world, where you're in a company that doesn't want everything you know about them shared about the world, and you're with people who aren't much into the internet and think you're a freak if you blog. For a while I just didn't write about anything, entries dropped off. But the older I get the more I realize that there are just a lot of common stories, ideas and situations that are job-applicable, but not job-specific, if that makes sense. You learn how to find things to write about that don't get you in trouble. it's cool.

SO anyway here's the real entry for today: my dad used to always do the christmas tree lights, and I started helping a few years ago, and we've both agreed to a single running philosophy as far as this goes. Two important factors: you must use lights from last year, because if you don't, that's a waste. Second, they must blink. for some reason, blinker bulbs seem to have a shorter life span than other lights, so we use replacements, and sometimes they don't work and you can't really explain why because the voltage levels all match up. I mean, if you put in a two volt bulb and it blinks really brightly once and then dies, then obviously you should try a three volt one, right? If the three volt bulb is dim and doesn't blink at all, then you've reached a scientific impossibility, and you stare at it get another beer and try to explain to mom why THIS WILL WORK.

it's more than science at this point, it's tradition. we don't light the house. it'd probably kill us.

but anyway, it's 2:00, I have the tree all lit and mostly blinking, so it's decoration time. gotta get off the internet.

speaking of work, I did write a really good (IMHO) article on spacefem.com about what engineers do, since I read that most kids don't want to be engineers because they don't know what the hell we are. just food for thought, especially if you want to be an engineer like me.

Okay, last entry...

DEFCON is a hacker conference, and as many of you know, my websites have gone down to hackers recently so I don't exactly have a soft spot in my heart for them. But I learned a few really important things about hacker culture this weekend that I'd like to comment on.

Everyone at the lectures is obsessed with security and incredibly paranoid about their own security. In a way, I felt like hacking was like shooting someone just because you thought they should be wearing a bulletproof vest, and a bullet in the chest was the only way to really drive your point home. So, they're assholes.

But the more I listened to them, the more I think their view on security are somewhat different. One of the speakers telling people how to pick locks put it best. He said that when he was a kid, his dad showed him a gun and showed him how to check to make sure it wasn't loaded and that the right safety measures were in place. He told him to never take anyone else's word that something was safe... see it for yourself. Know it for yourself.

In a way, these guys are the same way about computer security. They want to be able to see what's in there. They want to know everything about security, and make their own systems tighter, and they get really frustrated with corporations don't see things the same way. When a corporation says, "Buy our software and take our word that it's safe," a hacker gets really offended.

So there are hurtful criminals who really want systems to go down, but most of these people just want the world to think about security and think about safety and think for themselves, which is what we all want.

Maybe the only way for me to keep my systems secure is to be a hacker myself. Really read up on this stuff, learn how it works, stuff like that. It'll take time, but it's important, and this weekend has taught me that it can be interesting too. There's cool shit going on out there, and cool people who are interested in security, and a lot of ground to cover that I can handle.

DEFCON taught me a lot and I'm infinitely glad I got to go, that's really my point here... I was lucky.

now let's go tear up some code.