mikesdotcom.com

He will be missed

It's too bad, but Tim will be parting ways with Q9. It was great working with him both on shift and in his newer role. Good Luck Tim !

Are you compensating for something ?

Now that's big !!

Crackberry

At Mawhinney's request, check out this link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6126504/

I want this shirt

Some will get it, some will scratch their heads..

I'm an OS

Which OS are You?

Banff Pics

The pics are up from our Banff (Sulphur Mountain) trip yesterday. Link Here...

Morning in Banff, sleeping in Toronto

The last day was a blast.. Although it was a slow start, waking up at 6:00 AM MDT after only 2 hours sleep. We checked out of the hotel, swung by Kieron's apartment and picked him up. We hit the Trans-Canada Highway and started heading west for Banff. The scenery is very hard to describe as you approach the park. Just over an hour after leaving the city limits of Calgary, we were at the gate of Banff National Park. It cost us approx. $14 for a group to enter. The scenery just kept getting better and better. The mountains were everywhere, and a lot of them had snow caps. I won't waste my time in the descriptions, as the pictures will tell the story better than I can. We ended up parking at the base of Sulphur Mountain and taking the Gondola up to the top. It's about a 10+ minute ride up, and from what I heard to be an escalation of anywhere between 7000-8000 feet. When we got to the top, the ground was covered in snow and it was quite a bit colder. It took a little while to get used to breathing the air up there as it was so thin. After taking many pictures we decided to head back down the Gondola. We drove back to Calgary and went back to the noc with Kieron to get all of our affairs in order before hitting the airport. Aside from a small hickup with a flat tire on the rental car (another story) we were at the airport well ahead of schedule. The flight back on WestJet was great. We even ended up scoring a few free cans of beer from our friendly flight attendant. Now I'm back at home, and I'm dead tired. I am going to see if I have the energy to up my newest pics now.

More drinkin'

Earlier this afternoon we decided to head out to the Calgary Tower and take some pics of the city from a decent elevation. It was a really nice view. After that we picked up our rental car and went back to the hotel to meet up with Sylvain. After a few drinks we headed out to Brewsters for some tasy bison burgers. We felt it was best to go back to the Calgary Tower and have a look at the city while it was dark. Dean met us there to continue our sampling of the fine Alberta alcohol consumption establishments. We ventured out to a pub first and sank a few pints. We then continued the eveninng at Vicious Circle, which was a really cool martini bar.

It's now 3:00 AM mountian time and we have to get up in 3 hours to head out to Banf to see the mountains. So, I'm done for tonight !

Tired

Had a very busy night last night.. We started it out with a few drinks in the hotel room accompanied by Chris P. and Kieron. We then went out to Zen-8 for sushi which was voted to be O.K. There we teamed up with Jeremy and J.P. From there we went and met up with Dean and hit up a pub called Molly Malone's for a drink. We then moved on to Melrose where we had some drinks and some food and were joined by Jason. We now had a Q9 entourage of 9 people. We then ventured on to Cowboys, which was awesome. At first I wasn't too excited about the Country Western tunes, but it didn't take long for the scenery to change my mood. They also played different types of music later on. At that point we really needed some food, so we hit up a pizza joint. We ended the night with a few more drinks in the hotel room. J.P. and Dean joined us for a bit and left around 4:30 am.

We ended up sleeping in a bit this morning (10:00am), and went to Nelly's on 17th Ave. for a big breakfast. I managed to book a rental car from Budget so we can drive out to Sulphur Mountain tomorrow morning. I managed to get a Chevy Impala for $34, and we're going to pick it up later this afternoon.

For now we are just relaxing in the hotel room awaiting another full night of drinking. Since we are going to have a car, we'll probably drive around Calgary later and see what we can find.

Yes, we are just this cool

Mike V. and I decided it was a good idea to buy cowboy hats while we are in Calgary. So we've been parading around the city like real cowboys..

It's very western

We are currently in our 2 bedroom apartment suite in downtown Calgary. Got bumped up for free ! The flight was great, the 4 hours just flew by. (pun not intended, but still supplied)

Calgary is a really nice city, the view of the mountains is much more than I'm used to seeing.

We are just dropping our stff off in the hotel room and we are off to the data center to meet up with Q9 folk for lunch.

More to come later. First set of pics here.

Airport Enjoyment

So we are now sitting in the waiting area of terminal 2. Seems we are a tad early for our 0710 EDT.

The security check was loads of fun. I had to remove my laptop from my bag, put all of my stuff from my pockets, and even remove my belt. The funny part was when dahil lost his pocket knife.

This sucks, there is no food / coffee places open in this terminal yet. So we are just sitting here listening to how many times Mike V. can use the 'F' word in normal conversation.

Almost ready

Less than 24 hours before we'll be flying out to Calgary. I have a lot of stuff to take care of today: haircut, laundry, packing, etc. I managed to book a limo to the airport for tomorrow morning for only $34, which is great because I'm splitting it with Dahil. I called the hotel to confirm our reservation, and that we can leave our bags there in the morning prior to the afternoon check-in. Also called WestJet and confirmed the flight and was informed of the cool check-in process. Apparently they have check-in kiosks that allow you to enter your confirmation number, check yourself in, and even do seat selection yourself !

As for our plans once we get there, we're kinda winging that part. I guess we'll figure it all out then.

How can't I help you today ?

I am really getting sick of Rogers anti-customer service. Every small task becomes a head-on collision with their corporate policy. I have always thought it was best to keep internal processes as transparent as possible to customers, but they seem content throwing it in your face to tell you they can't accommodate your request.

When I bought my 7280 Blackberry I was promised a $100 rebate, after a nice 8 week processing period. It has now hit the 3 month mark and no rebate.

It turns out they have no record of said rebate and my only option is to send in another one and wait another 8 weeks for processing. I think not ! After informing them this was not acceptable, they have agreed to apply the credit, but only after it is investigated which could take 10 business days. This also pushes it into another billing period for me. And the bitch of it is, I have been waiting for this rebate so I can move my data plan to my cell phone account with my old cell phone number.

Just what I needed

I decided to add another useless technology to my life.. I installed FeedDeomon to pull the RSS feeds of all the sites I read on a regular basis. Why ? I don't know ! It really wasn't much of a chore to [ctrl][t] a new tab in Mozilla and pull up one of those sites, but now I have FeedDemon doing all of that back breaking labour for me. The one cool feature is that you can pull all of the new posts on multiple RSS feeds, say on a laptop, then read them all offline. Although I would prefer if I could get an RSS feed reader for my Blackberry that worked ! Either way, FeedDemon is worth checking out.

P.S. This entry is also #100 for my blog. Break out the bubbly :)

Stylesheet Hackin'

Decided to mess with the stylesheet for my site this morning... Decided to mimic the colour scheme from a particular site. ;)

Took a lot of changing variables in the .css and index, but I think I finally have it the way I like it.... for now.

XP SP2 WTF?

XP Service Pack 2 didn't start to annoy me until last week when I installed it on my laptop. Now I am left with a buch of broken apps, hardware and other annoyances. Ethereal no longer works, because Winpcap isn't allowed to make raw socket calls under SP2. My old hermes orinoco card no longer works, but my new one does with the newer hermes chipset. And the most annoying thing of all, that stupid Security Center. It was alerting me that I am not protected by the Windows Firewall and that I should enable it. Arghhh... I'm behind a NAT at work/ home and have my own software for locking down my PC when I bring it elsewhere.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I go to disable the notification about the firewall. I thought XP and I had an understanding that I wasn't going to use its firewall and it was going to accept that.

But I still get the stupid baloon warning me about the firewall settings every time I boot up my laptop. WTF?

But, just my luck... True to windows fashion "Security Center" is a service and can be stopped dead in its tracks.

start -> run -> services.msc
scroll down to "security center" and open it up.
click stop, and change the dropdown selection from "automatic" to "disabled"

Once you apply that, you won't have to deal with windows second guessing you on your firewall, anti-virus, auto-update settings.

More IPSEC fun

I was finally able to get Linux FreeS/WAN working as an IPSEC client using a virtual IP. The trick was to add the ip address to the ipsec0 interface wth "ip addr add x.x.x.x dev ipsec0" and then add a route for the internal subnet on the inside of the vpn pointing to the virtual ip you just added as the default gateway. This way when there is a packet destined for the subnet on the other side of the tunnel, it will have a route pointing to its own virtual ip as a gateway which is bound to the ipsec0 interface. Now it will get encrypted and encapsulated and thrown through the tunnel :) Without the added routes, the remote end (ipsec gateway) didn't understand the configuration and refused to go past Phase 1.

And here is my success:

STATE_MAIN_I4: ISAKMP SA established

STATE_QUICK_I2: sent QI2, IPsec SA established

Fun times

The night started out great. We saw Canada beat Czech 4-3 while having a few drinks at the Bier Markt on Esplanade. On the way out one of our friends exchanged some unfriendly words with another bar patron. What was supposed to be a relaxing evening turned into a night of police, ambulances, and me sitting in the waiting room of Mount Sinai hospital typing a blog entry.

Greetings From:

Cisco Vulnerability

From the Bugtraq vulnerabilities:

"Cisco IOS telnet service is reported prone to a remote denial of service vulnerability. It is reported that an attacker can trigger this issue by sending a specially crafted TCP packet to a telnet or reverse telnet port of a Cisco device running IOS.

All Cisco devices running IOS with a telnet or reverse telnet service are affected by this issue. "

The article is here: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/11060/info/

It says there aren't any known exploits yet. I wonder if this means denial of service to the telnet daemon running in IOS, or the actual device itself !?

Sad

This just won't do:

"You have no double-matches at this time."

I need some kind of new marketing campaign going here... I thought about offering free GMAIL invites to those who I matched with, but then I thought of the crowd I would attract. *sigh*

Blackberry 7100

Looks like RIM is releasing a new Blackberry 7100.. They have completely changed it. I like the fact that it is better shaped to be used for a phone. But I don't like the fact they decided to ditch the full keyboard. I always thought that was one of the things that set the Blackberry apart, since I always found it annoying to type sms messages on my cell phone.

Days off

My head hurts and so does my wallet... Good night out with the guys though. When I got up this morning, I was laying on my bed with my clothes on. Guess I didn't have time to plan ahead !

Now it's time to enjoy my four days off.... Just one more round of four days at work, then it's off to Calgary.

Can't bribe me ! oh wait...

Warwalking around the office

Had some spare time on the weekend at work, so I decided to fire up the laptop with Knoppix, Kismet and my Orinoco 802.11b card !

Just from walking around the windows in the office I was able to pickup 24 unique networks. Some with WEP, some without, and some that are just broadcasting all kinds of crap into the air. Of course I had Kismet do a pcap dump too :)

$ grep Network Kismet-Sep-06-2004-3.network | wc -l

     24

Friday

Went to look at a condo downtown Toronto today around Queen / Spadina.. Looked really nice. 1,600 sq. feet, 2 bedrooms + den, 2 bathrooms. We'll see what happens now. It is a bit more expensive than what I was looking at, but for the size it isn't all that bad.

After going to Bymark for a drink, I headed over to work to meet up with the gang. We ended up going over to Milestones for drinks and dinner. Too bad we had to wait 2 hours for a table outside.

And Mike K. brought the new BMW out, so we got a ride over to Milestones in style :)

Pics from Milestones

Essential Housewares

This might be one of my first (and most important) houseware purchases for the upcoming condo. A bottle cap opener / fridge magnet. I am just curious to see if it is going to fly off of the fridge the first time somebody tries to crack open a Heineken. It's only $33, so I figure it is worth a try.

On another note, the search for places is still going strong. I got another bunch of listings today, and I am going to see a place tomorrow. 1,600 sq. foot condo around Queen / Spadina. Hopefully it's nice !

Daily Post

Haven't made a post in a few days... I'm on my 4 days off, catching up on sleep and hung over. Nothing more exciting than that.