The otters approve!

I'm just your Jack-in-the-Box
You know whenever love knocks
I'm gonna bounce up and down on my spring
A toy used up when it stops
I'm just your Jack-in-the-Box
Because for your love I'd do anything

The year was 1984 and during the summer we went roller skating on Saturdays. It was a regular hangout for most of the family and neighborhood kids. Now imagine the din of skaters, the bad disco lights and the sound of Van Halen's "Jump" blasting all the way to the snack bar. What attracted me most to this roller rink was the state of the art arcade. It was stocked with tons of the best and newest games. It's the place I met Joust, Qix, Pengo and Tempest for the first time and 25 years later I still play those games but now on emulators.

One Saturday between roller skating and begging for quarters I had discovered that when you combined dry summer air, carpet and roller skates you would build up a huge static charge. This was just the thing for zapping friends and older sisters and with this discovery I added zapping things to my list of fun things to do that day.

This was the year for all sorts of discoveries about static electricity as months before this event I had gotten into the show Whiz Kids which was an attempt by the networks to cash in on the popularity of the film War Games and computer hackers. It had kids solving crimes with the help of a souped-up computer named Ralph. It aired once and was never in reruns but much of the show managed stick with me. In the episode "Airwave Anarchy" the villain was using a radio modem to hack into the police dispatch system to divert police from his crimes. But when static electricity blows out an important chip in his computer he was taken down by the meddling hacker kids. The moral was "static is the enemy" and because of that episode I would always be extra careful to discharge myself before working on the inside of a computer. I recently re-watched the series from a copy I got with bit torrent and it does not hold up well, but was still fun to watch.

Getting back to skating around all chock full of static electricity and a limited ability to stop, I noticed the game Carnival was free so I skated up and ended up slamming into it. With a loud CRACK I discharged into the controller and the screen flashed white and to my shock the game had given me a free credit. I expect the electricity was arcing over the switch that the coin would normally trip; either way I now had super credit powers! I spent the day experimenting on every game I could ram into; only Carnival and Mouse Trap gave me credits. Somehow those games were just a bit more fun than they were with quarters. This did not stay a secret for long as I expect I had probably boasted to somebody my memory is a bit vague, but I do remember that for the rest of the day kids were slamming into arcade games.

It came as no surprise that the following week many of the video games were out of order.

5 miles past the middle of nowhere a small silver fox played chess under a willow tree. The game was on a page of the large black book that sat on his lap. On the open page he watched an image of a chess board rearrange itself, the book was making its next move. He sipped on his now cooling cup of coffee as he worked out his strategy. A grin appeared on his face as he figured his next move. "I think I got you this time." he said to the book. Touching the page he slid an image of a knight it into place. "I believe that's checkmate." said the fox with a smile.

The image shrank away replaced with the words "Good game, want me to keep those moves in your library?" He nodded to the book, "Yes, thank you mother." The fox had the feeling she was letting him win lately. Flipping to another page he noticed his schedule had been updated. It looked like the plans for the new gallery he had submitted was accepted. With that news he got up, stretched and brushed the grass out of his fur. With any luck his solar transport has recharged enough to make it home.

Tomorrow will be a long day, he thought. I'm going to need a lot of sleep.

For many years I worked for companies that did special effects or made software for the effects industry. Due to laziness on my part, I was not networking enough and I paid the price in 2003 when I found myself laid off and without a community to help me back in. After that I spent a few months flailing about trying to hook myself back in to that industry. My last major attempt I made was going to SigGraph to schmooze and look for work. SigGraph is a small industry convention, a bit like a tiny Comicon without the costumes or dealers. Unfortunately, being in the San Diego convention center, it still had the same amount of walking.

In every way this trip should have been a gigantic hint that I needed to move on to a different industry. The real deal was going to be the parties and after swinging invites I planned on running around and network like my career depended on it. But that was for the evening, during the day I met with old co-workers and chatted with animators and shoved my resume to every major studio that was looking for render farm technicians. Where they looking for a render farm technicians? I would shove my resume on the pile anyway.

When the show floor closed, I ran to the bathroom to pee and freshen up a bit before trudging to the various nighttime events in old town San Diego. I made a beeline to the first stall I could find and unzipped. At that exact moment I saw something fly up in an arc, slowly into in the air and then hit the floor with a clatter before rolling away to a pocket universe for lost buttons.

FUCK! What that what I thought it was? It took several moments for the situation to sink in. This was not a good day to leave the belt at home. I could just feel the panic and embarrassment well up in me that I had to work at pushing away. Do I just give up and go home with my pants dragging on the floor? This should have been a hint the universe was telling me I needed a change in my life. Being a practical person, I pee as I think of possible solutions. I call upon my inner MacGyver as I rip apart my SigGraph badge. It was luck that the badge had a pin style fastener that I could use that to fasten my pants back together. I Pull my shirt out and let it cover up my waist to hide the patch, it was a thankfully long shirt and I went for the casual look for the parties.

The night was full of loud music, darkened bar's and schmoozing vendors. I think the biggest problem I had was the only people I knew that I could have gotten a job with were based in Texas and there was no way I would move from California. No work came from that weekend; in fact no major jobs would come for another year and a half. It would be a time of extreme financial pain but in the end I was much better for it. As I now look back at that period of my life I realize how unhappy I was. There are times when it's a good idea to listen to your pants.

There is an old joke where a young man is listening to a circus worker complaining about shoveling piles of elephant dung. Deciding to help, the man suggests to the worker that he should quit. The circus worker looks stunned and exclaims:

"What? Give up show business?!?"

Around 1990, about the only way I could get on to the Internet was to hack my way in. In those days the Internet was for government and educational access, there was no real access for commercial interests. When you see the quote "I invented the Internet" attributed to Al Gore, he was being misquoted talking about the "High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991" which opened up the Internet for commercial use. We have Al to thank for leading the way for things like commercial ISPs, Amazon.com and YouTube.

By 1990 I had a free shell account at Project GNU at MIT, the birthplace of the Open Source movement, but to connect to it I would have to call a dial up service called Terminus located in Boston. I couldn't sit on a toll call for hours so I needed an alternative that would allow the connection I craved without the bills. The easy target was the local college and with the help of a few friends we found our way in. Hell, for years I had the dial-up numbers for the computers there but I had never tried to get in. The first account we compromised was a chemistry teacher's. She had never logged in and the policy for new accounts was to use the account name for the password, never a good idea.

This account turned out to be the best choice to use as the teacher also had a reputation of being nuts, students would say "Oh! You have her class? Remember to sit in the back if you value your eyebrows" weird activity didn't get questioned. The funny thing is how we ended up treating that system; it was our doorway to the Internet so we guarded it more fiercely than the system admins. We took out anybody that tried to cause damage that would have gotten us noticed.

We did want more accounts just for the fun of it so we turned to password cracking. How passwords work under Unix is they are stored using an encryption that can only go in one direction. You can only encrypt but not decrypt. How that worked with the login process is: when you type your password the system encrypts what you type and checks that against the encrypted password on file.

Users are stored under "/etc/passwd" which for various reasons needed to be readable by all users. Once in the system all a person needed to do is type "cat /etc/passwd" to get a list of all accounts and the password hashes. These days the passwords are stored in a file called "/etc/shadow" that is only readable by root to prevent cracking. Once you have the password hashes you give it to password cracking software that tests every word in a dictionary against each encrypted password.

With our equipment at the time and largest dictionary file we had, a whopping 2 megs, we cracked almost half of the accounts on that system. The account we wanted most was the root account and after spending months throwing every dictionary file we could find at it with no luck we were left with trying every combination of letters and numbers in sequence. Due to the blazing processor speed of 7 MHz we calculated it was going to take up to 1000 years to get that password. In the end we never got root and I got a real job and moved cross country and left that poor Unix system to all the dangerous students there.

Now flash forward 19 years and introduce Moore's Law. This law states that Integrated circuit power will double every 18 months and has proven true so far. Going through my old disc's I found a copy of that old password file on a CD Backup of old Amiga files. I began to wonder how long it will take to crack that root password with my current 3 GHz quad core Intel system. So I grab the biggest dictionary file I can find on the Internet, around 110 megs of words, and gave it a go.

It found the password in 2 seconds.

Ok, I suppose if I had that giant dictionary file back then I could have cracked it in a week. To be fair in this test I ditched the dictionary file and set the software to try every combination of letters and numbers in sequence, it found the password in 2 hours.

In every respect it's a good thing I never got that password as 19 years of Unix experience tells me I would have accidentally wrecked that computer if I achieved root.

Still, it kinda annoys me the password turned out to be "camptown"

I found this tucked away in a stack of old business cards and it's probably been there since 1999.

The question is: did luck come my way? Given that I didn't get hurt by the dot com crash for at least 2 more years things were quite lucky at that time.

I have always felt that luck is something you make as even the bad bits lead to the good bits.

Every time I lost a job it would lead to something better or at least get me to the place I needed to be.

Looking at this, I found it funny the things I kept, little bits of my life in a baggie to be found and to remind my future self who I was.

So why did I keep this?

I probably just kept it because of the awesome drawing on it.

Years ago I had a job making video transitions for a company that made television production equipment. I was in charge of bundled content for the product and I had a nice setup with multiple video monitors, security cameras and other fun devices. One of those devices was a commodore CDTV that I used as a video source.

In those days Phillips made a set-top box called CD-Interactive that would play educational CD's, Games and encyclopedia type shit. CDTV was commodore's answer to CD-I and in every respect they were a solution to a problem nobody had. People just didn't want a "video game" system that was just for educational multimedia. Both Commodore and Phillips made a small fortune with these products... from of a much larger fortune and were soon to be overshadowed by Sony and their Playstation.

The only CD I had for my CDTV was an educational disc called "Muybridge: Women in Motion." If you don't know, Eadweard Muybridge was a 19'th century photographer that created the first real motion studies of people and animals. He got started making photo sequences due to an ongoing bet that race horses in mid gallop would have no hooves on the ground; he had been hired to settle it scientifically.

Muybridge set up multiple camera's and trigger wires so he could get a photo every few feet with the rider and horse in view and he managed to prove that horses do in fact float a bit when they run. You can find books of his photos and I'm sure most everything he did is on the Internet. Even Philip Glass wrote an opera about him called "The Photographer" and this is all worth reading up on Wikipedia.

Ok, so there I was in my office testing out video transitions when I switch on the CDTV to get a change of pace from color bars. Now, instead of bars I have a 19'th century naked woman jumping up and down on one of my video monitors playing in a loop. The video is almost hypnotic but I soon manage to ignore it and let the jumping lady fade into the background while I worked away. Hours later I hear talking outside my dark cave of an office that snaps me back to reality, it was the boss and some VIP he was giving a tour of the company to.

I look up from my coding haze to see them walking into my office when I suddenly realize I have animated Victorian porn on my video monitor and with a burst of adrenaline I flail may arm to hit the video transition button while thinking "Oh shit! I better get rid of that." To my horror the system was set for both video sources to be the CDTV so it slowly transitions to... the same woman jumping up and down. After much fumbling about I get color bars back on all the monitors just as I get introduced as one of the weird creative people that work in development.

Now I am not sure what I found worse: the idea that they saw Victorian boobs on my screen or that it was just a normal thing for me.

After that I decided it was time to find more software for my CDTV.

Early on I became friends with David, the son of my father’s friend and
sometimes we would all go out for dinner. Around 1972 at one of these dinners
I was introduced to video games for the first time.

For the life of me I can't remember the name of the restaurant but I can still
see in my head the dark lighting and wood paneling that was popular at the time.
Far in the back of the place there was this strange little machine
called "pong" and was perhaps coolest amazing new thing I had ever seen.

In 1972 you didn't just run into new technology that often, digital watches were
not even mainstream then and a bit of technology like seeing video games for the
first time was a fucking amazing sight. The idea that you could do more than watch tv
was too cool for words and we took to it within seconds.

The only problem we had was the device was on the far side of a dance floor that was
teeming with dancers.

To cross this strange territory required us to blend in so we grabbed hands and
began an exaggerated and sarcastic tango across the dance floor.

This is how the night progressed:

1)Eat some food.
2)Beg for quarters.
3)Tango across dance floor with great sarcasm.
4)Play Pong.
5)Dance Back.

This was perhaps the first major bit of electronics I ever got to play with and was the
beginning of a lifetime of technology obsession.

Thankfully, I don't have to dance for it anymore.

One of my first real jobs was at a women's clothing catalog company doing phone sales,
I suppose I should put real in quotes as the only thing real about the job was the
number of hours. Telephone sales work is mind-numbing and repetitive and most of the time
I was just trying to avoid angry customers as the service and the merch sucked.

You were expected to be online in a queue waiting for calls and when you reached the front
of the queue you got the next call. You could see a big leader board near the ceiling
that told you how many callers were waiting and how many sales people were online
in big glowing red numbers.

The way things went during busy days would be a new call every time you hit
the finish-call button or there were times when you would wait a few minutes between
calls due to less call volume. One day during a slow point and I began to wonder
how the queue functioned and I guessed it was like a line at a store where you would
wait for everybody in front of you but I was betting it didn't keep track of
where you were in that line if you disconnected.

All Telemarketing companies monitor the phone workers closely and your phone time is
tracked to the second, so you would get penalized for the time you spent offline
such as going to the bathroom or doing some offline work on an order.

So I tried hitting the offline then online buttons quickly about every 2 minutes and after
30 minutes of no calls I realized I was right. I was being put at the end of the line
every time I went offline. With my newfound mental breathing space I then preceded to
have fun exploring the edges of the order entry system.

Weeks later at my next review the confused looks on my managers face was priceless, I just
shrugged and said "No idea why it wasn't giving me any calls." Given the job I could play the
"I don't understand computers" card there.

I backed off on it so I was taking calls but I was able to get some space to keep my sanity
in what I now consider a horrible job.

Now I am sure you can't get away with that shit like that in a call center since it's 20
years later. I also find it funny that it's the same company that recently had millions
of credit cards stolen from a wireless access point running the insecure wep encryption.

When I heard the news I wasn't surprised that happened.

Just as a side note: I am writing this while I am at work.

Yaaay, toast!

It’s been a strange weekend, mostly due to me feeling out of place.

We saw Watchmen and I did like it, I have never read the comic so I can’t judge it on that merit. For the first time I saw a large blue superhero penis on the big screen so that was at least worth the cost of entry.

I blew $2000 on my car to replace the catalytic converters so I can pass smog and I was amazed when it didn’t bother me too much as I had the money, hell I don’t want to spend it but I would like my “check engine” light to stay off. From what I have found out when it turns on the computer in my car switches to a much looser gas profile and the car looses a ton of gas mileage.

On a fun note I did at least score some tickets to spinal tap for next month, I soon will be able to say I have seen Spinal Tap AND the Rutles perform live.

For anybody that is interested here is my twitter page:

http://twitter.com/LurkingGrue

Aphid eradication team.

Met her at the Star Wars convention. did I mention she was looking for love?

I once mentioned, that I don't like rats at the best of times...

Notice he doesn't use the word "I" much

Into the blue again, after the moneys gone.

Got back from Further Confusion and just posted some of my photos:


FC2009 Pics on Flickr

The things people write on the bathroom walls of the "Mad Greek" outside of Vegas.