Diary of a Wolfeman

The St. Petersburg Times writes today about a man being arrested for using someone’s un-secured wireless access point to gain access to the internet. They do not know what he was doing yet, but he was acting in a very suspicious manner, and the article goes on to describe some of the possible nefarious activities he may have been up to.

I can’t stress this enough, people: you have to set up the security features yourself. Wireless routers and access points ship from the factory with all the security features you could want, but they are turned off by default. If you follow the simple tutorial included in the documentation, however, you can turn all of that on – it only takes five minutes. Here’s a short look at what you can do:

Router Password This is the password you need to enter to access and change the router’s settings. By default, this will be blank or the same as the administrative login. Change this first thing to keep others out, and make sure the remote admin setting is turned off unless you really need it.

AD-HOC Networks This is what you call it when your computers connect to each other without the use of a router or access point. It can be usefull for file transfers to strangers, which is obviously both good and bad. Turn this off.

SSID or ESSID – This is the name of your network, so you can easily identify yours from your neighbor’s. D-Link routers use ‘default’, and Linksys call theirs ‘Linksys’ out-of-the-box. Not changing this value will lead others to think your network is open and invites hackers and bandwidth snatchers.

You can change this to anything you like, within a limit of 28 or so characters. In my line of work, we set up quite a few of these, and every time I set one up, I can ‘see’ at least one default network name. (Funniest SSID I’ve seen:” justworkdamnit”. Apparently somebody was having issues.)

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Or should I say belated review? It’s been a couple weeks since The Girlfriend and I went to see this.

For those that don’t mind a love story as long as there is some blood, gunfire and explosions, this is the movie for you. All I can tell you about the plot is that Mr. and Mrs. Smith are both assassins – but they work for rival agencies. Neither knows what the other truly does for a living, having both bought the other’s cover story when they met several years ago.

You can guess that this leads to some sticky situations. For example, one of Mrs. Smith’s assignments requires her to be a dominatrix as a cover, and she has to sneak out of the house in full leather gear, kill the mark and then go to a dinner party at the neighbor’s house. Everything goes well, with the exception that she forgot to take off her sexy fishnet stockings before changing into her pale little frumpy dress.

The acting may not be spectacular considering that Brad Pitt essentially plays himself, but you won’t be disappointed either. Looking through the IMDb listing for the movie, there are apparently some gun geeks out there with far too much time on their hands, but I assure you, the slight inconsistencies don’t interfere with the film for the rest of us.

All in all, a damn good flick with several lines that I’m sure will make it into this year’s vernacular.

“Honey, are you dead yet?” – Jane Smith

If you are like me and thought that the silliest court case you ever heard was the one about the woman who sued McDonald’s for spilling coffee, you were sadly wrong.

Yahoo! News reports that a Russian woman is currently suing NASA over the Tempel1 comet mission.

Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday “ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe,” the newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday.

Ok, the woman IS an astrologer who makes her living providing horoscopes to the public, but I somehow doubt she can resonably claim the $300 million she’s seeking as potential lost wages.

As a quick warning, I upgraded the blog tonight due to a security hole in the php – please let me know if you encounter any problems. The nice part is it took me only 15 minutes.

So, what does your friendly, furry, neighborhood techie-from-hell do on a Saturday? Does he rest easy? Does he lounge about chez Wolfe in a bathrobe? Nope.

He cleans.

Today we tackled the apartment en masse and got a number of things accomplished:

A trip to the Shack netted us the speaker wire needed to finally connect the rear speakers to the living-room media center. After which an hour so so was spent in trying to find the perfect movie scene to test said rear speakers. Considering the number of ‘caper’ flicks in my library, there were copious car-chase scenes to decide between.

Serious hoovering. The kind where you spend 20 minutes getting all the hair out of the hoover prior to using it to make sure you get all the crap out.

Floors have been scrubbed, as have toilets. Eww.

All of the above was also made possible by a trip to the store for supplies.

Why the veritable storm of sudsing? In preparation for the Great Annual Show-Up-If-You-Feel-Like-It Independence Day BBQ, of course.

That’s right, folks, hot dogs, hamburgers, chips dips chains and whips this Monday, including movies for your entertainment. If you want something that isn’t in the above list, bring it yerself. See you here around 2:00.

So there I am out at one of our corporate client’s locations today when one of the SalesFeebs walks up to me, asking why his computer is so slow.

“Slow?” Sez I, “I just doubled your RAM a week ago – it should be screaming.”

Some few minutes of investigation later reveals that the network is being dragged to it’s knees by something. This is pretty bad, since the most important software they run is network-enabled. Time to do some packet-sniffing…

Packet-sniffing leads to crawling behind the racks to trace a patch cable, which leads to their security cameras. Cameras? WTF are they doing on the network? Call to the boss:

ME: Why are your security cameras connected to the internet?
BOSS: Mr. C likes to check them from his house, why?
ME: It’s killing the sales network, and that new software you just spent so much money on needs the bandwidth.
BOSS: What can we do about it?
ME: You can bring in a third DSL line for the cameras. That will take about three weeks and cost you another $50 a month, plus some additional hardware.
BOSS: Hmm….can’t we do anything else to speed things up?
ME: Well, I can always disconnect the camera system’s internet, but that might irritate Mr. C.
BOSS: To hell with him! He can watch Baywatch reruns instead. Kill it.
ME: *poik*
SalesFeeb: Hey, the network’s back!

As I’ve said before, I occasionaly write fiction. I was originally posting it under the main site, but that means I have to edit html, where if I post it here it’s simpler.

What, me lazy?

So, off to the left you will see the heading ‘Fiction’ under the pages listing – that’s where I will be putting it from now on.

You may have already seen what I put there tonight; I could have sworn I posted it before, but somehow I have lost the first 54 posts to this blog, plus the posts I transferred from when I was using MovableType. Not a big deal – I doubt I wrote anything important. In any case, here it is again.

You were warned.

After having seen the new Batman movie, I have a question that should be telling about you: Who is your favorite super hero, and why?

For me, it tends to be a bit mainstream, and a close tie (I am a Gemini, after all)

The first is Bats himself, and not just because he’s the most recent in my head. Batman is the only DC title I have ever read with any sort of relish. Firstly, his only real super-power would have to be called Phenomenal Wealth – he has all the best toys that he and like-minded geeky types can invent. He relies on his own wits and training to do a job normally left to the truly super.

Secondly, it’s his use of fear as a primary weapon. Many criminals live the way they do because they have no fear of retribution from the system. Batman is there to remind them of the consequences of their actions, and to bring them to justice – whether it be a trip to jail, or just a midnight call to scare the bejeezus out of them. One of my favorite quotes is from a scene in which an armed robber has taken a woman hostage, and Bats is trying to convince him of the error in his judgement. He promises that wherever he goes, no matter what he does, Batman will be there, waiting for him. “I am Vengeance! I am the Night!” Indeed.

My second favorite would have to be Wolverine, for similar reasons. He describes himself as “I am the best there is at what I do, and what I do isn’t very nice.” Yes, he’s a killer which goes against most comic-book rules, but there comes a time when it is necessary. Anyone who does not believe this is deluding themselves.

There’s also Logan’s quest to balance his animal berserker self against his own personal code of honor. I was already reading alot about the code of the samurai when the X-Men comics started spending time on Wolverine’s ties to Japan, so this tied me more to the character.

There you have it – two of the darkest characters in the two mainstream line-ups, and they’re the guys I like best. Luckily for me, I have responsibilities that prevent me from becoming a vigilante.

Lucky bastard that I am, the Girlfriend took me out to see the new Batman movie last night, and we had a very good time (aside from spending $10 on a soda and popcorn. Sheesh!)

The first thing I thought about the movie was “where are the opening credits?” The movie has none – it simply begins, with a young Bruce Wayne (about 9 or so) chasing his friend Rachel around the greenhouse a few minutes before he falls into the old well.

Like any remake of an old idea, this movie puts Bats into a more modern world than what he originally came into. Gotham is, as always, Gotham, in the way that it should be. (I was pretty disappointed with the portrayal of the city in the earlier films.) The writers do an excellent job of telling us why Gotham is Gotham while the cinematographer is showing us what it is – and it is a truly polarized city, with the rich on one side and the poor on the other. A glittering monorail plies the skies forty feet above the ground – because at ground level is where all the streetscum live, and nobody wants to see that.

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