RNast

Mt. Rainier has been on my mind for almost four years now. Ever since coming across an interesting magazine article about a climb gone bad. One of the guys from the story found a frozen bird in the snow that he ate to stay alive while waiting for a rescue! The stars have finally aligned favorably, and I will be attempting the three day summit with a good friend dcash next week. Hopefully my next post will contain some sort of personal triumph story, but if not I won’t be alone. Over 10,000 people attempt to summit Rainier every year, and less than half succeed. An average of three unlucky people not only do not summit, but don’t make it back period. The route we will be attempting, Disappointment Cleaver, is also the site for the single worst climbing tragedy in the US where 11 climbers were crushed by ice fall on Father’s Day. That being said, I’m sure my own physical fitness will be the largest roadblock to overcome. I’ve been preparing for a while now, and I am in much better shape than I have been in several years, but all that is relative. If it were easy, they’d just call it “The Way”. On rock? ROCK ON!

*enable javascript and mouse over the pic for all you noscript users… i promise it’s safe for your computers. Your MINDS however may be blown by the scriptFu.

Backstory: One day Dave, and several others, commented on the number of McDonalds Chicken McNuggets they thought that they could put down in a single sitting. Dave confidently asserted that he could do sixy nuggets. All other contenders quickly stepped aside under the pressure of such claims. This is the story of one man (Dave), a love (of Nuggets), and… “The Challenge”.

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Rules: 60 McDonalds Chicken McNuggets (6 x 10 pieces) in 60 minutes. Contender can drink whatever he wants, use any sauces, but must keep all food down for the length of The Challenge + 10 mins. Vomiting before the 70mins have elapsed is grounds for immediate disqualifications and months of verbal abuse.

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The Challenge:


60 nuggets in 1 hour. Can it be done? First 10 piece is history. 2.5mins off the clock.

20 nuggets. At this rate he’ll eat 240 nuggets in an hour!

30 nuggets gone for those keeping score at home. Dave shows no signs of wavering.

40 nuggets consumed, 20 nuggets left to go. No problem. He is slowing down a little now. I dunno though, should we have done the 80 nugget challenge instead?

Still only 40 nuggets with 15mins left to go. Dave is looking a little pale at this point. Maybe eating that order of fries while we picked up the nuggets wasn’t the best idea after all. A little fresh air never hurt anyone though. No one say “puke”.

He caught his second wind. 50 nuggets are now in the books. 10 mins left!

Working on the final 10 piece.

Stiiiiillllllll working on that last 10 piece. 2 mins!

Staring down the last nugget, it all comes down to this.

Last nugget… bucket is ready just in case! Although, Dave has that tunnel vision look in his eye. Can he “taste” victory or have the Nuggets gotten the best of DP?

Yeah, yeah, we get it Dave, you did it. 60 nuggets in 60mins!

Cheers to the Victor! Well done Dave. Well done.

For your enjoyment here are a few facts about The Sixty Nugget Challenge:
Number: 60 Nuggets (6×10piece)
Weight: 33.6oz (2.1lbs)
Calories: 2520
Cals from fat: 1320
Sodium: 6720mg

This is the nutritional info from McDonald’s site. I actually think that they’ve recently made the nuggets healthier for you, so this may not be 100% accurate, but you get the idea. This also does not include any of the sauces.

The End?

Is it just me, or is the often quoted OWASP Top 10 computer security list just a tad bit generic? I’ve decided to start my own Rnast’s Top 10 Security Threats List:

A1 - Stupid Users	Stupid users are often ‘click-crazy’, and will download and run anything. Stupid users will often times have moments of genius where they discover ways to disable implemented safeguards. The stupidity of such users should never be underestimated.
A2 - The Internet	Ever since those first Universities linked up, it has been an uphill battle ever since.
A3 - Stupid Admins	Firewall rules? Do you know how long that would take?
A4 - Computer Files/Programs	The FBI states that over one-hundred percent of viruses and worms are created by or are spread through programs and files. [needs citation]
A5 - Management	“Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
A6 - Top 10 Lists	This is a self-reference.
A7 - Pr0n	Unprotected surfing is on the rise with teenagers. The only 100% safeguard is pr0n abstinence.
A8 - MySpace et al.	Social Networking sites have had the effect of concentrating millions of morons into one logical location. This critical mass of blather creates a dangerous imbalance. No one is safe.
A9 - High Speed Connections	Always on, high speed connections bring more attacks to you at a faster rate. If we went back to the 200 baud modems, the attackers would give up and go home.
A10 - Malicious Hackers	I honestly do not know how OWASP missed this one.

Table 1: Top 10 Computer Security Threats

Noticeably missing from this year’s list are lazy programmers, and angry ex’s. I guess we’ll just have to wait another 3 or so years to see if anything changes. I doubt it.

I want to preface this whole thing with the fact that I really like oranges, and OJ for that matter. But I’ve had this theory for a long time about the origins of orange flavored candy. Specifically, but not limited to, the following products in no particular order:

• Mamba
• Skittles
• Starburst
• Jellybeans (all brands - even jellybelly)
• Jollyranchers
• Now and Later
• Sweet Tarts
• Shock Tarts
• Twerps
• Pez
• Sour Patch Kids
• Orange Heads
• Circus Peanuts
• Tootsie (pops and rolls)

However there are a couple of exceptions to the list:

• Anything that fizzes
• Creme Savers

Have you ever been in a darkened movie theater and reached for a delicious red sour patch kid, and in the low light conditions mistakenly grabbed an orange one? I need not describe for you the horror of such a tragedy. Also, one of the largest candy based holidays, Halloween, has orange as it’s primary associated color. I guess that makes sense, I think I may actually be a little frightened by the thought of eating orange candy! *shiver* Maybe I should try to lobby to make St. Patrick’s Day a candy holiday. Lime candy FTW! Don’t even get me started on that somewhat recent fad of turning the green flavored candy from lime to sour apple! But I digress, so I’ll save that for another post.

So now that I’ve listed out some of the primary offenders, and given you some of reasoning behind my raw loathing, let’s get to the heart of the issue. Why does orange candy suck so bad? (no pun intended) I mean, it’s not that the candy makers aren’t skilled tradesmen. Grape, strawberry, and lemon flavors pretty much universally rock, lime too. I could understand if this was a one off problem, like Bob over at Starburst Corp has a poorly defined orange palate. No, as we can see from the list, this is an industry wide pandemic!

Ok, this is where the conspiracy part really starts to kick in. I’ve done some pretty hard hitting and intensive research to get to the cold hard facts on this topic. Which means I ate a TON of candy and fell into a sugar induced lucid dream state. This is what I came up with. Hershey, the real life Wonka, (and anyone who has read the books KNOWS how dark of a character Wonka is) heads up the underground group known as the International Confectioners Coalition (ICC). They meet bi-annually in an undisclosed location where they make decisions that affect the bellies of billions. Here is how the meeting for establishment of the orange flavor went down:

Wonka: Quit screwing around everyone! Let’s get this crap over with, I have some children’s souls to devour later.
ICC: *grumble*
Wonka: Ok, where did we leave off…. ahh yes… grape. How are we doing with grape? Tom?
Tom: Great. Huge hit with the test monkeys.
Wonka: Lime?
Lime Guy: Tom’s a hack, Lime will be the best seller fo’ sho’.
Tom: *shakes fist at Lime Guy*
Wonka: Orange?
Tom: uh, Orange Guy died last week. Some sort of aggressive mutation I think.
Wonka: Ok, here’s what we’re gonna do. We have strong showings from our other flavors, so let’s just take those left over chemicals from our pool cleaning, and toss in some Orange Dye #9, and some of that Orange drink that McDonald’s makes. Not the actual Orange Juice mind you, that un-carbonated stuff that tastes slightly gritty. That will be our orange flavor. Sound good?
ICC: *grumble in agreement*
Wonka: Great. Are we at a good stopping point?
ICC: …

That’s pretty much how it went down. And now you know. Yo Joe!

I ran across that quote the other day, and realized that it would make a good title for this post. I have recently traded in my frequent flyer credits, hotel points, free car rentals, and my consultant’s hat for a new position doing R&D with a tech firm within walking distance of my apartment. I have once again joined forces with the team over at jleyrer.net, and world domination does not look to be out of the question. I am super geeked about the work we are doing, and I am definitely getting that “rush” with each new discovery. You know the rush i’m talking about… like the first time you get a reverse shell, and the the cursor is blinking at you, taunting you….

Anyway, I know i’ve said it before, but maybe now with my new found free time, I actually WILL be posting more. Maybe the next one wont be so shmarmy.

I got this skirt steak recipie off Alton Brown’s show “Good Eats”. It is amazing - both the show and the steak. I promised a friend that I’d share it with him months and months ago, so here goes finally:

Skirt Steak Marinate
1/2 cup Olive oil
1/3 cup Soy sauce
4 scallions (chopped)
2 cloves garlic (minced)
Juice of 2 limes
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp Ground cumin
3 Tablespoons Dark brown sugar

Marinate for about an hour and cook on high heat until done. Typically around 6-10mins on a side.

Oh? Your company got hacked while we were arguing with you that your IDS effectively blocked security assessments, not attackers? Now that’s poetic justice!

I’m not normally one for re:blogging a technology that is easily Googled, but I came across something that I’d never heard of and now I can’t wait for it. So I thought I’d do my netizen duty and share. The guys who did Kazaa and Skype are working on a new project called Joost. What they did for music and telephone they are now doing for TV. I don’t want to type out their whole website, so here it is. Go there so you can read about what you didn’t even know that you needed. Duty complete.

*Update* I just read where Joost got $45M in new capital, and they went right to work hiring Mike Volpi, the ex-CEO of Cisco… this story just keeps getting more and more interesting.

I had one of the worst travel days of my career last week. I was supposed to head down to Miami, which all-in-all isn’t a bad gig in February especially when we are having blizzards here in Chi-town. We were supposed to just follow up on the previous weeks work, stay down there for a day or two tops.

I will just document the events in semi-list form. Here goes:

1) Flight was cancelled more than 12hrs in advance. I thought that my SMS alert was a system error on the airline side. It wasn’t an error.

2) Rebooked flight, but by this point only middle seats were available.

3) Boarded the plane, then sat for 3hrs on the tarmack while they “unfroze locks” and “repaired cargo rollers”. Not sure why it required everyone to sit on the plane in cramped quarters while they did this.

4) On the flight I sat 2 seats away from a crazy person. Not “Bam Margera from JackAss” crazy, more like “the-flight-attendant-delayed take-off-for-another-10mins-due-to-one-of-his-MANY-disturbing-antics
and-even-threatened-him-halfway-through-our-flight-that-if-he-didn’t
sit-down-and-buckle-his-seat-belt-that-they-would-land-the-plane-in-an alternate-city-and-have-the-air-marshal-escort-him-off-the-plane” crazy. Sorta like “should this guy be aloud to travel alone” crazy.

5) Ultimately we landed safely, although untimely, in sunny Miami just in time to see that sun set on our entire workday.

6) Nothing left to do now but to attempt to check into our “hotel”. One of the team members booked the reservation, but apparently he had not read either of the following gems:
JLeyrer’s Post or
Mike Del’s Post

7) Yes, ESA.

8) ESA informed us that our “reservation” had been moved to one of their alternate properties located miles away.

9) After 10 or so hours of traveling, I freaked. I called Shinanigans and informed them that we would be staying at the nearest Hampton. The ESA desk clerk informed me that the “Hampton” had just called them asking if they had rooms. WTF? Why would a Hilton property call ESA?!? Seriously. Anyway, I said I would confirm that information. Dialed 411, connected, and 10mins later had two rooms reserved at a nearby Hampton.

10) Enjoyed Miami over the next day and a half, and flew back to Chicago. The flight back was delayed again. Big surprise. When we landed I had a voice mail informing me that my day-after-V-day plans to go have dinner with the ‘cee (fiancee) and see Greg Giraldo perform some standup comedy was not going to happen.

11) Double “G” was stuck on the east coast due to the weather. I cancelled those reservations, called a car service and spent the next 2.5 hours travelling from the airport to my home 15.6 miles away. That’s an average of 6.24 mi/hr for those of you keeping score at home. Which was coincidentally the same exact pace that the worst kid on my high-school cross-country team ran/walked. No, that kid wasnt me. Well at least it wasn’t me by the end of the season Here is a handy link if you’d like to compare the speed of my ride home with the land speed of certain animals. Animal Land Speed. I’ll save you the suspense: it was faster than a spider, but slower than a mouse.

I don’t even know why I bother to separate my “Travel” category and my “Rant” category. Well, at least no one died that I know of.

Meet JD, or Jonathan Davis if you’re not into the whole brevity thing. He (?) is my new corn snake. Get it? Korn? He’s only a few weeks old, thinner than a pencil and not much longer. I’ve already fed him two pinkies. It is pretty sweet to watch and learn about. My fiancee has even been won over by JD, so it is definitely all good.