What’s up.

I was looping though the radio stations in my car via my favorite button ever — the “Scan” button, and inevitably stopped at GCN Station at 90.1 here in good ole Austin, Texas.  “GCN” stands for “Genesis Communication Network”.  It hosts a pretty insane cadre of “experts” who seem to believe a variety of so-called “conspiracy” theories ranging from the complete and constant monitoring of EVERYONE to getting ready for Jesus’ Second Coming.

I’m not into Jesus, but I am into privacy, so I gave them a listen.  After about 10 minutes, the show spiraled uncontrollably into the abyss of supposed police states, RFID conspiracies, and Big Brother-like plots.

That got me thinking — what would a person with the right type of access learn about me?  Looks like quite a bit.  If you flash your Homeland Security badge and cite some obscure deed falling under the Patriot Act, you’ll probably get access to the following:

• My bank records.  Because I bank at the same place, it will be a one-stop-shop of everything you need to know about my financial situation and purchasing habits.  After all, I like the convenience of debit, which means 95% of everything I buy leaves a trail.
• My shopping patterns — you could get this from several shopping club cards I carry for discount purposes.
• My internet search habits.  If you subpoena Google, you’ll have a very complete track of not just what I am doing, but what I am thinking about.  THINKING, for Christ’s sakes.  This is the exact idea behind Google’s recent flu maps.
• My viewing preferences.  Your cable company knows what you are watching — I’ve confirmed this.  One time, my DVR broke, so I called in and they were able to manipulate it from their central office, and they told me what I was watching (Comedy Central, of course).
• Most of my Internet habits.  To get this one, all they’d have to do is subpoena my cable provider, and voila — all places where my IP pointed, in neat little log files.
• My phone calls — between the exact time, date, and length of ALL my phone calls, some VoIP providers actually record the calls — after all, the cost per terabyte of hard drive space is dropping lower by the week.
• My travels — between the credit card records such as gasoline purchases and reservations at airline companies, you’d know exactly when I traveled and would be able to deduce why.  Don’t forget about toll tags in your car.
• Email conversations.  This one is easy and is directly tied to your email account provider — while Google and Yahoo! may push a little bit, Comcast and TimeWarner would quickly fall in line and divulge everything.
• Social networking sites.  Everyone’s got at least a Facebook/MySpace account — this one is self-explanatory if you just think about crap people post, sometimes with up-to-the-minute precision.
• Compliance records — driver’s license renewals, registration stickers, tax records, etc.

You can also get into some other stuff that tracks your behavior, like OnStar tracking, street cameras, Google Streetview.

The bottom line — we all leave more of a trail than a car with a busted oil pan.  I am not too bothered by it, fuck it, we live in a modern society.  But there are people that are … oh yes, they are.

In case you didn’t know … I love books and movies about zombies.  I watch old zombie movies, new zombie movies, play an occasional zombie video game, listen to Rob Zombie … :)

So it’s no surprise I’ve read the Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks.  This book, and the SAS Survival Guide are two of my most favorite books (the MOST favorite book of all time still being 12 Chairs by Ilf and Petrov … although if you don’t read Russian, don’t even bother).

Max Brooks’ Zombie book has an amazing variety of methods of protecting yourself from the attacks of the living dead, as well as ways to kill them quickly and efficiently.  However, the true awesomeness is on the back cover of the book — and since I could not find it on the Internet, I am publishing the entire list:

TOP 10 LESSONS FOR SURVIVING A ZOMBIE ATTACK

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head, cut off theirs.
4. Blades don’t need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

I suppose another reason this appeals to me is because I grew up in the Eastern Europe in the 80’s … so you can pretty much replace the word “zombie” with the word “communism” and instantly relate to why I like all this.

The lessons of this list don’t have to apply in a post-apocalyptical world of Fallout 3 … they apply here and now.

1. Be prepared.
2. Don’t be easily intimidated.
3. Think before you act.
4. Keep things simple.
5. Protect yourself, your family, and your assets.
6. Seek the high ground, but physically and morally.
7. Stay mobile.
8. Pay attention to your surroundings.
9. Nothing lasts forever.
10. History repeats itself.

This is the real reason I love all this zombie shit — it reminds me to be focused, alert, and prepared.  Don’t believe my being prepared?

Here’s some pics — one day back in May I realized we didn’t have a pantry.  Well, we had one, but it was stocked with a few canned goods and mostly perishables.  I then decided to utilize the space under the stairs to jam pack it full of survival food that would last the two us at least a year.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter

Here’s some soup — I know the most economical use of space would be to store canned chicken and dry pasta and then make your own soup, but that’s being almost “too ready” — at least with canned soup you lose a little space, but gain a lot in convenience.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Soup

This would not be long-term survival without SPAM — high fat, high calorie meat with a shelf life of 3 years, easy:

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Spam

I picked up a bunch of rice and other grains (wheat, buckwheat).  They don’t go bad, and you can survive on them forever.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Grain

I put together a box of medical supplies — antibiotic ointment, gauze, alcohol, wet naps, etc.  Yes, tampons too.  Oh, I also picked up a sweet hand-cranked radio/flashlight.

How to be Poor Survival - Zombie Shelter Medkit

There you have it.  I don’t have to worry about zombies, but if anything like a hurricane, a flood, or job loss happens, we should be good for awhile.

UPDATED: A man arrested for wireless piggybacking

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m totally in love with my new laptop. I know it’s not really that fancy (no BlueTooth, etc), but it’s been extremely liberating to take my work/play on the road. Nev, for instance, is taken with his tablet PC, but I’m pretty good with the keys and I’m against the smudge marks on the display =)

Shortly after getting the laptop, I installed a Wireless-B (cheaper, older) router in my place, thus enabling myself to roam freely. Of course, I threw a security key on the connection, however …

… apparently, there are people in town who don’t know how or don’t want to secure their routers. That top unsecured connection was snached up by my laptop while I was driving through town. I did not realize how many people actually live in wi-fi enabled households! It was a complete shocker to see how many people ran unsecured wi-fi!

So I surfed the net for a little bit while being parked next to a few houses, and bookmarked a few addresses with strongest signals on my Google Earth globe for future reference.

Then I did the first thing any IT person would do when (s)he sees an unsecured wi-fi network named linksys or netgear: open browser, punch in 192.168.1.1. When the login prompt came up, I punched in admin for login and password (or blank) for password.

Voila …

… I’m inside their router. I can do whatever the hell I want now, like knock out their Internet alltogether (by changing one digit in the DNS), or create a secured connection for one’s own hypothetical dirty deeds. Of course, their cable hookup would still work, and they could hook their computer up by bypassing the router and going straight to the cable modem. However, if it’s some computer-illiterate Joe Blow’s apartment, is he really going to find that router setup CD, reset the router by holding reset button for 5 seconds, and re-run setup? Yeah, right.

So perhaps he gets a flyer the next day saying something like, “Internet stopped working? A new superscary deadly credit card-stealing virus is going around!” and advertising a quick $29.99 fix … Too sleazy for your taste? It could happen …

The lesson here is this – always secure your wi-fi connection. It’s not that much more complicated to create a meaningful 10-digit key, though you must use hexadecimal base (numbers 0-9, letters A-F). The router wants to assign a complicated key, like A7C0BF96D4, but you can always make up your own by visiting Scrabble Dictionary and punching in ABCDEF into their word builder. Good key components abound – ACE, BAD, BADE, BEAD, BEEF, CAFE, DEB, DEAF, FAD, FADE, FACE … Why not secure your network with a cool, easy-to-remember and give-out-to-friends key like BADACEDEAD, or DECAFFCAFE?

How do you turn this runoff into a decent drink?

You filter it many times through your faucet charcoal filter. And by ‘many’ I mean about 50.

I built this little contraption out of a two-liter plastic bottle and three styrofoam plates. Of course, a container with an outflow hole the size of the diameter of the charcoal filter would be nice, but I didn’t have the luxury of looking around for parts – I needed to quickly turn Mohawk Rum into something drinkable.

I poured the liquor into the filter. The liquor collected around the filter in the top plate and seeped through the sides of the filter into the bottle.

Any leakage went into the bottom plate.

So did it work?

Oh yes. The nasty burning taste of ass is gone, and the liquor is very much smoother. Judging by its original taste, Mohawk people distil this rum out of street garbage, so I couldn’t turn it into a high-class rum. However, this method does work. Guys on Mythbusters ran their cheap liquor through a pitcher charcoal filter 6-7 times, but I went full 50.

Now I must retire to the living room and degustate.

I’ve been recently asked to take a look at a couple of servers at a friend’s friend’s small business. He seemed to be doing ok until I actually spoke with him.

It appeared the big thorn in his side was the IT, surprise, surprise. At first, VISA and MC decided that the merchants weren’t secure enough, so they instituted a mandatory software and hardware upgrade. Then the Point-of-Sale software people decided to do their own compliance upgrade, which would probably require upgrade of workstations AND the servers.

To make matters worse, the tech support on one of his software suites ended in May 2005. He’s about to do a major (forced) upgrade requiring extensive tech support. The helpdesk lady said it would be $500 to renew support up to May 2006, then another $500 from May 2006 to May 2007. Yeah, they do it in a retroactively-continious fashion.

Of course, everything would be an out-of-pocket expense for my friend. We’re taking several thousand, like, pushing ten grand. The problem just plopped on his lap, there, you’re out ten grand.

Thus, in the spirit of streamlining the IT, I walked around the location and took notes.

What surprised the most was not the crazy hodge-podge of random workstations homebrewed from all kinds of weird componenets, most stuck in PCI slots and attached to cases by bent paperclips. Neither it was the lack of personnel’s ambition to learn anything about these machines and how they operate. Neither it was a random DHCP router desperately handing out duplicate IPs while being stuck in a switch on the network with all static IPs (yeah, I know).

It was the utter and complete lack of backups. We’re talking, no one has a concept of backing up data.

My friend quickly understood that if his old AMD-K6 Point-of-Sale server blows a power supply and send the hard drive to hell, his business would literally stop. So I suggested getting an external SATA drive, a USB 2.0 enclosure, a copy of Acronis – a pretty good insurance policy for around $200.

He signed. I was just another IT guy trying to beat money out of him “for his own good”. Everywhere he looked, the evil IT folk was trying to shake money off him.

I thought about it, and agreed with my friend. Why is there a need to upgrade if everything is working beautifully? Why are these small business owners forced to pay for upgrades they don’t need?

On that discussion-stimulating note, I’m going to wrap up some quick affiliate marketing news and hit the sack.

• Basement Flooded site appears to be highly lucrative in terms of per-click revenue, not total revenue (yet). While my 300SD site is lucky to break $0.10 per click, the basement site can rake in a couple of bucks. It’s not indexed by Google yet.
• I wrote some php scripts for this site to display revenue. To show correct figures, I pull a couple of figures off AdSense and update them manually every day through FTP. Why? Keeps the site fresh as far as search crawlers are concerned.
• I decided to do an experiment. I will not promote my How To Be Metal site AT ALL (see? no link). I want to see how long it takes to build an audience with no promotion whatsoever by doing a post every 2-3 days.
• V for Vendetta is a very sweet movie. I happened to see it on an IMAX screen, so I was doubly blown away. You really have to go see it.
• You thought I was sleazy with my Basement site? You’re wrong. Check out this sleazeball.

Peace.