Pansy or Victim?

So unfortunately some who I [used to] follow over on @frednecksec cited an article over on prisonplanet.com which allowed me to check out the cool sponsors such as the one pictured above but don't forget Silverlungs.

To each his own, I inhaling gaseous gold myself. Much better preparation for the "End Times," the "New World" or whatever the "elites" have in store for us.

Grampa, where did you live during the "Long Depression" that started in 2008?

Richard Florida's article How the Crash Will Reshape America captures a lot of what has been on my mind (and occasionally blogged about) since we left Skokie last June. 

From the packing up and leaving what my son called "best house ever" (the shaky footage is his) without a sold sign out front to some motel thoughts on the trip to premonitions of the impending collapse back to July (more specifically the non-sustainability of suburban sprawl) to the "discussions" my wife share on how long we should rent and when and where we should buy a common thread is that where you live matters.

It matters a lot. A hell of a lot. Your future may depend on it.

In October, less than a month after the financial markets began to melt down, Moody’s Investor Services published an assessment of recent economic activity within 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Three hundred and two were already in deep recession, and 64 more were at risk. Only 15 areas were still expanding. Notable among them were the oil- and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas and Oklahoma, buoyed by energy prices that have since fallen; and the Greater Washington, D.C., region, where government bailouts, the nationalization of financial companies, and fiscal expansion are creating work for lawyers, lobbyists, political scientists, and government contractors.

Back in September, in the early days of the of the financial crisis, I thought about it a lot as I would look out into the Catoctins from the little park in our subdivision while my kids played (oblivous to what was on the radio) and I started to feel the first hint of Fall, that reminded me of 1987, my first Fall back in the states after living in Malaysia for 2 years. 

It was scary. With dozens of showings since our house went on the market on April 15th, 2008 yet not a single offer the constant talk of the forelosure crisis on the NPR, to say that it was stressful, it was an understatement.

Why did we buy in Chicago when we did? Why did we buy in one of the most overpriced suburbs on the Chicago North side? Well, because we couldn't afford Evanston or Winnetka and because of Skokie's diversity. We did not want our adopted Chinese daughter to be "the Chinese girl" in her pre-school class. Yes the schools were full of industrious recent immigrants. Immigrants that didn't care for the red brick Cape Code with the master bedroom where I sometimes bumped my head on the ceiling or the hardwood floors. All they wanted was space.

Multiple generations would fill the ugliest split level boxes you can imagine adjacent Crawford or Dempster. We heard from our realtor only the split levels were selling and how the demographics of the visitors were "different" (she was trying to abide by some regulations)  between our house and the those on nearby streets. Yes, so much was different between Austin and Skokie. Our first house two blocks from North Lamar (and where you could hear the music from Threadgills) sold on the first day. Those were different times and different places. 

Mostly white folks in their late 20s and early 30s. The hint of pot when you walked down the streets, some which had sidewalks some that did not. Certainly a larger percentage of Gay/Lesbian couples than in our previous neighborhood in San Antonio. Small three bedroom houses (if you were lucky) built in the late 40s and early 50s during the postwar boom. Aging water mains under streets and periodic electric outages. DSL was just starting to roll out. 

I remember seeing the street literally explode in front of our house on Brentwood: the last affordable neighborhood south of Anderson lane. Stay at home moms with graduate degrees. At the Elementary School meetings I felt out of place because I was sans tattoo. If I recall, our first night in Austin was on Halloween of 1999. The dotcom boom was in still in full swing and drcoop.com still held prime real estate overlooking MOPAC. 

We sat in the swings in Pease park that Thanksgiving, childless, awaiting what would be our final referral from Russia that would arrive in a matter of weeks and we would discuss it at the Little Deli on my lunchbreak, short 5 minute drive from the Southwestern Bell office on Huntland, adjacent to I-35. 

And all that we now know was still ahead of us: the letdown of Y2K, the NASDAQ crash in the Spring (I remember a day-trading colleague who had just joined from Dell) losing a lot that spring. I joined Cisco right after the last stock split in May 20o0 and I remember someone from SBC saying something about how I "was set" and could "retire." 

Yes, Austin is/was one of Florida's poster children for these new creative cities.

Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.

The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them

Returning home right before noon on that fateful blue September morning in 2001 after we watched both towers Fall live in the conference room. Watching the Reserve and National Guard Intelligence units gradually get activated and a getting a call from my XO down in San Antonio saying my name was on the list to deploy to Fort Belvoir. Packing my duffel bag, sitting around the table of our retro kitchen table and trying to explain to a toddler that Dada was going to go away for a while. Of course the orders were rescinded but my son and I were baptised in the Episcopal church anyway that Fall. There was more to it than that of course, but that was Austin. 

Years later I would grow restless and leave Cisco and work (virtually) from coffee shops on Lamar, Burnet, and Anderson and from my hot home office that used to be a kitchen and where supposedly a previous resident had died.  From the heat and the solitude I would slowly go crazy and would start looking to find a new job where I could work in an office again. I would strike out in Seattle (yeah I wrote that after bombing my AMZN interview, badly) but cool clarity would come soon. 

Giving up on big West coast software companies, I dug into the SCADA Plugins and a recruiter from Hewitt called, offering crazy money, a chance to run/develop Open Source security boxes in a large company and not do vuln work which I'd grown, a sweet relocation package,  and a way to escape the Texas heat. 

* * *

We will see if it is true but one of the more important (and troubling) charactization of our current malaise, elswhere Florida says our depression has more in common with the "Long Depression" of the late 19th century than the Great Depression:

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

And on the importance of geography:

To a surprising degree, the causes of this crash are geographic in nature, and they point out a whole system of economic organization and growth that has reached its limit. Positioning the economy to grow strongly in the coming decades will require not just fiscal stimulus or industrial reform; it will require a new kind of geography as well, a new spatial fix for the next chapter of American economic history.

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age—the geographic expression of mass production and the early credit economy. Henry Ford’s automobiles had been rolling off assembly lines since 1913, but “Fordism,” the combination of mass production and mass consumption to create national prosperity, didn’t emerge as a full-blown economic and social model until the 1930s and the advent of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. 

And, among other things, the foolishness of the American Dream of owning your own house. Thank God we're still renting.

On one level, the crisis has demonstrated what everyone has known for a long time: Americans have been living beyond their means, using illusory housing wealth and huge slugs of foreign capital to consume far more than we’ve produced. The crash surely signals the end to that; the adjustment, while painful, is necessary.

But another crucial aspect of the crisis has been largely overlooked, and it might ultimately prove more important. Because America’s tendency to overconsume and under-save has been intimately intertwined with our postwar spatial fix—that is, with housing and suburbanization—the shape of the economy has been badly distorted, from where people live, to where investment flows, to what’s produced. Unless we make fundamental policy changes to eliminate these distortions, the economy is likely to face worsening handicaps in the years ahead.

Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth. Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.

But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required

Of course a lot of this (as well as the stimulus package) hinges on whether or not the era of manufacturing jobs is truly gone.

Those crisp Lincolnshire mornings

We've had snow (sort of) these last few days and I got out my warm "Chicago" coat this morning. There is a hint of dawn on the horizon. Different. Definitely. East on I-70 as the sun goes up and West as it sets. Just as before, only at home in darkness.

I forgot how refreshing the cold is. And as beautiful as the still-night sky is this morning, the moon stiill out and the last few stars, as I go warm up my car (the true thermometer, it is not really cold until your car is hard to start) I can't help but think of all those crisp blue mornings driving North on the Edens, across the spur, through the trees of Riverwoods. The jet contrails into ORD. The frozen swamps of Lake County, feet and feet and snow, the frozen lake (was it a quarry lake) and all the Canadian goose shit on stomped down sidewalks on the Hewitt campus. Bigger than you would think.

Happy times. Sad times. Mood swings. Meds changes. Mania.

Once again we approach Thanksgiving and the dreaded Equinox.

Pinned by chemistry and angle of the sun.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

It is a Frost morning

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Why Manual Whitelisting works for Kids

As I've blogged previously a few times, I use squid with a simple white list

acl goodsites dstdomain "/etc/squid/goodsites"
http_access allow goodsites our_networks

for blocking access to my kids subnet. I have a very small list of sites, mostly .gov, because after all the government would never post anything inappropriate right?

(I initially allowed the entire TLD but my son started looking up crime statistics on the FBI web site, so made it more restrictive.)

My son has spent hours on the NASA sight downloading pictures, adding them to his GNOME backgrounds (yes his desktop is Ubuntu) editing them with gimp, creating OpenOffice presentations and during hurricane Ike I added weather.com so he's become obsessed with weather. but I was looking for something new.

My wife suggested adding one site at a time so he could take his time with each site.

One of the really cool things about the national geographic website is that topic areas have distinct hostnames, so I could be more granular in terms of blocking access.

1226102204.230     54 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 735 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/fact-486-footer.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.138 image/gif
1226102204.253     73 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 521 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/feature-486-body.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.138 image/gif
1226102204.268     81 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 686 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/feature-486-footer.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.137 image/gif
1226102204.438    170 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 1276 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Global/ApplicationAssets/flash/dl-loader.swf - DIRECT/208.59.201.137 application/x-shockwave-flash

There is actually a pretty good music there, too. Lot's of world music My son is playing the Ben Harper song above over and over again.

What he doesn't remember is that he listened to a lot of Ben Harper on KGSR back in Austin. That and a lot of Lucinda Williams.

Good stuff. Good times.

Leaving Chicagoland: Reflection & Closure

With the exception of one late night blog from a motel outside Toledo while my 9-year old, two dogs, and an old cat slept soundly (well, maybe not the cat) I really haven't engaged in that much reflection (too painful), but there has been a whole lot of 2nd guessing and too much worrying.

Why did we ever leave Texas? Should we have stayed in Chicago? What were we thinking buying an expensive house in Skokie as the housing market started to tank? And on and on. As much as Illinois is and was a strange and foreign place to briefly live, a few moments stand out.

Many of these are bittersweet, like the excitement and expectation in November 2006 when we stayed in the Embassy Suites downtown and visited the Children's Museum at Navy Pier, first feeling the wind off lake Michigan, taking the news from our realtor back in Austin that we had received two nearly fully-price offers on our house back in Allandale.

Driving through the Skokie and Morton Grove streets for the first time (the mounds of leaves still piled up neatly on the side) noticing how ugly the houses were compared to Texas. The bleakness of split levels. Could we really live here?

The 3-day road trip from Texas in our new Honda van. Christmas in Vernon Hill in corporate apartments.

A year later, having survived our first winter, we would be used to it and we would experience the first amazing Spring in a temperate climate. A Spring that counts, like nothing you would see in Texas. Ever.

The long morning-sick summer of Sam, when I was Mr. Mom. The awful humidity of a Skokie August. My nerve racking first Annual Enrollment. Constantly fighting the PF bugs. Compaq. DL-380G3, DL-380G4, DL-385G1. What, no SMP? Watching state tables, interrupt load, and Intel packet drops. The Black Monday when the Internet went down that I had saw coming on a Thursday morning, helpless with my Ruby statistics monitoring scripts. DL-145s with shitty ILOs. Bill's mysterious lockups.

The bleak sickness (of a another type) of a year ago. The tense days adjacent to the birth of Sam. One too many special education meetings.

Back and forth on Dempster from the Psych unit at Advocate Lutheran to the maternity ward at Rush North Shore. On one of the darkest days my mother in law, praying, convinced that something good would come from all this. And she was right.

The fresh snowfall on the morning we would drive Sam home, greeted by two parking tickets from the village.

And some time in January when we would decide to try to move back East.

To Actually See the Sky Again!

Took the dog out one last time tonight and was surprised to actually see stars amidst the drone of traffic on I-70 and Maryland 75. Didn't I write about that in one of my first short stories, alluding to Robert Frost's lesser-known (and rather nihilistic, which somehow seems quaint approaching 40, although amazingly I got carded for a 6-pack of Shiner Hefeweizen tonight! ) poem, "Desert Places."

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Yes one more data point (as if all the white people didn't weren't enough) that we are actually back in "the country." Well, that and that the lack of the detergent-like smell that was so pervasive in Chicagoland. Like you were standing next to a dryer-vent. The air smelled like that.

Leaving Skokie

My 9 year old took these pictures on Friday.



With all this Hillary nonsense behind us, the Rustbelt never looked prettier!

Should you work where you want to live? (or vice versa)

So my oldest son is pretty nervous about our move from Skokie to Frederick and our old cat that won't die and I are the only one's that can't sleep in a LaQuinta somewhere in Ohio. This time, my son and I (and the three pets) are make the final drive from Illinois to Maryland.

As we were driving across Indiana, he asked, "Dad, how do we know we are making the right decision?"

Kids are funny that way. I have been asking myself the same question. Of course the brutally honest answer is your really never know. You have a set of data at a given point in time and you go for it. You make your best effort and you could be wrong and you recalibrate as your dataset changes. But you don't tell that to a 9 year old that is anxious enough already.

* * *

When it came time to leave College Station in 1994 we picked San Antonio because it was a large city in Texas that I sort of familiar with (I had drilled at Camp Bullis) and because it wasn't Houston or Dallas. I had lived in Houston when the Oilers had a good team and never much cared for most folks that said they were from Dallas (or Plano or Richardson) while at A&M.

We really liked Austin, but we weren't sure if we could get teaching jobs there. And we just barely managed to find jobs before September, but San Antonio was definitely not our kind of town. Eventually we started driving up to Austin almost every weekend. And finally I managed to get a job working out of the Huntland office for Southwestern Bell. Then Cisco 9 months later. And we loved it. Too bad I got sick of Cisco and working at home at Digital Bond. I tried hard for Seattle getting shot down at both Amazon and Microsoft after the on-site interviews. Then Chicago came up -- with Hewitt. We felt we needed a change. Our last Summer in Austin sucked the life out of us, old houses with weak AC's and minimal insulation -- my wife said move somewhere cooler or put in a pool. The job was good. A more security ops related role that involved Open Source and development and the money was good, so we went for it.

That was 18 months ago. I really don't know how long we would have stayed in Chicagoland even if there hadn't been the an "act of God".

Skokie was definitely a unique plassI've been meaning to blog on it and I'm sure I will in the coming months, but it really wasn't us. And I'm not sure anyplace in Chicago was, either.

* * *

So I asked my son, "What is different about moving to Maryland than when we moved from Austin to Chicago?" And I managed to get him to admit that we know people there, we have family there and "I have two friends there," he said, referring to the two girls of my Dad's executive assistant that live on a farm.

And I told him that (like Austin) we picked Maryland -- then I found a job there. I'm not sure it put his mind at ease that is good enough for me.

Keeping the Creative Juices Flowing

Not that I've needed that the last few days.



More energy drinks and 3mm contractor bags please!

How long did it take you to figure out what this commercial was about?

Maintaining Perspective

Selling a house (under any circumstances) can be stressful, but these days... Well, with bad news everyday about the economy, mortgage industry, etc. well it can be a bit much. Fortunately, little suprises can bring things back into perspective.

Tonight, as I was un-shelving books off of one of the many unfinished bookshelves we purchased from the shop on Guadalupe back in Austin (right close to 45th street) I found a copy of a A Prayer Book of The Armed Forces that I was given in November 2001 by our new church that we had just joined in Austin.

In the heady months following September 11, I watched on the web as, one by one, Army Reserve and National Guard Intelligence units were activated. Finally the call came that selected members my Information Operations unit would be ordered to Fort Belvoir. My CO (or XO, I can't remember) asked if there were any reasons I could not go. I said, "no." The events are kind of hazy but I believe my wife and I started talking with my son, not yet 3, who we still called "Kolya" at the time ( because that nickname is used in the message from a St. David's parishioner who wrote of encouragement in the prayer book) about Dada going away for a while. I remember sitting down at the retro table in our retro kitchen in our 1948 1200 sq ft house on Brentwood -- the one that sold for full price the first day on the market.

I started packing my duffle bag, looking at activation checklists, wondering if how hard it would be to get on Camp Mabry to visit the JAG office. Camp Mabry on MOPAC was not the same place I had gone to every month while in college. I notified Cisco of my impending activation and found out that I could keep my salary for a year. I believe they ended up extending it to two years (as did many companies) which was important since I was an E-6 who made just a little bit less than a Software Engineer III at Cisco.

In the end, the orders were rescinded somewhere at the Army level, and like many others who had enlisted in the last days of the Cold War for college money, I did not re-enlist. Something I feel a little bit guilty about. And over a year later, my final ETS date came and went -- a month before the stop-loss on Intelligence personnel (and aviation and special forces and more), but I always wonder how things would have turned out if events had happened differently.

A Little Post-Ikea Saturday Humor

East-west trips from Skokie to Schaumburg can be brutal. And then with three kids in the big yellow and blue (although we have discovered Smaland, thank God) but today wasn't too bad.

But watch this before they pull it down (or Youtube's CDN goes down). The last few weeks have been pretty depressing politics wise, but this is good fun.

Another I-35 Security Startup

Following my LinkedIn updates led me to CoreTrace and this great picture.

I don't wnat this guy anywhere near my endpoint. Wonder how long he'll will be the mascot? He looks like he could get a bit bitter and cling to guns (but probably not religion!) if his VC money drys up and he had to go work on 6th Street.

Then he could do shots with Hillary and drive over to College Station and go shooting near the Brazos River like I used to do back in the day. Meaning the shooting part. Nothing like a nice stream bank to unload a few clips.

But application whitelisting? And from the usual suspects (if you were anywhere close the Austin/San Antonio scene in the last decade) but speaking of Austin startups that green appliance sure looks nifty. And based on the screencast, looks a hell of a lot easier than SmartBits/WebAvalanche. What a pain!

What the hell are Midwestern Values?

I was born in Kansas (but never lived there much) but I'm at a loss for these "Midwestern Values" Hillary refers to in her attacks on Obama? Of course this infers that Obama does not have them.

Some here are some some ideas my wife and I came up with

* Insanely clean floors (or perfectly rounded shrubs)
* Taking your Christmas lights down within two weeks (or not leaving you Christmas tree in the back yard until the first day of Spring, like someone I know)
* At least 6 months of Cheerios in your pantry (or "storm cellar")
* Informing on your neighbors? (or at calling the village when your dog barks too much)
* Fascist snow day regulations (you know, the even/odd thing that cost me hundreds of dollars since I moved to Skokie)

Then of course it gets interesting if you replace Midwest with Mideast, West Coast, Southern, African, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Asian, etc.

But the good news, after Hillary's response to Bitter-gate, my wife finally thinks Hillary is evil!

Yes, I have won!

NOTE: If you are wondering about the image, that (and all sorts of other freakish things) came up when I did a google image search for "midwestern values"). If female robots are the embodiment of "midwestern values" you can count me out.

The Angry Bitter Rustbelt

So even Andrew Sullivan (about as big as an Obama fanboy as you can find) is somewhat critical of the Obama remarks about the "bitterness" working class whites. But I don't find much to disagree with in the spirt or the words themselves.

Three weeks ago we drove from Chicago to Frederick, Maryland and back. On the way East we took the Southern route down through Indianapolis (the Northern suburbs, where we stopped for dinner, seems surprisingly nicer, nicer than the Indianapolis I remember from 1980) and spent the night in Columbus, which wasn't too bad either. We drove through the old factory towns of Eastern Ohio. Down into Maryland through Cumberland, Hagerstown, then Frederick.

On the way back I accidently took the PA Turnpike (and was pleased to see my iPass worked) and it had a much different feel. Particularly around Pittsburgh, then heading North through Youngstown, then Akron, before spending the night in Cleveland. The decay was visceral. The rot. The feeling of places that have been but that no longer are. (I wish I could find a comparison between Texas and Ohio that I found somewhere, that came out during the primaries that illustrated the opposite path these two states were on, on a number of levels.)

A couple of years ago when we decided to move from Austin, were briefly considered Pittsburgh (I was entertaining the idea of trying to get a job CERT) but all the research my wife did, it seemed to be one of the most racist intolerant places in the country driven by pent up anger and bitterness (damn foreigners taking our American jobs away, since all the best jobs belong to Americans you know! We deserve factory jobs were folks make as much as MCSE's) Sure there was a haven around Universities and you could get some cool houses for relatively cheap in Squirrel Hill, but who would want to live there? Especially with an adopted Chinese daughter? Even the Episcopal Church is stuck in a time warp there.

Call me an elitist (or just nostalgic about the Great State of Texas) but these "blue collar" parts of Ohio or Pennsylvania seem scary in ways that parts of East Texas (or West Texas) are certainly not. Yes there is Jasper, but there is something different about the racism in a place that actually has minorities than what that doesn't. There is something different about states that are on a downward trajectory and those that have some life in them (the Sunbelt) with people on the move, with a horizon in front of them, people moving in, moving out, people that are not stuck between hills, along the rivers, in dying little downs with smokestacks

I think even think Illinois and the well-off North side of Chicagoland has a bit of that feel of death and rot that is hard to put a finger on unless you've lived somewhere else.

Waiting for Super Obama Ad?

So I'm guess Obama's Supposed Superbowl Ad: Join isn't going to show in IL, but look where some of the footage for this ad is shot? Yeah, that's Zilker Park. And that's the Hyatt there on the right, where I presented at in 2000 for some SBC seminar about the February DDOS attacks. That's where we (back when it was just three of us) saw Lucinda on a hot September. I'm guessing there are quite a few Obama bumperstickers in my old neighborhood. And I'm not a huge football fan but I'm pleased with the first half and of course I'm rooting for the Giants.

After watching the ad 3-4 times, what is interesting is the sense of momentum (and of a growing movement?) that it conveys in just 30 seconds. I hope this is real. There isn't that much substance to it, but for someone who is approaching 40 (and more a child of Reagan than Nixon) and only saw videos of protest marches from the 1960s, it seems to have a "60s feel" to it. And In a good way. I wonder how boomers view this ad? Do they resent Obama co-opting this imagery? Although it is upbeat, I like the deft swipe near the end:

We want something new. We want to turn the page. The world as it is, is not the world that it has to be.

Much like his platform, I do not agree with everything in the ad, but I like it anyway. This doesn't mesh with my favorite John Chambers quote from the tech crash in 2001 ("deal with the world the way it is, not the way you like it to be") but I like it anyway. I certainly do not care for the the burned out HMMV juxtaposed against privileged college kids who have not and will never don a uniform, but it is better than the sanctimonious alternative.

Yuppie Elites for Obama!

Whether or not I'm a yuppie elite, count me in!

As Hillary Clinton looks to rebound in New Hampshire, it appears one part of her strategy will be to cast Barack Obama as the favorite of yuppie elites who aren't looking for experienced leadership so much as they are wanting to ride a trend or indulge a sentiment.

I would like to not feel ill when I hear the Commander in Chief (I was enlisted) on the radio the way I did during Clinton and Bush II. If that is indulging a sentiment, sue me.

I've always wanted to know if I'm a member of the cherished Middle Class politicians alway talk about and pander to? These Middle Class folks I keep hearing about, can they be software engineers or have ever cashed in stock options or worked for Bay Area companies?

I might have been a yuppie elite when I lived in laid back Central Austin neighborhood with lots of 40-something hippie-artistic types (oh the scent of Cannabis wafting across Burnet road), but up here in Skokie on a single income, struggling to pay for overpriced housing, expensive [public] pre-schools, with a few grand in unpaid mental health bills, where I'm afraid to even drive in these old-money North Shore neighborhoods in our brand new Honda minivan. Is that "Middle Class" enough? Maybe Hill is my gal? Forgot about manufacturing, will Edwards should fight to keep my high paying security job from being outsourced to an MSSP? No, I don't want a damn thing. I just want government (and the executive branch, because Congress is a lost cause) to have the appearance of being civil and competent. That's all I ask.

Only 12 Beds? (and "the West" of Jack Burden)

Call me crazy, but you'd think childhood psychiatric units in major hospitals on the rich, white side of the third largest city in America would have more than 12 "beds" each for inpatient care. But that seems to be a magic number. Wonder how they came up with that? Highland Park, Lincoln Park, and Park Ridge. Like hell I'm driving down to Rush or even bothering to give them a call. No room in the inn. One of the more surreal experiences: "we've got 20-30 kids in the emergency room, it's the crazy time of the year." Tell me about it.

I remember being surprised hearing about the low number (maybe less than a 100) of "beds" (are these "beds" individual rooms or two neat rows of six where they strap screaming kids down) available in post-Katrina New Orleans (and all the mayhem that ensues), but I guess that is the state of mental health care system in America. Which is something I've been meaning to blog on for a while, cause I've got some stories to tell. And folks think the "normal" health care system is messed up?

But things are strangely peaceful as I struggle to assemble cheap Ikea dresser, in preparation for the baby (my daughter urging me to get back to work) listening to the title track Lucinda Williams latest album:

Who knows what the future holds
Or where the cards may fall
But if you don’t come out west and see
You’ll never know at all

I look off in the distance
And blow a kiss your way
The thousand miles between us
Will disappear some day

I watch as all the starling
Fly in from the north
The beating of their wings
Echoes the beating of my heart

I sleep out in the desert
Under the stars above
And keep making an effort
To wander in your love

Who knows what the future holds
Or where the cards may fall
But if you don’t come out west and see
You’ll never know at all

Every time I hear this song I think of the 6:00 AM American "Nerd Bird" flight from Austin to San Jose. Leave Central Austin by 4:00 AM and be in your first meeting on Tasman by nine as the poor suckers are stuck in traffic on the 101. I loved those flights up over the Hill Country, over the flat West Texas plains, over the Rockies, over the Central Valley, then that last worn line of mountains before that scary approach over downtown. Peace in the sleepy silence of a Super 80. Catch a bit of shut-eye and wake up for an crystaline ice cream sundae if you were lucky enough to upgrade to first class.

That is the west and this westward movement was as close as I've come to Jack Burden's road trip in All the King's Men. And this rainy late Fall/Early Winter evening (the orange leaves, as bright as inthat fight scene between Maggie Cheung and Ziyi Zhang in Hero, neatly raked into piles on the narrow Skokie streets) is as about as far from the West as you can be.

Quick Thoughts on 170th Diocesan Convention

So it is unfortunate (but not terribly surprising, since most of the time I've had personal experience on some topic that has made it into the mainstream press, they get it wrong) that the headline summing up the two days of the 170th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago was "No Lesbian Bishop for Chicago Diocese." The AP news stories on the topic cast the election of the Rev. Jeff Lee as a vote for "the moderate."

But having been at the convention, I don't buy either of these. Moderation maybe, but the tone of the election (and the convention) didn't seem overtly political to me. True, the broader concerns of the Anglican Communion were in the background, bubbling under the surface but the results did not send a strong message (nor should they, in my opinion, either way --) on the ongoing strains over human sexuality and the consecration of openly gay/lesbian bishops.

Although she was an impressive candidate (and she was in my "top 3"), the Very Rev. Tracy Lind just did not make the cut. And this not only means the complex mix organizational/leadership skills, spirituality, the right personality, training and experience -- but the political savvy necessary to build alliances and campaign. I really doubt the final result would have been different if she had not been a lesbian, although it might have taken more ballots and we wouldn't have been through by 2:30 on Saturday afternoon.

This is not only based on the convention but from attending the "walkabout" in Lake Forest last month, where the 8 candidates for the 12th Bishop of Chicago gave short keynotes then entertained questions from members of the diocese in small breakout sessions. In the words of Petero Sabune (who I shifted my vote to in the 2nd ballot, after voting for Lee in the initial ballot) gays and lesbians are "already on the bus." The decision has been made. Some Episcopalians might be uncomfortable with it, but in the parish's I've attended, it is a done deal, they are in. Views on human sexuality was simple not a differentiating issue (at least based on their statements and the way they answered questions) of any of the 6/8 candidates I heard speak.

Some previously disclosed Cisco CLI Vulns, the joys of youth hockey practice, and fuzzing like a ninja

The highlight of my Sunday is my son's hockey practice at the Skatium here in Skokie. Among the more amusing things that almost always happen:

• One of the parents (who acts & looks like a coach, but I don't think he is) arguing with the real coach about religion (the parent is a Christian, probably fundamentalist, and the coach is Jewish, I assume)
• Eight and nine year olds tripping and falling on the ice and occasionally doing some nasty checks on each other (usually unintentionally)
  
• The previously mentioned parent (who is out on the ice for some reason, has a flattop and is a damn good skater) doing "hockey stops" (resulting in a shower of ice fragments) in the faces of kids. Today he also banged on his son's knee with his stick shouting "knee's can't get hurt" while his son was flat on his back, not wanting to get up.
  

All Good stuff. But other than that (and the upcoming election of the 12th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago , today I've been sort of been fixated on CLI vulnerabilities after my last blog entry on the futility of router vuln work in 2008 and Thomas's Quarterly Affirmation (reversing IOS images is not an option for a whole lot of reasons) so I was curious what was out there:

In cisco-sa-20060712-cucm we see this

The CallManager CLI provides a backup management interface to the system in order to diagnose and troubleshoot the primary HTTPS-based management interfaces. The CLI, which runs as the root user, contains two vulnerabilities in the parsing of commands. The first vulnerability may allow an authenticated CUCM administrator to execute arbitrary operating system programs as the root user. The second vulnerability may allow output redirection of a command to a file or a folder specified on the command line.

And in cisco-sa-20010131-arrowpoint-cli-fs

The Cisco CSS11000 must be configured to permit command line access to users by providing a management address and defining user accounts. Once command line access is gained by non privileged users (defined user accounts without administrative privileges), running a command requiring a filename, and providing a filename that is the maximum length of the input buffer can cause the switch to reboot, and a system check to be started which will prevent normal function of the switch for up to 5 minutes. The show script, clear script, show archive, clear archive, show log, and clear log commands are capable of causing the CSS to restart if the specified file name is the maximum length of the input buffer. Cisco Bug ID CSCdt08730.

And from cisco-sa-20060719-mars

The CS-MARS CLI is a restricted shell environment which allows authenticated administrators to perform system maintenance tasks. The CLI contains several privilege escalation vulnerabilities which may allow shell commands to be executed on the underlying appliance operating system with root privileges. These vulnerabilities are documented by Cisco bug IDs CSCsd29111 ( registered customers only) , CSCsd31371 ( registered customers only) , CSCsd31377 ( registered customers only) , CSCsd31392 ( registered customers only) and CSCsd31972 ( registered customers only) .

And Cisco Security Response: Cisco IOS Reload on Regular Expression Processing

Some regular expressions that make use of combined repetition operators ('*' or '+') and pattern recalls ("\1", "\2", etc.) into the same expression may result in a stack overflow on the Cisco IOS regular expression engine. A stack overflow will result in a reload of the device.

Given the ubiquity of dumb (IOS-like) shells on network devices (and not just on Cisco boxes), it would appear that this might be fertile ground for a tool that:

• Allowed you to connect to various transports (SSH, Telnet, serial)
• Obviously support authenticated/unauthenticated sessions and configuration modes
  
• Using built in command expansion and help documentation, map out the various commands (and their syntax) depending on the helpfulness of the shell you could probably prepopulate various payloads for common configuration parameters that have to be parse (IP addresses, netmasks, hashes, etc.)
  
• Could leverage some existing fuzzing/fault injection framework so you would have to generate control characters, malformed arguments, and other sequences
  

Although this is sort of intriguing, I doubt I have the time to pull this off. And if I've managed sketch up this idea, somebody has probably already written a tool like this somewhere. And if not, it would certainly be a more useful project than what they are teaching the kidz these days at Berkeley. Of course I'm probably just bitter that I couldn't get into any dept. there, let alone that one. Yeah some parent's hard-earned cash is going towards having their little one learn how "fuzz like a Ninja."

But I didn't Work All Weekend!

Although I did spend way too much time near Lincolnshire both days. And yeah my daughter's bangs have almost grown out after her "scissor work" during the summer.