Tying the last two posts together: something funny. Eben emailed me to tell me that he showed up in Charles's photo essay in picture 4 (Childish) on the left in the Georgetown Hoyas baseball cap .

I've chosen to republish (for a considerably smaller audience) a recent new release recommendation by Aquarius Records : "Daddy's Curses". As they say, "The disc is exactly as the title implies, a recording of someone's father cussing his brains out." As someone who had a prolifically swearing repairman for a dad, this one is as sweet and sentimental as they get.

"Double fucking bullshit. Mother fucking dog licking god damn bullshit. Nuts. Phooey and nuts...AND phooey, AND nuts."

RealAudio clip: "Excerpt 1"
RealAudio clip: "Excerpt 2"

Buy from them. Buy the Extra Glenns CD. The new assault on your boredom by Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and Nothing Painted Blue's Franklin Bruno.

Also, in the time-honored blog tradition of "linking to crap I like", are some new photos by Charles Peterson at neumu.

I found this set of links because John Darnielle writes reviews for neumu and, along with a few other things, he is the greatest music-related writer on the planet. I dare someone to top him. Witness a recent rant about Radiohead on Last Plane To Jakarta:

I am at sixes and sevens trying to figure out how critic after critic could have listened to this record and not come away disturbed and filled with dark wonder. I am fairly confused as to how it came to pass that at least one critic, hearing "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box," didn't put on a '40s style reporter’s hat with a little "press" card sticking out of its band and immediately wire the editor: NEW RADIOHEAD ALBUM STOP THREAT TO GLOBAL EMOTIONAL WELLBEING STOP SONGS LIKE RUBIKS CUBES WITH COLORS SANDED OFF STOP PLEASE SEND RYE WHISKEY NOW STOP.

Reply by Eben Carlson to my email request:

Tell me something that you did that I can be proud of.

davep

I called up my friend ______ ________, took him out to lunch, told him what the future of commerce looks like and asked him for $80,000 to release The Love Artist based on that model. (This was Monday, I've already asked people for upwards of three million for White Gold. And I've attempted to recruit at least six people to run the shit.)

I got a rejection letter from Chronicle Books. I went to my fourth Pilates class. I went swimming at the Y (that was a few weeks ago). And I sent my mom peanut brittle for her birthday and it got there the day before (I'll share the glory with the United Postal Service for that one). And it was wrapped.

I responded to the question "What do you want to do in NY" with "Get famous and improve Western culture", I got up at 3:48 yesterday, I'm living off of credit cards but still drink Odwalla, I arranged and went to a photo shoot w/Charles to get the cover of my book, I've steeled my despair to not care about the opposite of what it wants to not care about, I've assumed a leadership role with myself, I'm wearing an ironed dress shirt (pink, no less) and good shoes, I e-mailed back my brother the same day I recieved his e-mail, I'm making one phone call I don't want to per day, and I cook almost all of my own food.

I'm proud, tired, lonely, and broke as a motherfucking joke.

Oh--maybe the best one--I went to a party last Saturday that was a talent show and even though I knew everyone else would be doing drunk shit like eating marshmellows with their toes, singing baby songs, and burping the alphabet, I read a poem that I cared about. I also met with a gallery, showed them my drawings, and got three names of other gallerys to approach.

Plus I'm alive--and have made it through one of the most difficult years I've ever had.

Fuck it.

Eben

This is good news: people are sharing their Internet connections. This aint stealing DSL off your roommate -- people are publishing the location of their wireless internet-connected gateway so that if you're in the area, and you have a wireless card, you can get on the net. It's sweeping the nation. Burning Man (aka Black Rock City) has had a Wireless Access Network called PlayaNet for a couple of years now. If you're curious who's running free WAP's right now check the San Francisco Bay 802.11b Wireless Internet Access Point List

Now on the hackin tip. Remember the movie Wargames? The kid stumbled on a phone number that let him dial into the national war game simulator. It was based on a really common hacking technique. You get a list of all the phone numbers you can (white pages?) and then you program your computer to dial them and see if a there's a modem on the other side. If computer answers on the other side you then try to log into it. Some are open and some aren't. It's never been too interesting to me, I suppose in this version of panning for gold you occasionally come across something interesting but...anyhow. There's a new version of this hack called War Driving. Here's an article about people War Driving in San Francisco and another one.

I don't know about driving around all wired up like a HAM radio geek but you can sniff the air in your local area if you have a wireless card. You can use NetStumbler or AirSnort to determine if someone in your apartment building is waving their big wireless ass in the air. Once you find one, chances are that they took it out of the box, plugged it in and didn't set any security. It will be wide fuckin' open and you can packet sniff the hell out of it.

If you've never packet sniffed, (and you probably haven't), basically what you do is collect every network packet that is sent out. Normally you can only packet sniff on wired ethernet networks (in other words, a LAN -- machines that are connected by ethernet cables and a hub) but these wireless networks are ethernet-based. When you have a computer connected to an ethernet network, the card in your machine only grabs the packets that are intend for it and lets the other ones fall in the bitbucket. But a packet sniffer grabs all of them. It's kind of like if you went down to the little brown mail box on the corner and grabbed a copy of everyone's mail instead of waiting for yours to be delivered. Packets have a destination address, an originating address, some info about what kind of data it is and some data. Heck, just like a letter. That data can be the password that your Outlook client uses to retrieve your email or it can be the email itself. You can tell sniffer software to just show you every time a request from any address to any address on port 110 is made (Outlook's POP authentication) and show you what was in those requests.

Well, who cares about passwords and email anyhow. I know I don't. But it is kind of funny how you get the keys to the whole damn kingdom. This is more invasive than the normal IP-level internet hacking because when you packet sniff, you use an ethernet-level connection. Normally to snoop on this level you'd have to be attached directly (meaning, a cable from your laptop into the hub in their data center) to some ISP's net.

Hey tree house kids! Want the 2002 version of two tin cans and some string? If you have someone special in mind that you want to share the air with, why not build a couple of Yagi Antennas out of old Pringles cans?

Ok, I know two people who are interested so, in case you read Thursday's post and were wondering where the rest of it was, I tacked it on to the bottom of that post. Thanks for reading.

Wait, who am I talking to?

I don't know about you all but I feel completely lame. I think I'm going to take a shower.