(no subject)

What did I do this weekend?

Well, Moira and I had talked about going to see Margaret Cho at the Milwaukee pridefest. We also talked about driving out to the Bong recreational area and going for a walk in the woods. Neither of those things happened, but that's ok.

Instead, the two of us did go for a nice (and I don't mean nice in the traditional sense; I've never been big on fancy restaurants. I just mean nice) dinner at a Chinese buffet with posicat, serinthia, and todd_riverden. After stuffing myself, the group of us went back to my house where, Andrea having left for the night, the remainder of us began field-stripping a Comapq ML570 server.

( hardware talk )

Speaking of which, remembering a conversation I had with evil_dwagon about how easy it is to crack WEP keys, it occurred to me that I should probably stop talking about such things like a poseur and actually learn how it's done. A quick search brought me to the guide on WEP security and cracking on a site that, while it was heretofore unknown to me, definitely bears some future perusal: Tom's Networking.

I ended up burning a copy of an absolutely fantastic tool package contained in a bootable knoppix-based CD-ROM, the Auditor Security Collection. Loaded with innumerable interesting network utilities for both bounded and unbounded media, not to mention password utilities and other tools, this is invaluable for someone trying to learn a bit more about how the bits of a network under the surface work.

I didn't bump into the package until Sunday afternoon, but I was up 'till about eleven o' clock at night with it, learning how to hack my own wireless network. Neat stuff!

Of course, playing with all these Linux tools made me wish that I knew Linux a little bit better. I've done extremely little with it, apart from having tried installing it once or twice and never doing much else with it. So I asked Serinthia for her opinion on a good distro to start with and began downloading Suse 10.1. Which I then stopped downloading after the third disc because I got a phone call from one of our network admins indicating that I should really stop what I'm doing because if the head of the server team found out, he would be grumpy. It was stupid of me to not even consider that I might be clogging the network.

So instead, I VPNd to my home network, jumped on my server via VNC, and downloaded the last two discs onto that machine. Gotta kill catch 'em all! I was thinking about giving installation a try tonight, but it's been a long Monday: Serin would rather just head home and, while I may give it a try by myself, I may be too brain-fried to concentrate too heavily on it. We shall see. I may just set my laptop up to sniff packets through the evening and try to learn a few more Hiragana.

Oh yeah; I've started teaching myself Hiragana. Having finally fully cleaned up the computer room (did I mention I've finally got the computer room all clean?), I wanted to do something that would let me sit down and enjoy the space, so I popped in the Japanese instructional disc I bought at Goodwill a while ago. I soon found that I would either need the instructional booklet that had originally accompanied it (and that I was distinctly lacking) or a better knowledge of Japanese than I had.

I did another Google search (Google is entirely deserving of deification) and found The Japanese Page. Following along with the beginner's lessons there, I taught myself the first five Hiragana symbols: あ, い, う, え, and お, which are roughly equivalent in function and importance to English vowels. I'll see if I can get another five in my head tonight.

For some time I'd thought that I'd end up teaching myself to speak Japanese and end up learning the written form far later, if ever, so it makes me more than a little bit excited that I'm starting to learn the written form. I'm even planning to see if I can get wooisme to come with me down to Mitsuwa to see if I can find any children's books written in Hiragana that I can pick up and practice with.

Well, we're almost to Evil Bob's house, which means that I need to get into my car and give Serin a ride home. That's about all I have to say at the moment anyway, apart from the fact that I've had nine more hours that can each serve individually as a singular examples of why work sucks. I need another weekend.

*Storm curls up and tucks his tail under his head to rest for a few minutes and let the tension headache that began to make itself known around four o' clock begin to dissipate.*