Grimm's weblog

I have to admit that new iMac is damn sexy with it's lack of wires, and everything built into the display. I wish I could get a PC that sexy dagnam it!! Although with proper hardware inside, because those cute 1.6ghz CPUs are fine for mac users, but I need a little more beef in my integer crunching processor.

I'm goin to write something brief here, and will expand on it with a photo diary of the days events later on.

So briefly: The Convention was damn cool. This year they added a dedicated Horror section, to go along with the traditional comic/sci-fi/anime/toys sections.
Jason, Pinhead, George Romero, Leatherface, the list of movie mosters on hand to met, and get photos of, was awsome.
The place was so packed with people that I think next year they need to find a bigger venue. We spent pretty much the whole day going through the toy and horror section, with a bit of left over time in the sci-fi area where I saw Mr. Sulu, Worf, Geordi, and Chewbaca!

The hilite of the day, nay the month, nay the year, was meeting scream queen Misty Mundae! She's awsome! AWSOME I SAY!! And as cute in person as she is on film, even if she was wearing some ugly ass dress, she still looked good enough to eat (Misty vampire movie pun, fully intended).

Driving home from Younge & Eglington. I went down Younge to Lakeshore, then took Lakeshore to Islington. In the course of that 50min drive here is what I found:

729 wi-fi networks
I captured 9684 packets
52% of the access points were secure
48% were wide open!!

Tools used: Kismet, and Ethereal on Knoppix 3.4 with my Linksys WPC55AG card.

The most memorable SSID names I saw were: Phatpipe @ Lakeshore and Bathurst (open network), and Fuck You (open network) @ Lakeshore and Royal York.

There were also an alarming amount of access points set to factory defaults.

It was a fun nerdy drive home.

The story with my new MP3 car stero is as follows. Thurs after work I said to Jcloth "Hey wanna come down to 2001 Audio with me? I'm going to go get my MP3 deck". He said "sure", and off we went to the 2001 near work. Before leaving though, I burnt an mp3 CD so that I could throughly test out the decks.

Once at the store we put each deck through rigorous testing before settling on 2 likely candidates. While I did a few more tests to check the .m3u (playlist) capabilities, of the decks, that son of a bitch went and purchased the deck that I was going to get.

So if anyone is wondering why we now, both have, the same car deck, it's because he's a copy cating son of a bitch. Needles to say, it sounds much better in my ride anyways. Nooch!

[place holder] product review/opinion coming soon

Naturescapes.net has a good introductory article on the Shadow/Highlight tool in Photoshop CS.

This feature is useful in obtaining detail on severely underexposed subjects with strong backlighting or in correcting slightly over-flashed or overexposed subjects. Images where fill flash or neutral density filters were not an option upon capture can also be greatly improved.

I'll start by confessing that I'm no linux-ologist. Sure I can get around a bash shell, and can run ssh and dig commands. But compiling and mounting and doing other such complex things is way beyond my scope.
So keep that in mind when I say that I'm extremely proud of myself for figuring out these 4 lines that got Kismet running properly with my Linksys WPC55AG 802 card:

su
ifconfig ath0 up
iwconfig ath0 mode monitor
kismet -c madwifi_ab,ath0,linksys


Thats all you need to get some packet-sniffing action happenin' with the Linksys in Knoppix 3.4. Now I'm ready to start cracking certain 802.11g networks... you know who you are, you stupid networks!!

This past friday Monty got realy sick, we took him to the vet where they did several tests and xrays and things and sent us of with some antibiotics for him. Which seemed to help because on Sunday night he was running around all spazzy, like his usual self. He even tried to steal my sandwhich, which he's prone to do.

On monday he had to go back in to the vet again because they had found something weird near one of his kidneys. So he had to go in for exploratory surgery. During which they found a large tumor on one of his kidneys. It was pretty big in size, but the doctor said that it looked like he had gotten it all off, so we were relieved. The doctor called my sister and said that Monty was out of surgery and was doing well, he was recovering and we could go pick him up that night.

But sometime after that phone call he passed away. Before any of us got to see him. He died all alone in that damn hospital without anyone that he knew there. If the fuckign vet had told us to come see him right away, and not that "come later he's recovering" crap, then we would have had a chance to see him before he died. But nope, he didn't say that, and so at 6 years old Monty, passed away in a small recovery room all by himself, poor little guy.

[addendum]
Looking back I recognize that I was pretty harsh with the vet. That was just because I was really pissed of with him at the time.

If he had not told us that Monty was doing well when he got out of surgery, then I would have rushed down there as soon as he called. But no, instead I was out in the middle of nowhere while my sister and mom went to get him, because I thought he was doing alright and was coming home soon.

So this is what happened after the doctored called to tell us Monty was fine. He came out from the anaesthesia and was doing well, but then he just suddenly started coughing and wouldn't stop. The doctor tried massaging his lungs, or some such, but because his body is so tiny it was really hard for the doctor to do anything else without hurting. When my sister and mom got there they were told he just died, and apparently even the doctor was crying. He was still warm when they went in to see him. But again I was nowhere near there at the time because I had been told he was doing fine, and so I had gone off to do something while they picked him up, and so I missed out on even seeing him after it happend, and I feel terrible. All this after he was looking and acting fine earlier in the day, the last thing I did when I saw him was kiss his little head, which I guess is as good enough a last memory as any, but I'm still pretty damn sad.

Monty in the kitchen

Monty waking up from a nap

Monty caught in the act of stealing a pastry

Monty taking a nap

Nominated by mycophile, seconded by Bashtard and approved by Grimm. We now welcome Spiky, the first non-Swan person to tribe.noizex.com

"May all your disgraces be, uh, private"

What's up with that?

Today after a checking out the crappy Doom 3 preformance on my laptop and doing some rdf/xml work over at DC's and before going to the movie, we went over to the driving range to shoot a bucket.

Now let me tell you something, I have a wicked bad wrist from all of the *ahem* mouse gestures and such from all my computer work. Also I've never "hit a bucket" at a driving range, or for that matter ever swung a golf club, except to hit someone, and thats more of a clubing motion.

So ya, I crappily hit the balls, and even got a few to the 100 yards line. All was good, and I had a fun time. Then, when I was on my way to the theater, I picked up a bottel of water that I had on the passengers seat, well tried to pickup, because as I lifted it off the seat the damn thing just dropped right out of my hand! I lost all muscle control, twas freaky indeed. It's now better but still fucked up. I can't make a fist. and even writing now is screwing with me. I hope it's better when I wake up.

If you liked Dude Where's my car? enough to buy it on DVD and make a habit of watching it every few months, then trust me, you'll like this movie. For the rest of you lame asses: The HELL with you! Go watch Anaconda or something.

I'll leave you with a choice quote from the movie, that I never thought I'd hear on screen: shotgun anal!

Doom 3 is out and my pathetically underpowered box is not able to handle it (I got 1-4 fps while running it!). Looks like I'm just going to stare at the box on my shelf and wait till I pick up my new gear... hopefully in a week or so.

So to commemorate the event of not playing the newly released DooM 3, here is a nice picture I put together.