A Day Late

This was a busy week of house hunting. We have gone through so many houses, some nice and some not so nice. The problem is going to be choosing one. We have found about four or five that we really like, so now we have to put some offers on them and see what happens. We are concentrating our search in an area called Highlands Ranch, which we both really like. Denver is really cold, similar to Utah. We are supposed to be out of our hotel by Tuesday and we are looking at an Extended Stay type place but haven’t found one yet. Jeff also found some furnished apartments that we could do on a month to month basis, so we will see.

GO NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS!!!

Ok, so my new years resolution is to be more faithful at updating this blog. For those few of you who still check this, I will try to do better. 2007 was a year of changes for us. Jeff finally got his dream job (I think most of you know what it is!) and has been in training in Virginia since last August. He just got done this week and it is good to have him home. Being apart for so long was hard, but we got through it. He had a graduation which was really cool, and he is now official. We spent Christmas in Boston with my family and had a fun time. We now head to our first assignment in Denver Colorado, and we are both really excited. I spent some time house hunting there last month and found a few that I liked, but there are a few other areas that we want to look at as well. We will be staying in temporary housing until we decide on a house. Luckily for us, the housing market is poor so we should have no trouble buying a house. We hope that everyone had a good holiday and has a great 2008!!!

For all 2 (if not less) of you who check this web site here’s a little update. Ciara’s busy with work and school and I’ve been keeping myself busy with work, the gym and trying to finish our basement. The basement has been a fun little project and was an excellent excuse to buy some great power tools (Christmas came early this year, at least for me).

I’ve been busy with work this past month but things might slow down just a little in October. When I’m not at work, it seems like I’m either at the gym, or working on the basement. Over the past year I’ve been able to improve my fitness level quite a bit. I’ve even become one of those people that I thought I’d never become…one who likes running. I’m now to the point where I actually miss running on the days I don’t have time to do it. Now, if I would start eating healthier I might be in really great shape :).

As for our future plans, we’re still waiting to hear on a few things. Well…one major thing in particular. Hopefully we’ll hear something in the near future (next month?) but it seems like I’ve been saying that for 6 months now. In the meantime we have plenty of things to keep us busy. When we hear something, I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

I updated our photo gallery software and also uploaded a few new photos. I also locked down the gallery a little and to see most of the photos, you’ll need a login. For those who’d like to see all the photos, go ahead and register a username. It’s not very hard and I’ll give you access to the rest of the photo gallery.

That’s it for now. I’ll try and be a little more diligent about updating the site and uploading photos. I created a login for Ciara to update the site, so maybe we’ll see a post from her in the near future.

Some people have been asking me when/where are the wedding pictures. Well…unfortunately the photographer didn’t give us digital copies of the pictures. We only have one set of little 3 x 4 prints. Apparently we’re supposed to choose the ones we like and “order” the sizes we want. Is it just me or does this sounds like an out dated way to do things? Wouldn’t it be better to charge a flat fee for all the negatives or digital images? Or at least let us purchase the rights and abilities to reproduce the select photos we do like?

Ordering reprints of the ones we like now is fine, but what’s going to happen in ten years when we’d like copies and the photographer is dead, moved or who knows what? A wedding day is easily one of the most important days in someones life, shouldn’t they have the right to reproduce the memories of that day if they need or want to? I’ve taken many pictures over the last few years. Vacations, interesting things I’ve seen, all sorts of pictures. All of which I have the ability to have printed anytime I like. But my wedding pictures? Nope…I’ve got to track some guy down, who lives on the other side of the continent (to make things worse) and order my pictures from him. If this is the price of “professional” photography I don’t think I have much use for it. If I had it to do over again, I think I would have had a bunch of people snapping pictures with digital cameras. Out of all the results I’m sure we could extract a few good ones to remember the day. Sure they might not be as high a quality but at least we’d have the ability to save and reproduce them if our prints get damaged or destroyed.

Enough complaining…if I can get access to a scanner in the near future, maybe I’ll try and scan a few of the 4 x 3 prints in.

Here’s a handy firefox tip that enables handling urls with line breaks in them. This is particularly useful for those of us still using Outlook, which seems to improperly wrap URL’s quite often.

Here’s another Mozilla/Firefox tip: if you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:

user_pref(”editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines”, 3);

to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.

The past few days I’ve been following an interesting story about a software engineer named, Mike Lynn, who gave a presentation at the recent Black Hat conference. The presentation contained information about a vulnerability in the Cisco operating system (Cisco routers power most computer networks and the majority of the internet). Lynn didn’t disclose how to exploit the vulnerability; his purpose it seems was to make people aware of the vulnerability and its seriousness.

As a result he was forced to quit his job and is now facing legal action from Cisco. There’s an interview with Lynn posted HERE. It’s interesting and I’d recommend it to everyone, not just techies. I’m having a hard time figuring out why Cisco and ISS (Lynn’s former employer) had a problem with his presentation. If he had included information on how to exploit the vulnerability and take over the routers then I could understand their motivation to keep him quiet. But going after him just for making everyone aware that there was a vulnerability? Come on!

I came across the story HERE as I was browsing Bruce Schneier’s, Schneier on Security weblog. His entry includes several more links about the story and information about a legal defense fund setup for Lynn. Schneier comments:

…Hackers are working overtime to reconstruct Lynn’s attack and write an exploit. This, of course, means that we’re in much more danger of there being a worm that makes use of this vulnerability.

The sad thing is that we could have avoided this. If Cisco and ISS had simply let Lynn present his work, it would have been just another obscure presentation amongst the sea of obscure presentations that is BlackHat. By attempting to muzzle Lynn, the two companies ensured that 1) the vulnerability was the biggest story of the conference, and 2) some group of hackers would turn the vulnerability into exploit code just to get back at them.

I agree.

At work, this past week, I noticed an issue of Business Week that highlighted some online law enforcement issues. The articles were ok, but it sounds like interesting work. The articles are currently still available online: Hacker Hunters and Meet Cyberspace’s Head Fed.

I’m not sure if anyone is still reading this weblog, since I haven’t updated it in over two months, but according to the logs it appears a few people are still looking at it. The last few months have been pretty busy with the wedding planning, work and well…other things.

The wedding day is almost here. A week from today we leave for Boston where we’ll be staying with my fiance’s parents in Concord, MA. We’ll catch the Red Sox game on Friday and then get married on Saturday morning with a reception that night. We’ll spend the next week in Cancun (can’t wait) then it’s back to Utah and back to work. For the Utah folks we’ll be having another reception on the 18th.

It’s been an exciting few months and this summer shouldn’t be any different. Unfortunately, with all the things going on, I don’t think I’ll be able to get much fishing in. Then again, with how high and muddy the rivers are, even if I had time I don’t know if it’d be that good. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a few rounds of golf at Hobble Creek in but until I pass a physical fitness test in July, for a new job I’m looking into, I think my main focus will be running and working out at the gym. Even after running several times a week for the last 2+ months I still dislike it. I wonder if that will change over time or if it will forever seem like necessary punishment.

For those of you who have expressed disappointment that I haven’t posted any pictures of my fiance, sorry. I’m just not sure how much access I want to give the entire world into my personal life. Post pictures of my dog…sure, fiance…hmm, I dunno. Anyway, after we get back maybe I’ll post a few wedding pictures (with permission of the better half of course ). Hopefully that we’ll keep everyone happy.