I've been interested in the Lets Encrypt project since I first heard about it, quite some time ago. It's a cool idea, automatic free certificates for everyone!  I've been using startcom for the majority of my personal sites, minus swbcrawler, which I purchased a cheap commercial cert for.  A few months back, Lets Encrypt finally opened up for publi use, and I giave it a little poke.  I didn't end up putting any of its certs live at the time though.

In 2011, Dave Kennedy and his crew started a little conference, called DerbyCon.  Named for its location, in Louisville, KY, it's an awesome infosec con, with a great atmosphere.  Because of the name, derby hats have been a staple. Much of the staff wear them, and many attendees also wear them.  Many of them are modified, lights, displays, whatever.  This eventually lead to a contest, in 2014 attendees were able to enter their modified derbies in the "Hack Your Derby" contest.

Yesterday, I received my long-awaited NFC ring in the mail.  And it is awesome.  Well, as awesome as you can expect it to be anyway.  I had backed them on kickstarter about a year ago, and now that they've worked through their issues, rings are coming to those who backed.  Its neat technology, and it's got some interesting uses.  At the moment all I'm using it for is unlocking my phone. 

So, years ago, I was working Technical Support for an ISP. This was late 90's, early 2000's. I was just out of business school, with a fresh Associates degree in PC Networking under my belt. At the time, computing was at what I perceived as sort of a standstill. Yea, things were progressing, but it was all just redoing the same thing better. Memory was getting cheaper every year, CPU's were getting faster, storage more affordable, OS's were being udated to newer better features, but it was all just the same muck. My 486 was replaced with a Pentium 3.

Just a little snippet. I'm working with puppet, and foreman. Im working through the Pro Puppet book from APress. In the first section, they have me create a sudo module, which will pull /etc/sudoers from a puppet file bucket, and put it in place on the agent. I was running into the following error.

The brother of a high-school friend of my wife's, is missing. He was on a camping/hiking trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the Mammoth Lake area. He was separated from his friends when his car broke down, and never met back up with them as planned. The hunch is that he went on a hike on his own while waiting for his car repair.

He's been missing for almost a month. It doesn't look good.

Fifteen years ago, I knew a teenager, who spent his evenings hacking away on his Gateway 2000 486, and his days trying to work his way around the security put in place to prevent him and his fellow students from accessing data they shouldn't. Never malicious, just curious, and thirsty for control of something.

So, my wife has a Nook Tablet. I bought it for her a little under 2 years ago as a gift, and she loves it. She's a big reader, and this thing has done a great job of feeding her addiction. Over the time she's owned it, she's asked me to install certain apps on it, some of which we just plain couldnt. See, the Nook is an android tablet, but it's extremely limited. It doesn't have the standard Android Play Store. And it wont let you install any apps not signed by Barnes and noble. Which is a shame, its a decent device otherwise.

This year's been good to us at the College, and our RedHat rep's got me and my boss on yo a panel at Summit. Talking about real-world cases where customer's have switched to RHEV. So we got to go to RedHat Summit for free, in Boston, MA. I don't travel much, so its always enjoyable to get out and see new things. I've never been to Boston, so that was an experience in itself, even though I didnt exactly have time to sight-see. Boston seems like a very nice place.

As a former cross-country runner myself, I'd just like to send my thoughts and prayers out to those affected by the Boston Maraton bombing today. Such a joyous and exciting event, destroyed by tragedy. For what?