qpmarl blog

The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll is a well written and entertaining book about the true story of a network administrator who tracks a hacker after discovering an unauthorized login to his system. I had given a copy (or two) of this book to Thomas, and picked it up when I was out there so that I can give it to someone else who might like it. So I started reading it again while I was there. It's really a very good story - especially if you're a big computer geek like me.

I stopped reading a third of the way through though because I went to Borders and found The Art of Intrusion by Kevin Mitnick. This is a collection of true hacker exploits and also very entertaining. This book goes into more technical detail than The Cuckoo's Egg and raises awareness of computer security holes with strategies to defend against hackers. I finished it while I was at "The Lake" in Canada. So I started another book that I picked up at Borders when I got The Art of Intrusion.

Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen A. Rago is a very large computer programming text book. It is 927 pages long - I'm currently on page 219. Unfortunately, I do not have my computer with me to try out the sample programs and exercises, but I am absorbing a lot of information from this book and It'll be a big step towards really getting back into programming. I actually enjoy reading this sort of book.

I've been vacationing at Abrams' Cottages on Desert Lake since I was two years old. Back in the old days, we used to rent a cottage for a week or two (or four). The facilities are quite rustic, but it's pretty cheap. Most of the cottages (they don't know what a "cabin" is) have outhouses and only cold running water in the kitchen sink. Two of the common weekly rented cottages have flush toilets (still only cold water). One cottage is heated (still only cold water).

We no longer rent one of the common weekly rental cottages. We've been renting from the Abrams longer than anybody. So when they decided to fix up an old house on the top of the hill overlooking the lake, they offered it to my father first and he took it. That was several years ago now.

Now we have a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house on the lake with hot and cold running water, a shower, and of course we don't have to use an outhouse anymore.

When I was a little kid, we had a pretty nice and fast speed boat. But it was no good for fishing on Lake Erie (only an hour or so from where I grew up in PA). So my dad had to get a bigger one that could handle the big waves. This boat is also a speed boat capable of towing a skier, but it's designed more for fishing - it has a smaller engine. But this is essentially the boat that I grew up with because I can hardly remember the previous one.

When my parents moved to Wyoming, making it no longer practical to haul the boat home every winter, my dad decided to store it up there over the winter. Then one time (I'm not sure exactly what the story is because I wasn't there), the boat sank. I guess it was tied up to the dock and filled with rainwater or got a hole or something and it sank into the lake. This pretty much ruined the boat. But they pulled it out, drained it, etc, and got it running and buoyant again.

But now it's a total piece of crap - partly because of the sinking and mostly because it's an old piece of crap. I've been saying that we should drive it out into the middle of the lake, fill it with concrete to sink it permanently, and get a new one. However, the boat's not really ours anymore because (I think after it sank) my dad gave it to the Abrams with the condition that we can use it whenever we're around. So I'll just let them worry about that old pile while I concentrate on procuring a new boat - a wakeboarding boat, a boat that no one would ever consider fishing from.

Here's my plan. I'll convince a bunch of my relatives who enjoy hanging out on the lake to go in on the purchase of a new boat. Everybody splits the monthly payments and it'll be less than $100 or maybe $50 per month each. The only problem is that most of the people who would enjoy a new boat on the lake don't have steady, well paying jobs.

The Lake's been awesome. I've just been doing a whole lot of nothing - and also some wakeboarding, tubing, sand castle building, reading, visiting with family and friends, etc.

I'm at the Kingston Frontenac Public Library, My brother had to do some stuff, and I decided to ride along. They have a pretty nice internet access center here.

I'm in Ohio now. We left Seattle Friday night at around midnight (Pacific Time). We drove to Denver, CO to drop off a guy, then to Ohio(where I am now).

Today we are leaving OH and going to Desert Lake, On.

We drove straight through taking turns driving and sleeping while the other drives. So we got here in like 48 hours.

We ate a lot of not-so-good truck stop style food.

We brought our bikes on a roof rack and they travelled very well, but dropped our gas mileage to about 22 miles/gallon.