Tales of Ordinary Madness

http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2008/03/28/pwn-to-own-final-day-and-wrap-up

The gory details can be read at the link above, but here is what happened.

Day One: nuffin’
Day Two: MacBook PWNED
Day Three: Vista SP1 PWNED

Last man standing and UNHACKED by the end of the 3 day contest, Ubuntu.

I’m a bit suprised the Macbook fell first… I’m not surprised that Linux stayed strong.

Wow — how time manages to slip past. I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since my last blog. A lot has happened in those two months…

First, on October 28, 2005 Jess created a most awesome Halloween costume for me. Pictures are below of Jess and I pre-party and JustBill and I at JustBill and Jaimee’s Halloween party that night:

Second, on October 30, 2005 I earned my class M endorsement from the state of Pennsylvania, which means I am now licensed to operate a motorcycle. I signed up for and completed the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course. The course was fun and challenging; I was surprised at the amount of coordination and thought that is required to operate a motorcycle. I went into it thinking it would be a cake walk, I left with a healthy respect for the art of motorcycle operating. I’m hoping that over the winter I can acquire a nice “starter” motorcycle and start riding in the spring.

Thirdly, I ran for and was elected to the board of directors for the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group. I will be serving as the Director-at-Large for the upcoming year. We’ve already had our first board meeting and I’m excited to see how things progress. We have also started a ErieLUG revival committee. I’m hoping JustBill will join the committee and help us kick-start ErieLUG again.

Maybe this is old news to everyone — but last night while visiting my local Walmart, I happened to notice that the machines that allow you to preview a CD were broken — displaying some random text on the screen. I walked over to them to take a closer look at it and low-n-behold, it appears that they are running Linux.

Admitedly it could be some other *nix variant — since I could only see a small part of the boot messages, but until I hear otherwise, I’m sticking to the story that it is Linux. I grabbed a few pics with my camera phone. The quality on my camera phone blows — so my apologies — but it was all I had.

UPDATE: JustBill has confirmed that indeed the WalMart MMS Server is running some flavor of *nix. JustBill works for a company which is a leading global technology company that does service work for Walmart and others. (so he knows!)