George Starcher

Amazing how you lose track of people that were once really important to you.  I just found out a little over a year ago a friend passed away.  Brandon Breed was one of the few good friends I had in Junior High on into High School.  Instead of me riding the bus to school in Jr. High Brandon would get up early and come pick me up on the back of his motorcycle.  Being a scrawny geek kid I got picked on a lot by the bullies in places like the bus.  

Brandon was an amazingly well rounded individual even back then.  He was a big fan of hot seasoned foods.  I don’t remember exactly which, but he was cross breeding two varieties of peppers in his back yard.  Jalapenos and some other monstrously hot beast.  You could barely be in his parent’s kitchen when he was drying the latest variety.

One time I recall riding with him and our friend Wayne.  Some jerk of a trucker came running up on us and started forcing us onto the road shoulder.  We knew he did it on purpose because we were way ahead of the truck and could hear his engine gunning as he ran up on us.  I am not sure of the details but I was told some years ago Brandon had a bad accident.  It left him with seizures and debilitating headaches.  Also that he had moved on to Houston and spent his last time doing volunteer works.  They found him passed away and suspect a final seizure.

He was always close to his family.  And I find myself wondering how much difference Brandon would have made in my life had I kept in contact with him.  He was a very balancing force for his friends.  Maybe a number of really stupid decisions I made in college never would have happened if Brandon had been around to tell me how stupid I was about to be.  And maybe, just maybe I could have helped him when he needed it after his accident.

His family posted a tribute that I just I saw on You Tube.  Sleep well my friend.  I hope the Lord hooked you up with a really kickin bike and a long road to wind it out on.

Well.  RSA USA 2008 was an interesting experience.  It was certainly well organized.  The online tool for making your session schedule simply rocked.  I was even able to export it to iCal so I could just use my iPod touch as a pocket schedule.  

I ran into Martin McKeay the on Monday and he pulled me into a round table with Symantec at the point they were covering Data Loss Protection.  If was a fun time and thanks again to Martin.  Symantec acquired the Vontu product.  Certainly I agree that DLP is a fundamental shift change and method for controlling data loss that can only benefit us as professionals.  The problem is that it is so expensive to implement that only the largest of companies can afford it for now.  I did contribute one good question to the discussion.  I pointed out that their “quarantine” function of replacing data that might not be where it should be was not doing a secure overwrite. Data could still leak in the file slack space.  Michael Santarcangelo was fun to watch questioning the presenter and asking some hard but to the point questions.

The thing I was not overly impressed with was the normal sessions.   There certainly were some gems.  But a large number of sessions I attended the speakers just did not send me out with anything so new it excited me.  More than one session the speaker took 30-40 of the 50 minutes just to reach the topic of the session. Too much time was spent on basics.  Even some keynote speakers took time to define basic information security terms like: separation of duties.  Come on, don’t speakers at this level know to research and speak to the level of the audience?  

At least some speakers like Joshua Wright of Sans wireless training fame gave a well paced and informative talk on 802.11N security issues.  I also attended a real good session on metrics.  This is something I have already used to make some project dashboards for the big bosses at work.  It also forced me to learn more excel than I had previously.  Oh well a price for everything.  *grin*

I think one of the talks I most loved was Malcom Gladwell.  I read his book Blink over a year ago and loved it.  He was a very engaging speaker and his take on decision making is really interesting.

Most likely I won’t be going next year.  I think I can find other conferences with more consistent value to me.  I wasn’t the only one wondering where the good sessions went either.

Man. Today I was putting a core 4507R switch onto our Tacacs AAA controls. The main IT admin for that site got all fussy about what if my tacacs account is locked out and its an emergency? Did not like the answer well call the Corporate helpdesk to have it unlocked. So I had to figure out how to make only the console port ignore tacacs AAA and use the local login database instead. Here is what I had to add to the aaa commands.

1. Create a local user account under global config mode.
   username local-MYNAMEHERE privilege 15 password MYPASSWORDHERE
2. Next under global config mode
   aaa authentication login console local
   aaa authorization exec console local
   aaa authorization commands 0 console local
   aaa authorization commands 1 console local
   aaa authorization commands 15 console local
   aaa authorization console
3. Then under the console line interface
   authorization commands 0 console
   authorization commands 1 console
   authorization commands 15 console
   authorization exec console
   login authentication console

I am so bummed. My buddy Chuck Herrin is not able to get to RSA after all this year. I haven’t seen him in person in years. I will say to his credit that he is not going to cover work so his staff can go. The more experienced guy who was going to cover work with the newest guy took ill. So rather than making someone else stay Chuck is staying at work himself. That is a good boss. Doesn’t ask someone to do something he is not willing to do himself.

Anyone going? I am hoping to meet and catch up with Chuck’s guys. But this is my first time there I would love to meet some folks while I am there.

I am so looking forward to my new hardcopy of Scott Sigler’s novel Infected.  Seems like just yesterday I was listening to the original audio release of the book.  Now I am anxiously awaiting my pre-order copy from Amazon.  I think to share the love I will also use the Barnes and Noble gift card the in-laws gave me for my birthday to buy a second copy and donate it to the Linebaugh public library where I am volunteer teaching.  Of course the  Dark Overlord has no mercy even on small puppy dogs.  See what happened to my poor dog Rylie cause he overheard the current release of the new Infected novel in audio? 

It seems everywhere I go these days the stores and restaurants pester you for your zip code.  Granted it is better than hitting you up for your phone number like they did the past few years.  But I decided today to start running a test.  I am going to give out 55544 instead of just declining.  That it an invalid zip code.  Let’s see how many places do real input validation on what the person enters into their system.

Last night I decided my discretionary time would be spent on starting with xcode to get started toward my bootcamp in October.  The more I learn before then the more I will get out of the camp.  I was using Aaron Hillegass’ Second Edition Cocoa book.  Of course Apple had to change how you create and associate classes to objects in the GUI builder.  I found once I went through Apple’s own tutorial example that I was able to automatically adapt the process in the book to how xcode v3 works.   Was pretty fun once I got it straight in my head.  There is still so much to learn and I doubt I will ever be up to a professional programmer level.  I am just hoping to get proficient enough to make some ideas I have had.  Making a few cocoa front ends for some good security tools would be cool too.I want to get all the way through this second edition book.  Then the couple of others I have.  Aaron’s third edition is coming out sometime soon.  Likely, I will get that and go through it once before October. 

My birthday was last weekend.  My wife had been trying to find a Wii for me in time for it.  Well someone was smiling on me.  She nor I could find one.  Not even online that wasn’t a scam to trick you into paying $600 for a lot of stuff you did not want just to get the Wii.  Here is what I did that worked great.  We get the Sunday paper.  So I made sure on my birthday that Sunday morning I checked it before the stores opened.  Guess what?  Kmart, Toys-R-Us and Best Buy all advertised Wiis for sale.  I checked and found Kmart opened at 8am (I was reading the paper at 7:30am).  Toys opened at 10am and Best Buy at 11am. I ran down to Kmart and got lucky.  Out of 10 they got in, 5 were left when I walked out.  3 had sold before I got there at 8:30am and a kid bought one same time I did.  But it turns out my strategy of being willing to go park in front of the other stores would have worked fine too.  I went to Best Buy at 1pm to get some accessories after I had a chance to figure out what I needed.   They still had 20 left out of 100 they got in.So if you are hunting a Wii, you might try that trick with the paper and checking ahead of time which stores open when.  Then just hit them in order as they open up.  It is not Christmas so this will probably work for you too. 

Well I jumped into it.  After having filled in for a couple of classes down at the Murfreesboro library I have agreed to teach for the next three months.  I will be teaching the basic computer skills course for beginners.   Also I am going to write up a new course, part agenda and part freestyle workshop on computer security.  Pretty much it will be targeted for the home and small business types.  I setup a subdomain site for the class.  Nothing fancy but good enough to pass along links etc to the students.  http://linebaugh.georgestarcher.com/ 

I decided to do something interesting with my bonus from work this year.  Well bonus plus saving till September.   Instead of adding yet another certification I decided to modernize my coding skills.  In October I am going to go down to the Big Nerd Ranch for the Objective C/Cocoa Bootcamp.  All my own dime and vacation time.  Heck after 11 years at the same place I have over 4 weeks of vacation saved up that I have to use this year.  If work benefits, great, if not then I can do some things I have been wanting to code up for a few years.  My seat is reserved and its an easy drive over to the Atlanta area when the time comes.  It should be intense but fun.  I have always enjoyed bootcamp environments.   Plus I have a stock of books to read in plenty of time before October.