a little shocked.

I was speechless earlier. That's been happening a lot lately. But it was bad enough today that a couple of co-workers asked if I was ok.
There's a site I try to hit 10 to 20 times a day, Ethical Hacker Network Forum. There are usually a lot of great conversations going on there. I've came across some really decent stuff to read from there:

• Hacking for Dummies
• Daemon
• Freedomtm

They've had some great challenges for skill building, on the main page, and some really great give aways.

The most recent one, was a chance for 1 of 5 certification classes. The class includes the cert test at the end. I got an email today saying I was one of the 5 winners. My mind was going 1000 miles per minute with thoughts, my mouth could only get a couple of letters out at the time.

This is great, but an oh crap at the same time. Like my friend Jen B, I've been feeling a little over whelmed lately. My feeling comes from between the things I HAVE to do, NEED to do, and WANT to do.

Getting 2 of the possible certs I could take are on the Want to do list, but so are a lot of other things. There are items on the Have and Need to do list that would be nice to get out of the way, because getting past those items would go a long way towards helping me make sure I can get the most out of the course.

All I know is, it's going to be an interesting couple of months. (Which will just keep adding to the interesting year I have had so far).

Books

I read Daemon and Freedomtm
by Daniel Suarez. really good story divided between 2 books. Really enjoyed it. Sci-fi / Cyberpunk / thriller.

There was a lot of things in Freedomtm
, that mirror our world today. Little frightening when you stop and think about some of it.

I highly recommend both books.

martail arts tonight was awesome

Got to work grappling with someone. Someone very skilled. Feel good, enjoyed it. Defended my school's honor. However if it would have been an all out fight, he probably would have wiped the floor with me.

Wrote a book review

So I said I was reading Hacking for Dummies, 3rd edition. I finished it a while ago. Part of the reason I was reading it was to write a book review for an online magazine.

The book review is up: Ethical Hacker Network Book Review

Learning so much

So I read Hacking for Dummies, 2nd edition. And I didn't feel like I learned as much as I probably should have. I also read it differently than I'm reading the 3rd edition. Most of what I did learn in the 2nd edition, I think I forgot, or just filed in the back of my head.

I'm actually learning this stuff this time. Not just reading it but looking into things and trying to figure the things out when they don't work instead of shrugging and saying ok next.

Some of it is, oh yeah, I remember that. It's just a much better read this time. Wish I could read more often and faster than I currently am, and I could play with things.

scratching my head

Sometimes, no matter what, you're left scratching your head. Tonight is one of those time. See, I'm a time addict. I have been for years. I constantly want to know what time it is. I usually have ntp running on my computers.

Turns out the latest install of my laptop doesn't seem to. Yet it kept it's time pretty current. Maybe there is something hidden somewhere in KDE / the system I couldn't find. Anyway. I installed NTP, and made sure it was set as a client. it was only about 91 seconds off compared to the server I used to do an ntpdate against.

However, that's not what made me scratch my head. I spend most of my time on Red Hat based systems at work, and do more work on them than I do on my boxes at home. Even though every computer runs Linux (Debian) at home. One thing I'm used to, and type mostly out of habit is the service command for starting and stopping daemon processes.

I have never seen this work on Debian. Until tonight. I don't know how many times I've typed service something restart or stop or start, and have the system tell me service (the command) not found. But tonight, out of habit I typed it and it worked. After I hit enter I remembered, not on a work system. won't work, then saw the message that was displayed... So now I'm scratching my head wondering if I found it somewhere and installed it, or what.

oy.

Deleted the last post.

Things have gone strange in my world again.

Not going to go into details. Just.... Its all good with gravy. I'd say what my best friend says in situations like this, but I try to keep it closer to pg around here. Not always. Just all good. Strange but all good.