Bruce Schneir’s recent admission that he keeps his passwords in his wallet has been making rounds throughout the ‘Net. I respect his opinion, but I must admit, the idea surprises me. I suppose it makes sense, since my wallet already holds other bits of precious of an equal value, but it seems to go against my natural paranoia. I do sometimes write new passwords down and carry them on me until I memorize them, but then I incinerate the piece of paper it was written on. And when I write the password, I do it on a piece of paper placed on a hard surface, so as to not unintentionally leave an impression on a notepad. Too paranoid? Maybe.
What if I encrypted the passwords with Solitaire and carried the cyphertext with me. Still too paranoid?
For the past two months, I’ve been attending Unbridled Martial Arts – or, as I refer to it, Fight Club. It’s a mixed martial arts club, mixed gender and of various skill levels. There is no belt-system, or ranking of any kind. Tuesday and Thursday nights are stand-up fighting, which draw from the likes of muay-thai, kickboxing, judo, American boxing, and karate. Wednesday nights are weapons and grappling. The weapons training is escrima, with the weapons themselves being escrima sticks and knives. Grappling draws from wrestling, Jujutsu, judo, Shamrok submission fighting, and Israeli self-defense.
There are no contracts, so class sizes vary. Usually attendance at the stand-up fighting class is around 16, and weapons/grappling about half of that.
Rob is the only instructor (though he sometimes draws on other students to assist). He’s a great teacher, and somehow manages to split his attention throughout the class’s various skill levels. During my first few sessions, I always felt that he gave full attention to us noobs, and now, I feel like he gives his attention to those of us slightly more experienced, even when we have a batch of beginners joining the class.
All the instruction is focused on real-world street self-defense. There are very few flashy moves. I believe one could become a more effective fighter by studying a classic art, such as Aikido, for an extended period of time, but what’s taught in Fight Club is skill enough to make one sufficient in a short period of time.
As the Macbooks don’t come with PCMCIA or Express card slots, I’m unable to use my old Proxim card for less than savory acts of wireless piracy. I haven’t been able to find any USB wifi dongles that please me, so I decided to go another route.
The DD-WRT project is alternative firmware that turns your supported consumer wireless AP into an untamed beast. More to the point, it allows the AP to act as a repeater – hijacking a current signal, boosting it, and rebroadcasting. For the hardware, I bartered for a Linksys WRT54GL (v1.1) at the Bay of E. The device is supported, and has two RP-TNC jacks, allowing me to replace the default antennas with two of my uncommonly large spikes.
Despite the labyrinth of convoluted, contradictory information that is the DD-WRT wiki, installation was quite simple. First, I reset the router to factory defaults through the web interface. It was new out of the box, so I imagine already set to factory defaults, but who knows. The wiki suggests the first flash of the WRT54GL be with the mini firmware, but, after that, it can be flashed to any other version. So, I downloaded both dd-wrt.v23_sp2_mini.zip and dd-wrt.v23_sp2_standard.zip. The wiki also claims that Firefox may fubar the upgrade and suggests using IE in its stead. Not having access to IE, I went to flash dd-wrt.v23_mini_generic.bin through the web interface using Safari, which promptly failed. The router’s default firmware was in no way damaged, so I went to do the same thing again in Firefox (2.0.0.11), which worked without a hitch. Giving no explanation as to why, the wiki suggests that after one arrives at the “Upgrade Successful” screen, one should wait for the esoteric count of 5 minutes before hitting continue (perhaps while chanting some manner of incantation). I did this (minus the chanting), hit continue, and was greeted by a login prompt. The default user/pass of root/admin didn’t work, so I held down the reset switch on the back of the router for 30 seconds (leaving the power cord plugged in), after which the router booted up, accepted the root/admin login, and all was shiny. After that, I upgraded to the standard firmware without note, and quickly realized that I actually needed the v24 beta firmware. So, I grabbed dd-wrt.v24_std_generic.bin, upgraded to that (again without problem), and was finally ready to turn it into a repeater.
To set it up, I first changed the router’s IP to 192.168.69.1, so that it was on a different subnet than my target. Next, under Wireless Basic Settings, I changed the mode to Repeater, entered the target SSID, and changed the wireless channel to Auto, leaving all the other settings on their defaults. After saving those settings, I added a virtual interface with my own SSID and made sure it was set to Bridged. Then, after saving that, I followed the wiki’s advice to go to the Security tab, uncheck everything under Block WAN Requests and disabled the firewall. That was it. The router had a WAN IP displayed in the upper right hand corner, indicating that it was working.
Note that up till here, I was doing everything on the router through a wired connection, which was strongly urged in many places and seemed wise to me. At this point, I unplugged the cat5, turned on my Airport, connected to my new AP, and was online immediately.
Even after last night’s few flakes, I didn’t believe the forecaster’s call for snow this weekend. It seems much too early. But this morning I awoke to a good inch on the ground, and snow still falling (though it’s getting a bit wet, now in the afternoon).
The Farmer’s Market is dwindling, about a quarter of its usual size. Most vendors have retreated to the covered areas.
After tonight’s sub-freezing Critical Mass (there were a few flakes of snow), I lubed my bike chain and treated myself to a couple kebabs, both of which combine to make an interesting aroma. I imagine my dreams tonight will involve beef and oil.
But for now, I will warm my fingers around a mug of kukicha.
High hopes had I for this new-fangled terrain view on Google Maps. “Aha!” I said to myself, “This I shall use for planning new bike routes.” But the inaccuracies are too great, the scale too small, and I’m left with my worn topo maps.
The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin school. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and baulk this natural magnetism which with sure discrimination selects its own.
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It is natural and beautiful that childhood should enquire, and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.
