High school 20 year reunion trip

I received notice from my mother that my high school class reunion was about to occur. The reunion committee sent the notice to her house; I'm not even sure how they got her address.

I talked with my girlfriend about this and we decided to make a trip out of it. It was very last minute and I knew this would be a tough test on our relationship. BTW, did I mention that we were going to drive the 1100 miles (each way)?

We started off on Wednesday night (August 6th) after I got out of work. We made it to Las Cruces, NM were we stayed the night at my aunt and uncle's house. This is the first time for my girlfriend to meet any member of my family. My aunt wouldn't let us go to sleep till about 2am! We woke up that morning around 8am, had breakfast and took off for San Antonio, TX. We made it to SA around 4pm and checked into the Red Roof Express near downtown. This hotel was nice at a great price. The parking was plentiful and free and the Internet was also free (you needed to get a connection card to enter a daily access code). We were only about 1 block away from the Riverwalk mall and thus the Riverwalk itself.

On Thursday night, we walked the Riverwalk and ate at Cafe Ole. We had a huge plate of chicken and steak fajitas and my gf got a margarita. The margarita was awesome. We had to order another glass 'cause we downed it so quickly. After dinner, we were both so full that I thought I was going to pass out into the Riverwalk!

Friday we spent some time at the mall. I forgot to pack t-shirts and it is so humid and hot that I was kicking myself for not bringing any loose and light shirts. I bought two shirts that were on sale and one which is now one of my new favorite shirts. When we asked the sales man about the size, he mentioned that the med would be too small for me and I should get a large. He was an Asian, gayish man...and it was just funny how he said. My gf was trying to get me to buy the shirts too small so that I would end up giving them to her.


We decided to go visit Shamoo at Sea World. We spent most of the day at the park and had a bit of an issue. I wanted to ride a roller coaster that was kinda rough, but my gf decided to "just say no!". I didn't want to wait in line and ride this coaster on my own, so I was a little disappointed. When we got back to our hotel, we decided to get more margaritas at the Cafe Ole restaurant. It was ugly! We ended up not talking, arguing and just ignoring one another. When we decided to leave, I let her guide us back (remember, we are only about 1 block away from our hotel). We ended up in the worst part of the ghetto! I joked that we started seeing dead people, which just were the homeless people sleeping on the streets. But after a bit more walking, the "dead" people were no longer in sight (this was not good). We stop at a crossing which was a feed to the freeway. We waited for about 25 minutes before my gf realized that you had to press the cross button to get the cross signal to come up. REALLY? Finally a glimmer of hope. I can finally see the glowing sign of our Red Roof hotel, but we had to first cross the darkest part of the ghetto area that only had a single bar (Krazy's, I think was the name) lighting up part of an intersection.

We made it alive!

Saturday morning, we made up with the usually couples make-up routine and tried to leave for Houston. I did say "tried". My truck had a metal pin stuck in the rear right tire. I changed it in the parking garage and spent the next 5 hours trying to find a Discount Tire to replace it!!! After a long wait and $125, I had a cheap, no white label, tire mounted. Now we are really off to Houston...really.

About 2 of driving we made it to downtown Houston. The Double Tree hotel was very close by to our off ramp and the valet was impressive. We checked and and got our warm cookies. The room was "swanky" nice. The view was from the 14th floor and just as nice. We started off by working out at the hotel's gym, which was small but nice. After about 1.5 hours at the gym we got ready for the reunion party. The room was kinda small, everyone was talking to everyone and I felt a bit uncomfortable. We immediately met up with someone who called out my name. It was Steve, someone how used to work at Taco Bell with my older sister. I was a bit surprised that he was at my reunion, since I thought he graduated before me. We then got some finger foods and met some other of my old class mates (JJ, Brian, ??). We walked outside the room and we talked on our own for a bit. I ended up telling my gf about some of my dark secrets from my past. I'm not too sure this was the best thing for me to do. It ended up back firing on me during our drive back. More about that later.

We decided to leave the reunion party and walk around downtown. As we were leaving, I heard someone call out my name. It was Jeff from my class. He and his gf went outside with us to just talk. This was probably the most memorable moments of the entire trip. I learned so much about Jeff and his past. Even though Jeff and I didn't spend a lot of time together during our High School years, I spent the most time with him during this reunion.

After our talk, my gf and I decided to do that walk downtown. We found the "hot spot" and stepped into an Irish Pub and had a drink. Walking back to our hotel we ran into a lot of tall, beautiful women. We both enjoyed this walk back.

Sunday morning and now for the long ride back. We tried finally found a place to get breakfast and my gf took over the driving. OMG, this was a nice change. I really enjoyed watching the Seinfeld episodes and just dozing off. We had two arguments dealing with lack of trust on my gf's side. I tried to convince her that there was nothing going on but it just wasn't enough. This sucks. We got home around 10pm and I asked her to not spend the night at my place and for her to go home. Let the drama begin. Needless to say, it went over badly. She finally went home and we didn't speak for about a week.

I text'ed my ex-gf and told her we can still be friends and that she owed me 1/2 the cost of the hotels. She finally responded with an email that just flamed me to hell. She mentioned that she wasn't going to pay me the agreed upon hotel cost because she cooked for me in the past. Huh? I'm not playing these childish games. I guess I learned a $150 lesson.

We finally made up and now whenever she talks about this trip, she says "it wasn't that bad". I'm starting to wonder if we were both on the same trip.

Las Vegas with Silvia (July 2009)

My new girlfriend (the divorced mom from Match.com, read my previous post) mentioned that she has never been to Las Vegas, NV and I felt it was my responsibility to "de-flower" her with the Sin City.

We drove from Albuquerque, leaving early on Saturday (7/11/09). We had tickets to see Chris Angel at the Luxor that day at 7pm. I turned on TomTom to get approximate time and it said we would arive arond 7:20pm! Shit! It turned out that TomTom f'ed up the time change..?

We arrived about 1.5 hours early and registered at the Holiday Inn Express. We got a AAA discount thanks to Silvia. This hotel was nice and close to the Luxor. Breakfast was good too.

We saw the Magic show and it wasn't that great. Silvia loved it but it was just a bit cheesy. The Cirque Des Le performed with Chris Angel, which was one of the only portions that I thought was good. We bought some drinks before the show and they were AWESOME! It was kinda weird when we first got there..we were early so the place was kinda empty but we sat right next to another older couple. After talking with this man, he told me they were from San Diego and he used to work in the tech industry and now works for the San Diego Psychiatric Hospital.. "Oh really?"

Next morning we checked out and went to Downtown. Walked the Freemont mall, played some BJ at Binions (had to validate our parking) and then saw the largest (former) gold nugget at the Golden Nugget hotel. Then we went to an Ed Hardy outlet store. Silvia bought me my first and only Ed Hardy shirt. Very comfortable. She bought some Calvin Kleen underwear.

Checked into the Luxor, the line was outrageous. Got into our room in the pyramid and we had 2 beds...WTF! I asked Silvia to call the desk to fix this and they told her to call back tomorrow around 1pm. OMG, I'm starting to get pissed. She called back asking for the hotel manager. They moved us to the West Tower (upgrade). The bell boy was very helpful and we tipped him with a $20...yea biatch we're high rollers!

This is starting to get very exciting now...and for Silvia, she was exstatic! We spent much of our time at the pool drinking a ton of Pina Coladas. We got in the hot tub when it wasn't too crowded. Lots of little kids in the hot tub took away from the mood, but it was still relaxing.

We went to eat at Hooters. This was Silvia's first Hooters experience. Lots of "firsts" for her on this trip. We also went to the Hard Rock Cafe. This kinda turned out ugly. We had an argument that lasted until the next morning. We went to bed mad, well, I wasn't mad, but she wasn't talking to me and I just kept my mouth shut.

We went to various hotels to view their goodies and outrageous gimmics. The Venetian was beautiful. We bought our Crazy Horse show tickets there. That night, we got dressed to the "nines" to watch the burlesque show at the MGM. The women were perfect! Carmen did only a couple of small dances and didn't look nearly as nice as the other women. We sat next to two Russian women, a mom and daughter. The daughter had a nice black dress. The mom took a nice photo of Silvia and myself.

We planned on going on the Hoover Dam tour but it was just way too hot and I was tired. Next time.

I hope you enjoy some of these photos.....

My new Match.com match....

I've signed up with Match.com, after deciding that I have to be more active in finding that right person for me. It has been a little slow but have had a couple of real promising matches.

The first was made after only a couple of days on my new service. She was recently divorced (which ironically, most of the women on Match are) and has shared custody of their child. We started off really strong and I found myself really falling for her. This went on for a few days when she didn't have her child with her. When the week started, her child came back and I was completely shut out (well mostly, I couldn't see her during this time). I understand that she didn't want me to meet her child yet, but I felt we could have done something more to see one another.

Well, after just over a week of not seeing her, I told her we should call it quits. This was so difficult for me to do since I was CRAZY about her, but I'm a person that just needs that time with my woman. I think about that moment everyday, whether or not I made the right choice. I also felt like I was smothering her a bit since she had a lot of things on her plate.

Now, I'm seeing another woman. She is awesome. We didn't start off strong, but seem to be getting better with one another as we spend more time with one another. We had a couple of "calling it quit" moments, but we have worked thru them. She if funny, attractive, adventurous and really tries to spend as much time with me as possible. I love that! Oh, and her dad loves to play tennis, so at least him and I will have a common interest, if/when I meet with him.

She is a bit younger than me, but that doesn't seem to be an issue with us. I just hope this works out for us. I want it to work and am willing to give it a fighting chance.

I'll try to put up some pictures of her if she is ok with it..in the near future. Stay tuned!

CS591 ST 008

Lab ?

I started work on Test 4. I have given answers to #1 and #2.

A comment was made by Jed on one of the questions, I believe #3. I need to go back over the videos to see if it needs to be rephrased.

CS591 ST 008

Lab 4 (cont)

This lab objective is to send a designated string to Ta server and hopes for a "pass" message in return. Ta has a firewall active which will look for certain key words which when received will send a RST command back to the client.

I have taken the message.txt file and broken up certain key words:
antithesis
consequence
fundamentally
consequence (not found in message.txt)
illuminated
viewpoint

I created a new file called message_new.txt with all these words broken apart onto the next line. The python program reads this new file and sends these lines via sockets over port 8084.

Currently it seems that my program hangs after sending all the message text lines. I'm not sure how to print out the "Success" or "Try Again" result text. One thing I've noticed is that the server uses printf("...") to send the result message but fprintf(stdout, "...") when sending the initial question string. I'm not too sure if this is causing my program from not receiving the final output of failure or success.

If I leave the program hung up, the server eventually returns a "Too slow" message and resets the socket connection.

Here is the source code in Python:
import socket
import time

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect(("10.0.0.3", 8084))

fd=open("message_new.txt", "r")
lines=fd.readlines()
fd.close()

#get question message
print s.recv(1024)

for l in lines:

s.send(l.strip("\n"))
time.sleep(1)

#get pass/fail message - should be "Success!"
print s.recv(1024)

s.close()

I'm assuming this is working since there is no reset while sending the text lines. I just wish I could output the result message from the server to help verify this result.

CS591 ST 008

Lab 4

I downloaded all lab 4 files and read the instructions.

I compiled the server program with gcc on my Linux machine and ran it with port 8080. On another terminal while in the folder with the message file I ran the following command:
>cat message.txt | nc 127.0.0.1 8080

and got the following response:
>What is Prof. Crandall (a.k.a. Jed, a.k.a. J-Dub, whatever you prefer)'s favorite Von Clausewitz quote?
Success!

Now I need to look into how to send raw packets in C.

CS591 ST 008

Lab 3

- What are the IP addresses of all machines on the subnet? How many are there (if you think you've found them all, e-mail me to confirm rather than wasting your time looking for more since there really aren't that many)?
Answer: 192.168.33.2, 192.168.33.80, 192.168.33.22, 192.168.33.40


- What kind of BSD distribution is the BSD server running (e.g., OpenBSD? FreeBSD? NetBSD?)? Can you tell me the exact version?
Answer: Running (JUST GUESSING) : FreeBSD 5.x|6.X (89%)
Aggressive OS guesses: FreeBSD 5.4 or 5.5 (x86) (89%), FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE through 6.2-BETA3 (x86) (88%), FreeNAS 0.671 (runs FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE) (87%)


- What other ports is the web server listening on besides the HTTP port 80? What else can you tell me about the web server?
Answer: Discovered open port 80/tcp on 192.168.33.80
Discovered open port 22/tcp on 192.168.33.80


- Are there any other machines on the subnet besides these two servers? What can you tell me about that/those machine/machines and the firewall rules that protect it/them? Is it likely intended to be a server or a client?
Answer:


Nmap information:
Different scan types are available for different machines, firewall rules, etc. The default scan is SYN (aka Half-open scan). This sends a SYN packet to the port and listens for a SYN/ACK for an open port of receives a RST for a closed port.

Other scan types can be used where SYN doesn't work. This can be NULL, FIN, XMAS, ACK, along with other types. The NULL scan leaves the TCP header empty. The FIN sets the TCP FIN bit. The XMAS sets the FIN, PSH, and URG bits in the TCP header.

By adding the -O -v options allows Nmap to try to determine the OS type of the machine you are scanning. These flag options allow for Fingerprint (type of device..eg printer, router), Running (OS family and generation), OS details, Uptime guess, etc. to be displayed and used to determine/guess the OS in question.

Here are some example commands I have used for this Lab:
nmap -n --scan-delay 1 ls -vvv -A -PN -p22 -sT 192.168.33.2 -oG output.txt
sudo nmap -sV -O -v 192.168.33.2
sudo nmap -O -v 192.168.33.80


(References - http://nmap.org/book/man.html; http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-scanning-network-for-open-ports.html; http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-scanning-network-for-open-ports.html)