Brad's Cactus Shack

Camera phone dump 2009

March 23, 2009 rbcp 7 comments

Today I plugged my phone into my laptop to sync some music and decided to delete/move some of the pictures while it was hooked up. Here’s a few of my favorite grainy pictures. This first one is a smoke shop in Corvallis that I was walking by earlier this month.

Here’s my downstairs bathroom light fixture containing red green and blue lights. Only the blue light is more like a black light, so that throws the whole idea of turning RBG into white light out the window. But it still makes cool effects when you’re peeing.

The kids and I were driving in Corvallis and noticed identical shoes coming out of both windows. Look closely and you’ll see there’s feet out the other back window too, but his shoes don’t match. I don’t think the driver had his feet up, but it’s hard to see him.

Here’s a personalized plate we found at Albertsons. I’m wondering if the wife got it for him during a bitter divorce.

This one I took this one a couple days ago in Salem. I asked the guy getting in if I could snap a picture and he said sure and got out of the way for me. He was, as you’d expect, pretty weird.

I didn’t do much this weekend. The kids weren’t around, so I went to Salem to do some shopping and returning. Yesterday I vacuumed the house. Man, that was exciting. I had to dump the vacuum bin 5 times! On Saturday I got up at 5am to do a phone mob, which I turned into a PLA Radio yesterday. I only lasted 90 minutes into it, then went back to bed for a couple more hours. I watched Step Brothers which I didn’t expect much from but ended up LOLing at a lot. I also watched an old 70’s movie called Paper Moon which was really good. Oh yeah, Payton was here for a few hours on Saturday morning and we watched Stephen King’s Christine together. I hadn’t seen it in at least 10 years and it was fun to watch again. Payton liked it too. Geez, I watch too many movies.

A guy from an online “radio” station called Party 934 contacted me a few weeks ago about doing a weekly show on their station. He said I can do pretty much anything I want so I said sure and I’m doing an hour per week. They’re licensed to play actual music and insist that I play at least 4 songs per hour. He says it’s a terrestrial station too and goes out on 102.5 FM in the Hudson Valley in New York. I’m feeling a little skeptical on that part, though, since I can’t find any records on that and last week when I did the show I couldn’t get anyone to call in. It is the middle of the night there, though. From 2am to 3am.

I’m calling it The Phone Show since I’m sure whatever I do with the show will somehow involve phones. I set up a couple computers so that I can take calls on the air with it too, which seems to be working fairly well. (Thanks, Darin Abernathy, for helping me test!) And they gave me a really neat program made for broadcasting online stations. I guess tonight will be the first official show, since I’ve actually announced it on here and on phonelosers.org now. I haven’t prepared a bit for it and I have no idea what I’m going to do on it. It can be listened to on party934.com Monday nights from 11pm PST to midnight. Which is 2am to 3am Tuesday mornings EST. What a horrible time to do a show! The official page for it is www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow but there’s nothing on there yet.

Darin Abernathy

March 16, 2009 rbcp 5 comments

Saturday I was setting up 2 computers with some broadcasting software and Skype so I could take calls. (I’m doing a new show, more on that later.) So I was testing it all out and it seemed to be working perfectly and I could hear it on the internet stream several seconds later. To make sure I had the levels all set right, I decided to make some test calls. Whenever I make test calls for anything, I always default to calling Domino’s Pizza in East Alton, IL. It’s the one John and I pranked a lot as kids and their number is easy to remember. So I called them up and asked a bunch of nonsense questions, as usual, and we hung up.

Then I had more to test so I needed to call another number. I dialed a familiar exchange and then a random 4 digits afterwards and immediately realized that those 4 digits weren’t exactly random. They belonged to a childhood nemesis of mine named Darin Abernathy. This is a guy I haven’t thought of for about 20 years now, but somehow I’m suddenly calling him up and talking to his mom. I have no idea how his number suddenly popped into my head.

So I start in with lots of nonsense to Darin’s mom, asking her meaningless questions like, “So, how’s your dog?” “Uh, we don’t have a dog.” And I needed to test the music function of this software I’m using so I said to her, “Hey, listen to this really awesome song!” and I start playing Roses by Outkast. You know, the piano part. She tells me it’s very nice and I ask her if she was able to hear it okay. It wasn’t too loud or distorted was it? She says no, it sounded fine to her. Then she resumes asking me who I am. I’m Dave.

I don’t know why I didn’t like Darin Abernathy as a kid. He was about 2 years older than me. I know me and John Sever both had something against him. I’m not sure if I brought John into it or he brought me into it or if John was even that much a part of it. I’m not sure if Darin actually did something to warrant my dislike for him or if it was just completely random. I do remember that he seemed to really hate me, but it’s probably because of whatever irritating things I was doing to him. It’s just been so long that I don’t remember. Maybe John will know.

I do remember a few specific things that I did to Darin and his friend though. They would play tennis behind our garage and I would hang out in the garage making insane noises inside. Crashing into things, yelling, starting up the lawnmower, setting off fireworks, etc. Just whatever I could do to irritate them. And it worked too. They would bang on the garage wall at me and yell back. I wasn’t yelling at them though. I was just performing theatrics in the privacy of my own garage. How dare they listen in on me!

I had this plan to mount a big speaker at the peak of the roof inside the garage and run a wire for it underground so that I could annoy them even when it wasn’t possible to go outside and bother them in person. I was dedicated! I even went as far as running the wire along the fence and hiding it with leaves, but I think I ran short of wire or something because I never completely.

Something I did often in the 80’s was hang out on our patio’s swing. You know, a bench hanging from chains? And from this swing I had a perfect view of Darin’s front porch on the next block over, which him and his friends seemed to sit around on a lot. So when we got our first cordless phone I discovered the hilarity of outdoor prank calling by calling his phone number whenever they were outside, just to see them get up and go inside to answer it. I’d hang up before they got in the door, they’d come back out, sit down, then it repeats. At the time it seemed so innovative, having a remote means of dialing the phone from outdoors. Cordless phones were amazing!

Eventually they must have noticed me on the swing talking on the cordless phone in completely unrelated phone calls. And also noticed that I was always there when their phone was mysteriously ringing, because they started yelling at me (from a block away) whenever I called them. I forget exactly what they were yelling.

This tormenting of Darin continued until at least when I was 16 or 17 years old, because I remember using the phone line in my room (which I had installed when I was 16, after I had a job to pay for things like that) to call the Alton Telegraph and set up a fake newspaper ad, listing Darin’s home for rent. This is back in the day when newspapers would set up an ad before getting paid for it. I gave them my own telephone number so that people could call me about the house, I think with the intentions of recording the phone calls and saying funny things to the callers. But then I started telling people to come and look at the house and if we weren’t home to just walk around the house looking in the windows to see what it looks like inside. I made it a really awesome renting deal so there were lots of calls.

I guess when I left home and went to Texas I completely forgot about him. Weird that I dialed his number like that, after all these years. And even after I was so weird at his mom the other day, she still kept talking to me so I asked if Darin was around. I expected her to say, “Oh no, he hasn’t lived here for 15 years!” but instead she told me he was out for the day and then she gave me his cell phone number. I called it for another test of my system, but only got his voicemail. I babbled to his voicemail for awhile and played Roses in its entirety, then talked a little while longer, mostly about issues I was having with software. His voicemail seems to have unlimited recording capacity. I should give him a call later and apologize to him! I bet he’d love that.

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Mark Twains

March 16, 2009 rbcp 2 comments

Kristine sent me an awesome wooden Mark Twain to keep my existing Mark Twain company. As you can see, it was just in the nick of time since he was getting pretty lonely and hitting the scotch. (Yeah, I know, I’m hilarious!) Thanks, Kristine!!

This weekend the kids and I saw Witch Mountain. It was dumb.

Movies

Houses I’ve Lived At – Courtesy of Streetview

March 1, 2009 rbcp 7 comments

Last week I was using streetview to cruise through Galveston, admiring all the weird houses that I’ve always loved about that place. And I decided to travel the entire length of Avenue M to find some old house that I really wanted to move into back when I first moved there. At the time I was living on the couch of some Mexican guy named Edwin, who spoke no English at all, that I’d met through my job as a painter. It wasn’t a bad place, but I really needed my own room so he’d stop waking me up each morning, singing along with Mexican MTV.

By this time I’ve met a few people who agree to be roommates with me, so I’m spending a lot of time looking at places to live since I seem to have the most free time. I find this one place on Avenue M which is 4 or 5 bedrooms for just $600/month. I go to the office that own it and they give me a key to it and tell me to go look at it by myself. How trusting! The first thing I noticed about it is that the window on the door is broken and the door is already unlocked. It’s an awesome place, though. Huge rooms, really old decor, the floors are all going up/downhill and creek a lot, some of the rooms have these giant wooden doors that slide into the walls instead of opening, there’s a balcony, lots of character and you get the feeling that a few people have been murdered there before. Later I take Tammy to see it and she agrees that it’s awful, but awesome. I take pictures and show the other guy who’d be living with us and his flamboyant response is, “You want to live on Avenue M? M stands for murder!”

For some reason, I decide that I really want to go see that house again in the middle of the night. The front door is broken so I know I can get in. And even though I own a flash light, I decide that the best way to explore this house once more is by candlelight. What better way to explore a creepy old house in the middle of the night, right? I park a few blocks away and walk up to the house, reach in the broken window and turn the doorknob. Once inside, I light my candle and start leisurely wandering around, exploring each room on the first floor and discovering a new door in the kitchen that leads to a cellar. I wasn’t brave enough to go down there. I eventually begin walking up the open staircase, long candlestick in hand, and as I get to the top steps I see some kind of movement down the hall.

I stop, trying to see what it is. I move my hand that’s cupped around the flame to the other side, trying to shine light in that direction and I see a face peering from the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Holy crap! Neither of us say a word to each other and I slowly back down the stairs and then quickly leave the house. I bet this squatter was a lot more freaked out than I was, hearing someone creaking around downstairs and then coming up the stairs with a candle. Who uses candles???

Here’s my old picture of the house and then the Streetview of it:

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I don’t know why, but I was using black and white film during my first few months living in Galveston. It was a brown and yellow house, but appears to be much more colorful today. We didn’t end up getting that house because we found a tiny one at 5517 Ave K instead, for just $300 per month. Finding that house on Streetview made me think it might be fun to find all the other places I’ve lived on Streetview. So I did. Well, most of them. I dumped out my box of old letters, postcards, Christmas cards, etc and noted the addresses that people wrote me at.

I found most of my old addresses this way. I have no idea what our address was on Avenue K, since I never got mail there. I also don’t know Edwin’s address or the addresses to the other houses in Galveston that I lived at. There was 3428 Cove View Blvd in Galveston, though.

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Brad Thompson lived there and I stayed with him for a night or two and he got me the painting job. I didn’t get any letters there, but I found a pawn slip from 8/3/92 and a seat belt warning from 4/12/92 with that address on it. I ended up using his address to get my Texas drivers license when I moved there, so that address ended up being on a lot of paperwork over the next year.

Another address I found on an old ticket from the cops (10-10-91) was 1108 Ave O, Galveston, TX. Streetview says that doesn’t exist, though, so I guess I lied to the officer. I couldn’t make out what the ticket was for, but I guess that would have been shortly after I’d just moved to Galveston. I mostly got all my mail at PO Box 821, which was the big post office in Galveston on 25th Street. (Gina wrote me a letter at that address.)

My next move was to Myrtle Beach, SC, but “Myrtle Beach” didn’t sound awesome enough for my new P.O. Box, so I got a box 10 miles away from where I lived and worked, which was PO Box 15993, Surfside Beach, SC 29587. Myrtle Beach is another place where I have no idea what my address was. It was a few blocks from the beach and I shared it with a varying number of other guys for the summer.

A library card from 1992 says I lived at 513 Van Buren in Normal, IL, but I guess that address isn’t exactly right since Streetview can’t find it. It was on the ISU campus in the Van Buren building, room #513 where me and Sylvia lived with Chris Tomkinson for a month or two. Soon after that, Sylvia and I moved to Los Angeles where we lived with Kristine on Romaine and Vine in Hollywood for awhile. I searched Romaine and couldn’t recognize our old place, but here’s a Streetview of the street.

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We were in there someplace. We also lived on Jumilla Ave in Canoga Park, CA, but that’s another one where I don’t have the exact address and I don’t remember what the house looked like. It’s only a block long, though.

A letter from Shonna shows that we lived at 1021 Broadway #4 in Highland, IL, but Highland hasn’t gotten a visit from the Streetview gods yet so there’s only an aerial view.

Next was Indianapolis, living alone in various places. A lot of the time I was homeless on the IUPUI campus, but there was a really cool giant house I lived in for awhile, though I have no idea what its address was. I lived on the 3rd floor with the mice and the roaches. I also spent a lot of time living at the Skyline Motel at 6617 E Washington Street:

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My permanent address here was PO Box 441403, Indianapolis, IN 46244, which I found on a letter to me from Kristine. The letter was addressed to Alex Carbon, the name I was living and working under during my entire time in Indianapolis. (On the lam from Madison County authorities.)

From Indiana, I retired to the small community of Celina, Ohio, where I lived at 129 1/2 W Fayette where I received a letter from Martini.

Ohio was next. I lived in an area of Cincinnati called St. Johns in a tiny apartment above some businesses. A collections letter from MCI Telecommunications tells me that the address was 6004 Vine Street, Apt. #3C, Cincinnati, Ohio, and that I owe them $216.75 OR ELSE!

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I used to walk down the street to use the pay phone that was several blocks away, in front of a church. There was a pay phone closer to me, but it wasn’t in front of a church with a giant rotary dial on the front of the building.

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I spent some time living with Colleen on 161st and SE Stark in Portland:

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I also lived at the Jack London Hotel which some website claims is at 415 SW Alder St in downtown Portland. Doesn’t look familiar to me, though. Probably cause they appear to have cleaned that area up.

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I lived in that house, which was at 5225 NE Wyngat in Portland, shown by a letter addressed to my new name Alex Kelley. It was a really nice house where I had 3 roommates. The lady who owned the place stupidly left all of her stuff there and the 19-year-old girl who rented one of the rooms stole a ton of it while she lived there. Her and her friends went through the garage and all the closets, taking everything that they wanted. Luckily she stayed out of my room when I was gone since there was no lock on my door.

I had post office boxes all over Portland too, for mine and Colleen’s various mail order scams and credit card fraud. There was the PO box at 950 Lloyd Center #62, but the one we used the most was 2000 N East 42nd, Suite 128, which was in the Hollywood area of Portland.

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I had at least 4 different post office boxes while in Portland for all our crazy scams. I had an apartment with a girl named Lisa too, but then she bailed out on it after we’d already paid the first month’s rent because she couldn’t handle a few roaches living with us.

I used the address 213 Congress #314 in Austin, TX 78701 with mail being addressed to me in the names Chris Tomkinson and Alex Kelly. I lived in a very strange place in Austin which was underneath a skating rink, but don’t remember the address or the area it was in.

Next is 810 Morgan #4 in Corpus Christi, Texas:

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This place featured the live entertainment of the guy next door screaming at and beating his wife often!

A letter from Kristine shows me next living at 825 Ermine Avenue SE in Albany, Oregon. I love how she always went with the flow of writing to whatever name I happened to be using at the time. It was Alex Carter at this address.

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Colleen and I next lived at 1013 Kingswood Court in Celina, Ohio, but there is no Streetview there.

1.5 years later we moved to Illinois, where we immediately set up P.O. Box 483 in East Alton, IL before moving to 3504 Meridocia Street in Alton, IL for the next 7 or 8 years. (Not much Streetview in Alton yet.)

Below is 805 Elm Street SW in Albany, Oregon:

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I recently spent a full 2 years living there, but moved just last year. It was cool having my front door open onto a city sidewalk, but not so cool having people walk by as they talked loudly at all hours of the night.

Only the back side of my newest domicile is on Streetview, but it’s probably best not to post it so all you weirdos don’t start sending me pizzas and taxis.

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Family Ties

February 23, 2009 rbcp 3 comments

No kids this weekend. Hiked on Saturday morning, then spent the rest of the weekend at home doing pretty much nothing. The most unproductive weekend I’ve had in a long time. Watched a lot of Netflix on TV. Somehow I got the idea that Across the Universe would be a good movie. I think I lasted for maybe 20 minutes of that. I wasn’t expecting it to be a musical. Not that I have anything against musicals, but this was awful. I also watched Jenn’s movie Spaced Out, which was great if you like movies about anal probes. It was fun to watch once, and about a million times better than Across the Universe. (I’ve been writing wacky reviews for Spaced Out on imdb, Amazon and Netflix. Plus I added some fake trivia and goofs on imdb, which haven’t been approved yet.)

Somehow last night I ended up watching Family Ties on Netflix. It’s a show from the 80’s I loved which I haven’t seen since the 80’s. Usually when I attempt to rediscover some old show from the 80’s, I can’t believe how awful it is and that I ever liked it. But Family Ties was great, despite that God-awful intro song where the hippies sing about how much they suck at math and English. I watched about 6 episodes. And I was really surprised to find out that Alex P. Keaton was friends with George McFly a year before Back to the Future came out. He had a small part, but it was cool to see them together in something else.

The Rough Guide to eBay

February 13, 2009 rbcp 5 comments

Some stranger emailed me a week or two ago and told me that they’d seen my Ebay feedback featured in some book called The Rough Guide to eBay by Ian Peel, which was published more than 2 years ago. I’d never heard of it, so I looked it up on Amazon and bought a copy for about $3.00 so that I can post it on here and brag about it.

I’m given a whole page detailing my Ebay feedback antics, even though they chose to display the most boring of my comments possible. If you’ve never read my Ebay feedback, it’s here:

https://www.notla.com/ebay/

Books

CLoCKS

February 12, 2009 rbcp 3 comments

I woke up at 3:15am to my printer doing some kind of crazy-loud reset thing, a car alarm sounding outside for 5 minutes, and a clock blinking 12:00AM. I got up and noticed that all the clocks were blinking, so I had to reset mine and get up at 6am to get Emily up for school, since her alarm wouldn’t be going off. That’s early.

The cable guys sure like to eye all the weird stuff in my room when they come to repair things. My phone keeps going out so I’ve had two of them over in the past month. I’m surprised they never comment on the abundance of phone stuff everywhere.

Back in 2000, I was at my parents house to pick something up and my parents had a couple of cable guys in the house installing high-speed internet for them. I’d just had it put in my house the previous month. After I left, one of them asked my dad, “He lives over on Meridocia, doesn’t he? I remember he had a basement with all this STUFF in it.” Nice to know my weird decor is worth remembering. I think.

Uncategorized

Elephant Poop

February 11, 2009 rbcp 2 comments

What good are those touch screen signature pads for signing for your credit cards really? All they do is make your signature completely illegible and the cashier still has to print out 2 slips of paper – one is the credit card receipt for her to keep and the other is your receipt. Isn’t the whole idea to be paperless? Why does she need a receipt? Why not just sign the paper that she prints out for herself so it’s actually legible? In the rare instances that I’m not using my debit card as a debit card and I need to sign, I draw stupid pictures or write my name backwards.

I wonder if there are people who have a phobia about using toilets that have the auto-sensing “eye” that flushes the toilet for you. There must be people out there that think that little red window on the flusher is an actual camera (after all, it sees you and knows when to flush!) and is too shy to pee in the presence of it. Even if they don’t think a human is on the other end watching, I bet they’re afraid for the machine to watch them.

My car freaked out the other day when I tried to start it. The “ding” sound was stuttering, no lights came on and I heard a relay switch under the dash going nuts. It was weird. I tried a few more times and it finally started like normal, but not before resetting my car stereo, causing it to prompt me for a code which I didn’t know. Guess that’s an anti-theft device for when people steal my stereo. I checked the instruction book and I’d written my code inside, but there were also instructions for resetting the code in case you lose it. So what good is that as an anti-theft device? I’m betting that a thief could reset the code just as well. Now I’m paranoid to take my car out of the city because I’m sure it’s going to have some bizarre breakdown and I’ll end up stranded somewhere.

My HD Flip camera is great. It takes excellent video, even in the dark, and has great sound. The only problem is that the file sizes are huge and that my laptop is too slow to edit HD video within a reasonable time span. So I think I’m going to take it back and get the regular Flip camera again. I don’t even care about HD quality video – I just wanted a wide screen camera and the only one they had was in HD.

Hey CK, thanks for introducing me to that UGK song in your LJ the other day. I downloaded two of their albums and I’ve really been enjoying them.

ShmooCon 2009

February 11, 2009 rbcp 9 comments

This past weekend, I went to ShmooCon and it went a little something like this…

Thursday: Drove to Portland, parked my car in a cheap parking lot. Took the Max to downtown and did a lot of wandering around. While passing a pay phone phone, I noticed an odd sign attached to it. It warned of an unnamed man who was suspected of jamming pay phones. Here it is:

I guess the guy is referring to pay phone stuffing. I’ve never heard it called pay phone jamming before. Decades ago, a popular money making scheme was to stuff tissue up into coin slots. People using pay phones would never get their money back because it would land on the tissue instead. Later the thief would come back, pull out the tissue and be showered in free change! Supposedly that worked pretty great from the 50’s to the mid 90’s. I can’t see how it’d be very profitable today though. Maybe the sign is referring to something else. I love the picture of that old man, though. I should call the guy and get the story from him.

I got on the train and headed to the airport by midnight since that’s when the trains stop running. I spent the night in the airport, reading a new book part of the time (No Sanctuary by Richard Laymon) and doing as much sleeping as possible on their uncomfortable seats. Around 3ish, a cop came over and hassled me for a few minutes, but left me alone when I convinced him that I had a flight in a few hours.

Friday: Woke up around 4:30am or so and got checked in, went to my gate and looked for breakfast. I didn’t find anything good, though, so I waited til my layover in Denver where I found some McGriddles at McDonalds. Both of my flights had empty seats between me and the other person, which was nice. Got into DC around 5:00pm, took a subway to the hotel and wandered around for awhile, Twittering in hopes of meeting up with some people. I finally got spotted by vixen and Trevelyn, said our hellos and went in search of Altalp. Met RTF and RogueClown at some point before heading towards Altalp’s room.

A few of us went across the street to eat at Chipotle’s. Then we went to the Podcaster’s Meetup and stood around until the end of the show, then talked to a few people there. Seems like more happened on Friday evening, but I can’t remember. I think it was between 9 and 10 that we all piled into a cab (minus Trevelyn and two of us in the front even though the cab driver insisted that wasn’t allowed) and went to the HacDC party, which was awesome. I met tons of people there and saw a few old acquaintances. Drank a lot (free drinks!) and played i-hacked’s Labyrinth game which was rigged up to a Wii fit board for controlling it. Pretty neat even though I sucked at it. The night came to an end when the fire alarm was pulled and everybody went outside. After about 15 or 20 minutes in the cold, we decided to go back to the hotel. We all got to sleep between 2 and 3.

Saturday: I woke up first, around 9am, which Trevelyn, i-ball and vixen close behind. Altalp continued to sleep while we went to McDonald’s for breakfast. Looking at a map from the Shmoocon program, we headed for what we thought would be a back route to sneak into the con for free. I tried buying a badge in November and their payment system failed so when I retried it was too late. That’s my justification for sneaking in. Turns out it was really easy to do. The hotel is enormous and there were several back ways in by just going up some stairs and sneaking across some empty conference room. (With lots of unguarded computer and sound equipment along the way.) At one point we took a wrong turn and ended up in a very busy employee area (a kitchen I think) where employees were all staring at us as we walked by, but none of them told us to leave. I think I got video of that.

Altalp made a really cool fake badge the night before, out of a piece of thin plastic which she cut into the shape of a badge with a razor and then imitated the markings with my red Sharpie. I made fun of it and her, saying that it would never fool anyone. But I guess I should admit that I was completely wrong and she didn’t get questioned once. A piece of plastic that she found in the lobby gained her free admittance for the entire weekend. Not to mention hilarious admiration from everyone she showed it to.

I-ball’s trick was pretty good too. He wore an official-looking button up blue shirt and a hat that said SECURITY on the front of it in big letters. I guess he was just walking in the doors, getting by on the assumption that he was someone official. (I think he told me he got an employee discount somewhere because of it too.) The getup looked pretty good, but around noon we were standing around and suddenly there were 3 or 4 Shmoocon staff surrounding us. I didn’t even notice them until one said to I-ball, “Excuse me, do you have a badge?” Being the true friend I am, I immediately walked away as fast as I could so they wouldn’t notice my missing badge too. Minutes later I signaled Trevelyn who was walking by, and we looked out the window and noticed I-ball heading down the escalator. He’d been kicked out. (But only until he snuck back in, in less conspicuous clothing.) We went downstairs to meet him and on the way out heard one of the door checkers talking about the guy wearing a security hat.

Before all that happened, I borrowed Trevelyn’s badge to go to the registration desk and get a wristband for the Saturday night party. I asked if I could have two of them since my friend needed one too. The lady said to me, “Your friend needs to come and get it himself or you need to figure out a way to social engineer me.” A challenge! About 10 minutes later I went back with I-ball’s sunglasses on and my hood up, saying to her in a loud, monotone voice, “Hello! I would like a badge for the party tonight! I’ve never been here before and this is my first time asking you for one!” She smiled and handed me a badge. I kick ass at social engineering!

I got the elevator extensions, but we never got to do anything hilarious with them. I started out by calling Verizon’s assignment office, who checked the hotel’s address to give me all the phone lines working there. Unfortunately they were all special circuits, so there was nothing to give me. So I called the hotel, said I was with Verizon and that I needed their elevator phone extensions. They were happy to help and I can’t remember if they even asked why I needed them. They sent their phone technician to the phone room, where all the numbers were written down. They ended up calling me back 15 minutes later with the numbers. Unfortunately the elevator phones weren’t speakerphones, so we couldn’t just call in and talk to people that got in. That would have been fun there. (If you’d like to try that out, though, here’s a page full of elevator phone numbers.)

We did some exploring in downstairs hallways which was clearly for employees only. But the few employees that passed us didn’t say anything to us. I’m guessing a lot of them didn’t speak English. We took tons of pictures and videos and Altalp scored a nice robe from a laundry room. (Had to find the thing to tie it with in a completely different room on a different floor.)

Tried to go on the roof, but that failed. We found the access door, but it was locked and there was no sign of a way to unlock it. There was a phone nearby which instructed us to call a certain number to have it unlocked. I called later from my cell phone and ended up talking to Loss Prevention about it. I said we simply wanted to go on the roof to dance around all crazy-like, but the grouchy guy on the other end of the phone said that would never happen. Sadly, he was right.

The hotel’s ATM was hax0red by someone by using the default password to get it into admin mode and playing around in the menus. There wasn’t much to do with it though. We also kept putting stickers on the ATMs, which warned that smiling into the ATM’s camera was a crime, punishable by something. Hevnsnt and Surbo later discovered that the entire cover of the ATM could be opened up, which they wrote about here. And where you can see a picture of our sticker, available for download from signhacker.com.

I made a sign for our door that read CACTUS. Later we noticed that the people down the hall put a sign on their door that said The Blue Oyster. (A awesome, obscure reference.) Altalp retaliated by putting some Post Its on their door which read Blue Oyster Sucks and Cactus Rules! We were hoping to start up a war with whoever was staying inside, but they didn’t play along. Though they did leave our extra signage up. On Sunday I added PostIts reading DOWN WITH BLUE OYSTER! and VIVA LA PLA! but I think they may have checked out by then.

I think this is where our obsession with PostIts began. I don’t know why AltAlp even brought those with her, but those, combined with my Sharpies, kept us entertained for quite awhile. We traveled the halls, putting PostIts on everything we could find. Glass is Fragile was one that we put on a fire extinguisher door. Push for Killer Robots was stuck next to a room’s doorbell. I jumped up and stuck a Low Ceiling sign up on the ceiling and the whole Ye intruders betware, crushing death and grief… shtick on an access hatch on the ceiling. There were tons other others, but I can’t remember all of them. Oh yeah, Break Glass For Candy is one we put on a glass fire extinguisher door. I took pictures and I think there’s a few more in them. I think we did even more PostIts after Saturday’s party.

Oh yeah, the party. Altalp inexplicably drug a chair into our elevator as we were leaving to go to the party, I guess so she wouldn’t have to stand up for the entire 3 floors down. The elevator opened and we all walked out, leaving the giant chair inside. And who would roll up to that elevator to go upstairs but…a guy in a wheelchair. What are the odds of that? I think it was I-ball who suddenly grew a conscience and went back to take the chair out for him.

RTF can make PostIts funny without even writing on them.

The party was about a mile away and the weather outside was amazing (50’s or 60’s, I think) so we walked. Had some insanely large slices of pizza on the way there, (a slice was big enough to feed my family for a week) and then went into the party. Unlike last night’s party, this one didn’t rule quite as much. It was overcrowded, the line to get drinks took forever to get through (free drinks though!), and the music was just loud enough to make conversation impossible. Trevelyn was the first to leave, after maybe 30 minutes. Altalp and I lasted maybe 45, before walking home. I-ball followed about 15 minutes after us, who I met when I went back outside to visit CVS.

I think the 4 of us walked around and did some more PostIts, then went down to the lobby to go down some escalators that descended into a completely dark room, figuring there must be something to explore down there. And holy crap, was there a lot to explore! I think we spent close to 2 hours exploring all these basement rooms, and didn’t see a single employee all night. It really made us realize out incredibly huge the hotel was. There were several enormous banquette rooms and a lot of small conference rooms too, lots of storage areas, eating areas, long hallways, and rooms that had no business being open for just anyone to walk into. Each room was full of new laughs for us. We played Frisbee with giant serving trays, Trevelyn danced on tables, we moved some walls around trying to create new rooms, we shut giant automatic doors, we tried to get a waxing machine started so we could drive around on it, and Trevelyn gave a great speech in front of a podium which I videotaped and I’ll put up on YouTube someday this week.

And then there was the network room. Several racks full of internet stuff with cat5 running into everything. Trevelyn made a pretty funny video about taking down Shmoocon’s network, but I should point out here that we put it back how it belonged afterwards. Then off in another room, where we had to duck under a concrete wall to get into, was the phone room!

Two walls, completely covered with giant banks of modular jacks and phone blocks with phone wire running everywhere. There was even a phone in the middle of the room to plug into them all. It’s just a good thing that we’re not the type of people to take advantage of a situation like that. Can you imagine?

The hotel got really weird when we found an elevator down there that went DOWN. And we were already in the basement. We went down another 7 or 8 floors and ended up in what appeared to be freezing, abandoned hallways with more rooms for people to stay in. But then we found a garage that apparently opened up into the street when the giant metal doors were open. The cars in that garage had a layer of dust on them. I’m still a little confused how 7 floors below the earth is once again street level, but I guess the hotel is so huge that this is somehow possible. I wanted to walk around the hotel the next day to find out how, but never got around to it. I think we probably just walked into another dimension at some point, but luckily got back up to the basement level and eventually went back to our room. Those couple of hours exploring the hotel’s basement were awesome though. Made me glad we left the party.

As we found our way back out, we spotted a giant, framed USA Olympics picture filled with signatures. Noticing that there was ample room for more signatures, we used a Sharpie to fill in the extra space.

I-ball and Trevelyn fell asleep shortly after that and Altalp and I hung out on our floor’s foyer, watching the drunk people occasionally pass by and making more evil plans for the remainder of the weekend. Skydog happened by and sat down to talk to us for awhile. I met him a few months ago at Defcon and found out that he was the one who had to fix my mess with Phreaknic’s hotel phones a few years ago. He told AltAlp all about it, and his version is so much funnier than mine. Later we made some PacMan art on the floor out of chair cushions, which made people passing by either laugh or give us WTF looks. Didn’t get to sleep until it started getting light out.

Oh yeah, around 2am or so, a message came across Twitter from hevnsnt saying, “I’m going to punch Brad Carter in the face the next time I see him.” Holy crap, what did I do?? This slightly worried me for awhile as I tried to figure out exactly which of our shenanigans had he pieced together enough to find out that I was somehow responsible. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out he was just kidding around. Luckily I didn’t break down and start confessing all the awful things we’d done to him that day.

Sunday: Slept until 10 or so, then got the hotel room packed up and checked out at 12:30. Trevelyn left us around 11am. Put our bags in vixen’s new room (she’s stayed an extra day) and went out to eat breakfast/lunch at a pizza place. Taxied back to the hotel, got our bags and sat in the closing ceremonies for awhile, long enough to see RTF win an award for his barcode design. Went to say goodbye to him and RogueClown, and to get them to sign Altalp’s PLA coffee mug. Me, I-ball and Altalp took the subway to the airport, where we all went our separate ways.

I thought I was wide awake on my flight, but when I started reading my book I kept drifting off, so I finally put it away and fell asleep for a large portion of that flight. Managed to finish up my book on the 2nd flight. Got to my house around 1am and went right to sleep. Bed felt pretty great after 3 days of sleeping on hotel room floors, in airports and on airplanes.

Hacker cons are great. There should be more of them that aren’t across the entire country. Here’s some more pictures on my Flickr page.

Travel

Altercation of the Day

February 4, 2009 rbcp 17 comments

I went to pick up my son from school today, and parked on my usual side street. As I’m leaving my car and walking towards the school, some guy trimming his hedges says to me, “Hey could you not park there in front of my mailbox? The mailman doesn’t like when you park there.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry about that, I won’t do it again.”

“Could you go ahead and move it back a few feet?”

I looked and I wasn’t even in front of his mailbox. It was about a foot in front of my car. “It doesn’t look like I’m in front of it anyway.”

“Just back up a few feet for me!”

“Not now. I won’t park there again though, I promise.” And I keep walking towards the school.

“YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE!” he yells.

This makes me smile. I pause for a minute and then go back to where he can hear me.

“Hey, I’ll probably park there tomorrow too. And every day from now on.”

“Go ahead! I’ll call the police! You’re an asshole!”

“Bye now!”

And I continued walking to pick up my son. I told him about it so that if the guy started yelling things at us again, he would be prepared. I was kind of hoping for more, but he wasn’t outside. He was probably on the phone with 911, frantically telling them all about me.

I usually can’t even park in that spot because some other mom is already there. And is it even illegal to park a foot away from a mailbox? I know it’d make it difficult for the mailman in his truck, but that can’t be illegal. Or maybe it is, who knows. In my 3 years here, I’ve never seen that guy in his yard but I can’t wait to give him a friendly hello every time I see him from now on.

Stories

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