Declan’s Blog

To all of my fans across the world, especially the adolescent Chinese girls constantly IMing me, I’m not Declan Galbraith.

Yes, I AM hot, and yes I can carry a tune, but I’m no Declan Galbraith:

(5:56:54 AM) NAME: this is declan. right?! IM be back plzz!!!!! ilyssssm<333333
(5:56:54 AM) declansnwl : I’m not here right now
(6:33:03 AM) NAME: i love all of your songs! mostly nothing else mattters<3333
(6:33:03 AM) declansnwl : I’m not here right now
(7:54:54 AM) declansnwl: heh, wrong declan
(7:54:55 AM) NAME : Planss
maybee txtt mee??
< .3.3.3.3 < < < < dayumm hes hot!!! < < < <
be backk laterr
txt meh_!

Sadly, I’m betting that this post only confuses more of his fans…

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Last Wednesday was a full moon very close to the summer equinox, so Erin and I went out to the park and waited for it to come up:

Not great, but some cool color. I should have brought out the telescope, but it’s too heavy for my mule… um, Erin to carry

The Girl and the Moon:

A tree with moonshine:

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Congrats to Nathan (on the right - his buddy Gerry is on the left)!

Nathan graduated from Westview High School yesterday. Grandma came out to see:

And Diardra and Doug flew out too!

Erin was thrilled to cheer on her brother:

After the ceremony:

(Can you spot Nathan?

We went to Adams Avenue Grill for some nom:

Of course, since I borrowed a killer lens from Patrick (thanks dude!), I got a few nice shots around the restaurant as the sunlight was fading:

Here are lots more:

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So many times I visit a city and think, “man, I wish I had my bike!” Well, with a little planning and the generosity and height of Joe Gross, I was able to borrow a bike and we did 55 miles from the Mission district, across the Golden Gate Bridge, then through Sausalito, past Larkin, then along the Paradise Loop.

Here’s the map from Motion Based:

Here we are by the bridge:

Here I am crossing:

I call this one: Find the Bike:

It’s a study in vertical lines and horizontal curves.

Thanks so much to Joe and Lorah!

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A few weeks ago, San Diego held its third BarCamp and Dan Tentler (@Viss) and Billy Marsh (@cannibal) made a mini-defcamp challenge. Gabe (@gebl), Holly (@pomopants), and I (@declan) won last year in about 2 hours, so Dan vowed to make this year’s challenge much harder.

He succeeded.

Short version: We spent 8 straight hours and won a $200 flashlight each! Thanks Surefire!

Long version: Our team included me, Robert, and Jonathan. We were up against some young punks from #sdcolleges, and I was sure they’d cream us. In fact, it’s a sad shame on them they didn’t. What self respecting protohacker can’t pick a lock in under a minute… There was also a team of people I hadn’t met, and one more team of kids who were around last year.

The challenge started out with a url to 9 subdirectories of starting clues and problems to solve. These included passworded zip files, sound files with hidden messages in the ID3 tags, and many hashes that took John the Ripper quite some time to hash out. We were certainly stymied by the lack of access to ssh to a proper computer to run John, and SOMEone set up my laptop with virus scanning software that wouldn’t let me install John. Damn IT people…

Anyway, after 4 hours of discovering all the places Dan “oopsied” the challenges, we got to the physical box challenge designed by Billy. He’s made a nice couple of movies of the challenge:

Any bad language you hear is all Jonathan.

Here’s more footage of some LOOOOzers:

Watch for the sad @numist and @djcapelis as they snip the wrong wires… priceless

I’d planned on crowing more about the victory, but after 8 hours of grueling hacking, I was dead tired. I think I put my head on the pillow at 5am that night. But there was so much more going on Sunday morning, that I was back by 10:30!

Thanks to Dan and Billy for a great challenge. Thanks to my teammates for the win!

And thank goodness those punk kids didn’t beat me…

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Yes, I’m too young to have this going on:

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Here’s a very cool video about KPBS and the fire map they created during the October 2007 wildfires:

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Some days, this is what my job feel like:

found on boingboing

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I went through all of my England Trip pictures and pulled out the best ones:

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As part of this England trip, the bunch of us hopped a train from Southampton to Salisbury, then a cab to Stonehenge:

Oddly enough, it wasn’t even 18″ tall!

By the time I got all the way around, taking way too many pictures (I’ll upload once I’m in a country with bandwidth), all my buddies were gone and I had to take my own picture:

Somehow this image became one containing cake:

Thanks, Viss…

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