Interpretive Logo Narrating Frustration

Most people I know would same I’m a pretty nice guy. I can be trouble at times, but by-and-large I’m a nice dude. Especially when I comes to customer service representatives. Man, those people have it rough. I get really frustrated when I hear people ragging on offshore call reps or anybody else that deal with moronic customers who demand perfection. But there’s a point at which I stop being a nice guy.

There’s a point at which I snap, I lose control. Like a mother bear and her cubs, it’s not a good idea to come between me and that which I cherish beyond any mortal. It’s not a good idea to come between me and my….Internet. It is for this reason that I write. I won’t berate you with the details, I’ll just inform you that Cox Cable is one of (if not chief) the worst customer care groups I’ve dealt with in Oklahoma.

Okay, so I lied. Get ready for a detail hailstorm.

Sunday, I move my stuff over to my new apartment. It’s the Holiday weekend, I’m cool with the fact that no one is picking up any phone any time soon. Alright, so I plan. I go to bed at 8pm Sunday night in preparation for the attack. I’m not kidding, I mean serious business when I work with my Internet. When my Internet is in danger I will run 14 miles through sleet and snow, run barefoot across hot mall parking lots, and lift Volvo’s just for a minute or two of that high speed goodness. So I’m ready for this trivial task. When 7:30am rolls around I make the call. It goes something like this:

• Cox: Hello
• Ray: Hello! I need to switch my internet over from my previous apartment to my new one.
• Cox: Alright, I need your pin.
• Ray: What pin?
• Cox: The pin on your bill, for the account, I need it to authorize the movement of the account
• Ray: Uh, no bill. I just moved, everything is everywhere and simultaneously nowhere. Everywhere I turn is a vast space filled with trinkets, baubles, dioramas and food. Can I get the pin sent somewhere or give you some other information? I mean I know everything about me. My mothers maiden name, the credit card used to make payments, my social security number, my blood type, the number of cheeses in my refrigerator, my secret passcode-handshake-dance?
• Cox: No, just the pin. Just check the bill, it’s on the front of the bill.
• Ray: Ohhh, well I don’t have my bill available. Let’s just assume, for the sake of this completely ridiculous and hypothetical scenario, that I shredded my bill by accident. What do I do? Can you email me the pin on my Cox email account?
• Cox: No, I can’t give the pin out. I could call you on a Cox account phone, do you have one of those?
• Ray: No. IDEA! Can you call me on the phone number registered with my Cox account and give it to me over that number? Will that work?
• Cox: No, it has to be a Cox phone. Sorry, sir.
• Ray: That doesn’t make any sense, aren’t both numbers equally linked to the account?? You have my phone number that I own, or you have my phone number that you own. Either way, it’s my number and it’s worked so far in identifying me.  Isn’t that the point to keeping information on file? Is there any other reason that you would use my phone number…except to call me on it?
• Cox: Sorry, sir. I can’t do that.
• Ray: Okay, well we’re at an impasse, Ms. Cox. What shall we do?
• Cox: You can come down to the corporate office and request the move with two valid forms of I.D.
• Voiceover:At this moment I’m swimming in murky pools of non-logic, so I cling to the only reality within my field of perception. “YES!”, I shout emphatically, “YES! That I can do. You see, Ms. Cox, I have both a car and two forms of ID. This is entirely within my reaches. You’ve given me hope!”

Now, this hurts my chances of getting cable in the same day: my original hope. However, I think that even if I lost cable for one night, that would be alright. My only goal is to maximize my options. I continue and call 2 other customer reps for other companies, both of which reaffirm my faith in customer service and capitalism.

I proceed 6 miles to the Cox center and request my service get changed. That went something like this.

• Cox:Hello
• Ray: Hello! I need to switch my internet over from my previous apartment to my new one.
• Cox: Alright, what’s the old address?
• Raymond: %address_old%
• Cox: New Address?
• Raymond: %address_new%
• Cox: Okay, by the end of the day! Wait tomorrow….yeah, tomorrow…end of the day.
• Raymond: Darn, I was hoping for today. Wait, that’s it?
• Cox: That’s it!
• Raymond: Where does my PIN come into play?
• Cox: What pin?
• Raymond: Didn’t I need a PIN or 2 forms of ID? I didn’t need to drive 12 miles round trip? This is worse than what happened to Abraham, you know that! At least he got to keep his son. I still don’t have Internet.
• Cox: Eh, not so much.
• Raymond: ……….

At this point I show great restraint and honor. So I don’t. But when 3 o’clock rolls around I ask myself where the dude is.  I call, here’s the abbreviated version. “Should be working man! I’ll send to to tech support….Yeah, should be working. Nope, I’ll have to send a technician. Tomorrow? (me: ARRRRRGH) Oh wait! They haven’t come yet. Give them until seven!” How did you not know whether your own technician had done the job or not? Okay, so I’ll wait.

I notice the power gets shut off in the old apartment, so now running the wireless from there isn’t an option any more. I move the modem to my place and get no signal. I wait. I talk to Bryan. I wait. I consider talking to Bryan again, but stop myself.  Then I try again. By some sort of mysterious magic…the signal has changed…and yet this change comes without the ability to access the internet. What could have happened?

Apparently….apparently, the technician untrapped the line and let the connection through. HOWEVER. I guess it’s not policy to give a courtesy knock on the tenents door to let them know you set it up. So there was no point at which I could say..”It’s up? Wait, no it’s not. Could you look at this?” No. No point. So what did he do today? What did the guy do…today? He cost Cox money, and me time. And sanity….don’t forget…sanity.

So what’s the final damage? Thursday afternoon between 4 and 7 I will be getting the visit from a technician. Thursday. In my big book of Internet outages, I saw it written that a Monday-Tuesday was alright. Worst case stretches over Monday-Wednesday. But because of 3 poor phone support reps and a technician with somewhere better to be I am now out of cable for 4 days.

Do I realize that there are children starving around the world? Do I realize that I have enough food to last me for a month in case of emergency? SURE. But what I hate is that something tragic like me not having my Internet could have been avoided with some simple steps and better business planning. Plus, the money I would normally donate to starving children is now going to me finding otherways of getting my internet access and writing this blog post.

It’s been busy for me at school and elsewhere. I’ve started regaining my social life in the midst of my more intense studying aspects in the hopes of finally becoming the well-rounded individual. Also, I’ve finally returned to the developer stage with some interesting projects.

I’ve pretty much abandoned my trivial web projects in favor of a few more serious research and other projects in Python and C++. This is the third time I’ve been programming in C++ and the first real exposure to Python. It’s been fun dealing with interface/facade ideas in these languages instead of using the familiar Java concepts. It’s also interesting to try plugging in these tools into some fun new libraries.

I must say that I don’t despise C++ as I used to. It’s really not much different from Java except for the exaggerated power you feel from managing your own memory.  When I switched over the first time I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt with the lack of the amazing Java library and documentation, but you can overcome that.  The code can obviously be much more elegant at times as the magical pointer garbage can be pretty interesting. The biggest concern is that your code doesn’t start looking like something written by Escher.

Python is fun and different, but I’m not sure that I’m used to it yet. When working with C++ and Python at the same time you start to realize how uncomfortable that void of high level management is. I really have no idea how long it’s going to take me to get really comfortable with the language. You know what I’m talking about; there’s that point where you feel like you’re working on a code assembly line and the code colors and connecting shapes are all in arm’s reach.

The current situation with Python is a lot like that episode of Futurama where Bender is floating through space. A small species of people form on his body and evolve into a fully civilized species and he plays god for a little while. Then he screws up and causes a nuclear war, killing off his little world.  He then meets up with a god-like galaxy and they start talking and figuring stuff out. I think I just encountered god after playing around and blowing up my own mini-universe. Soon I should a good approach for creating life, but right now the options are just blowing my mind.

I’ll keep you up to date and I hope to have some descriptions of my tools and projects soon. Until then, I guess I hope that you’re staying healthy and looking forward to a happy Thanksgiving.

Liquid Garlic Salsa - 1% Lime, 2% Salsa, 97% Garlic

I’m not kidding. I mean, seriously, I’ve eaten raw cloves of garlic that taste less garlic-ey than this salsa. I only hope that the bottle I got was just disgustingly full of garlic. If not, vampires aren’t safe walking in Walmart any more. One of these bottles hits the floor and they’re all dead.

The focus of the piece is reconsidering the driving force behind security advancement. The classic direction is in implementing best practices available to engineers in order to minimize risk, although the paper didn’t speak to these principles directly. While using the previous direction as log from Frogger, it proposes the chief factor that drives advancement in security is liability and the transfer thereof. It tries the case through several examples focused primarily on security systems used in United Kingdom banks.

It’s hard to simplify in less than five pages, but overall it points out how litigation following incident lead to the most change in the way the UK banks operated and how this system differed from the American cousins. This may seem obvious, but he also tries to tease out the notion that the flaws in the systems did may have resulted from poor designs or because the industry as a whole was not handling these types of issues despite an abundance of technology that could have stopped many of these errors.

The premise is one that I can see merit in, but the application is quite limited in my mind.  The shortcoming of this analysis is that thec cases cited showed that loss due to failure of security mechanisms could be mitigated by an insurer or other liable body. This is not a common issue. In fact, banks and other asset management systems are the only groups that fall into this category, from my view. The only way you can restore most, let alone all, losses resulting from a security incident is if the lost material is of an entirely non-unique, exchangable nature.

I’ve become intimately familiar the concepts of risk as it pertains to reputation, trade secrets, and personal data. These are the pillars of risk, and they are regarded as the very purpose for security in our age. If you look at each element of risk you can see where Anderson’s model doesn’t apply. There are far too many groups out there to determine that liability transferrance is even an option for most cases.

Can Oracle transfer liabile risk of reputation damage to an insurer if they write poor software? Google’s search algorithm is worth trillions of dollars if potential earnings considered, and they could not insure their systems against loss of that information. And how would the Department of Defense transfer liability of operations information being leaked through an insecure system?

These cases are just a few of the corporate and government organizations that represent a vast majority. It’s unreasonable to think that any of these situations would have liability driving their security design and implementation. Why would it then be a driving force for the industry as a whole? It is unlikely, at best.

Again, I do not disagree with Anderson’s paper entirely; I feel that it is quite limited in it’s potency on a broader scope. I applaud his introduction of litigation and liability to the process, but it has far less impact on security than he believes it to be. Liability will always be a concern for any organization, but that does not mean that purpose or method changes because if it.

One of the tools that brought me back was the NuWave Oven (Pro). This was a wedding gift to/from a couple that I know and love, but I guess that’s a long story. The short story is that the oven is quite nice. While I’ve only used it for two things so far, both turned out quite nice.

The first was traditionally more complex: herb encrusted chicken breast. To do this I tried the basic approach with some frozen chicken breasts. I don’t have a lot of time or space so this was going to be quick and dirty. I tried to thaw the breasts a little, but didn’t get too far and just went right in to the spices. The base was basil, thyme, and rosemary with a little lemon pepper and crushed red pepper for warmth. All of these were just patted into the breast surface and the breasts were just tossed on the rack. Then I seasoned the other side and started the oven up.

Within a minute I could see the chicken sweating off all memory of the freezer and loosing a lot of fat. The wonderful thing about this oven is that you can clearly watch the progress and get a great estimate for how it’s doing. I noticed that the bottom side wasn’t cooking well so after the first 8 minutes I flipped the three pieces over and started again. After 10 more minutes the entire cycle was complete.

The seasonings seemed to be sucked rightinto the chicken and the flavor was fantastic. I did notice that the breast was tough (especially as it sat), but I think that was a combination of faults on my part. First, I didn’t use directions (please, no guy jokes). Second, the chicken was pretty close to the coil on the top, I should have dropped it to a lower level. Third, frozen chicken breasts shouldn’t ever be used…especially if your freezer has been struggling to reach 32 degrees for a week. That said, I think the only pull back from the chicken could be righted almost immediately and I could start adding vegetables to lower trays.

My other experiment was a simple lesson in toasting. I took a huge, day-old-sale sourdough loaf and sliced it up into pieces. Then, using extra virgin olive oil I coated each of the slice sides. Then I seasoned with basil, oregano, and garlic salt, and I threw the slices on one rack in the oven. It took longer than I thought, but the results were fantastic. Perfect restaurante quality toast to mix with some tasty tomato-basil penne from the night before (quick saute with extra sauce makes a great way to reheat).

If you have extra money to spend, or marrying benefactors, I recommend trying out this product. If you don’t have either of the aforementioned items stop by, and I’ll make dinner for you.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a portable MP3 player….too long. Rather than bearing with the burden for years and years before I die due to lack of soothing tunes, I decided to satisfy that need. The object of my aural delight is a 2GB Creative Zen.

To all of you technophiles out there, “no, it’s not a Zune or an iPod”. I can’t justify spending over $100 bucks on a device, especially if it has software dependencies. I respect the options out there, particularly the proper potential of Wi-Fi synchronization in the Zune. If I were going to switch to a main player, it would probably be the Zune. That is, of course, if I didn’t get an option to pick up an iPhone first.  There’s no contest there.

But anyways, here’s a quick rundown…nothing to earth shattering.

What do I like:

• Physical Size (near credit-card HxW and just large enough for 3/8in plug deep)
• Expandable Storage using Secure Digital Cards
• Drivers compatible with all Windows installs so far (no pc software needed)
• Great WAV Recording Filtering for Clarity and Good Stream Rates
• Loads of standard video support (Even my weirdly formatted videos look great)
• Nice 2.5″ Display
• FM Radio Displat
• Simple Menu Interfaces
• Photo Support (fantastic images)
• Price ($80 new)

What don’t I like:

• No “Play by Folder” Options (I’m an addict)
• No support for Ogg Vorbis formats
• No Soft key buttons (Starting/Stopping recordings is a pain)
• Apparently they don’t use iCal format for calendar
• Integrated Battery (It may be a must for size, but I don’t have to like it)
• Poor earbuds included

But it’s a great product over all. I’ve been more inclined to record meetings now that I have it on my body so I can review discussions after the fact. And the WAV sampling is great, so fair quality speech at the 10 foot range is coming out at about 15 minutes per 2.5 megs. Not to mention everyone who has seen it has asked what it is; it’s very sleek.

If you’re looking for something fairly inexpensive but still sexy I’d advise you to check out the Creative Zen.

Important Note: I have a hard time talking about portable players without saying this but all the MP3’s on my Zen are legal.  I know just about everyone might have carryover stuff that may be of questionable legal background from your childhood (when you had no money and didn’t know any better), but it’s no excuse to keep taking money from people who earn it. 99 cents a song isn’t bad. And if you play 100+ hours of that video game, isn’t it worth $40-50?

I also like to take issue with the anachronism that is the modern day music conglomorate and DRM licensing. If I can purchase a player that can just let me use my music the way I need to use it. When I buy it, I should be able to put it on any device that I need without paying more royalties. I’m not advocating sharing and reselling, but the rights of use are there when it comes to entertainment.

Consumers Unite! Please buy your music, software, and movies and buy players that let you use them the way you want. It’s irresponsible to steal from artists and developers, but it’s not time to give money to these companies by locking into a software use nightmare or DRM fiascos.  Buy and use freely, respect and enjoy.

I have always been a very dedicated student, but over a series of poor decisions by myself and faculty, I became largely disinfranchised with the idea of finishing my last semester. While I still remain personally attached to some of the faculty and staff, there was a lot that I needed to get away from in order to be happy with my future.

A large portion of what I left in Superior revolved around a very long and very painful relationship. It was one that I tried to solidify and ground but, instead and much too late, wound up destroying there. Most of the relatively small city carried some bad memories and it was time for me to move up and move on.

One professor, call him V (purely random letter), actually recommended the program in Tulsa to me in late November. He talked about the reputation that our school had with the advisor and how my performance as an undergrad would make me a possible competitor for a slot. Probably the most interesting thing about this suggestion professor was that he and I had a rather complicated past. During several occasions, in courses, the students ran into “issues” with the way things were proceeding. At the time, we got in to some very tense situations, but I realize that he was fantastically professional and understanding through each situation. Any lack of respect that I may or may not have had in the man has vanished over the years, and I can now say that he was one of the best people I’ve been able to work under as a student.

After a whirlwind, and somewhat last-minute, romance with the graduate program, I was accepted and I began preparing to leave. Friends and family were fairly pleased with my decision to start my graduate degree in Tulsa. But that is not to say they were pushing me out of the door with a stick, they were civil despite the opportunity to be rid of me. Some of my closer friends that I wound up with at the end of my college career were friends that I had made years before in high school and with whom I had renewed relationships. They had it worst of all as I’ve learned that my charm is much like an exploding star: certainly striking but you better not pay to close attention or you’ll blind yourself and gain lasting, nagging burns whose intensity depends on the exposure to the radiation. Despite all this,  I confess that I will miss their support and friendly faces in the coming years (though we’ve continued phone conversations already).

We did much to part ways, and the move out process was slow and awkward. Still, by seeing them frequently and still knowing my exodus was emminent allowed us to sort of ease into the prospect of being apart. I am glad to say that it was not painful to leave, and it has not and will not be painful to be apart. To be honest…I think that without the leave, there would be a lot of fishbowl inertia keeping us all in place. It’s not exactly poetic, but it is nice to think that perhaps splitting up will give each of us enough fin room to make escape velocity and jump into the open air. Now it only remains to see if each of us will be able to survive out of the water.

Good thing this garbage is purely metaphor, and an obnoxiously contrived one at that. I like my neck without gills, and my life to be more than a monochromatic, two-dimensional etching of a three-year-old. On that note, I’ll wish myself luck and luck to my friends (Godspeed, SHRELM).  In the words of a tragically misunderstood dogsledder but wonderful librarian, “Love you, miss you, bye.”

While studying common methods for cryptography, there was quite a debate when discussing how humans crack the Caeser Cipher. Everyone seemed to have a strong opinion on whether the method was induction or deduction that humans would use to experiment with various 2- and 3-letter word possibilities, as you do in my mother’s personal vice: the cryptogram.

As I pointed out, to much derisive laughter, it’s neither. The correct form of reasoning to use here is abduction. This kind of methodology is not as pure as its bother and sister, deduction and induction, as it can lead to incorrect results. However, this sort of reasoning is arguably the most visible in our modern society. In particular, mysteries and detective-work almost always begin with a great deal of abductive reasoning. A trick to remembering these is to walk through a scenario. Here’s one that I made up:

Sherlock Holmes went to his friends house for tea and found his friend laying in the entrance with a gash on his head and a bloody candlestick next to him; he was dead. Using abductive logic, he could guess that he was struck and killed by the candlestick. It is possible that he died some other way, and that may not even be his blood on the candlestick, but it is fairly reasonable to make that step. Based on this, he could could also use inductive reasoning to estimate that a human struck him (a fairly strong induction as Sherlock remembers only 1 in 200 beating victims that he’s seen attacked by an animal).

Sherlock then remembers that his friend’s will stated that ‘if I die, my butler will take over and own my estate’. Since the man is dead, the butler must own the estate. This fine bit of deductive reasoning tells Sherlock It’s probably a good idea for him to go talk to the butler.

By and large, the paper is extremely simple (and quite short), but I’m not really aware of how influential this paper has been over the years. It was written in 2001, and I have been told that it’s the seminal piece of this entire movement…but that’s really hard for me to believe. Especially since the McCumber INFOSEC Model (the McCumber Cube) was published in 1991, and this paper basically just tosses that model into a “fourth dimension” and expands, a little ridiculously, the characteristics part of the model.

The contributions that I see to the model’s data characteristics are trivial distinctions in the terminology.  The new Information Assurance Model (a.k.a. McCumber Cube 2.0) merely splits the three Information Characteristics into five Security Services. Their main contention with the earlier work, I infer, was that the loose definition of data integrity was insufficient to outline what was really needed. Their addition of Authentication and Non-Repudiation may have merit, as Integrity of data is commonly used to measure immutability and structural continuity, but I don’t see it as necessary for those with a background in data integrity. I guess if everyone is reading something, it’s probably good that  CIO’s to hackers probably need to see the distinction between the data integrity itself and the integrity of the source and the retrieval process.

Regarding my statement on, and obnoxious quotation of, their “fourth dimension”, this paper added the additional, singularly organic concept of Time to this idea. Where most previous outlines have neglected this concept, I do see the point they make with the steady changes over time. My experience in this area isn’t immense so I don’t know if they’re singularly responsible for this idea, but the modeling of that idea is actually quite sound.

For me, this concept of adapting security over time is a lot like dropping a 12 gallon, cube-shaped water mass (in honor of McCumber) into an 8 gallon bucket with a hole in it. If you figure the water is about 6 feet up then there are a few reasons why a lot of the water isn’t going to make it into the bucket to begin with: it’s just not a perfect match. When it does hit the bucket there’s going to be a pretty large splash, and a lot of what was put in place will be thrown out right away. The last few phases are a sort of balancing until the surface water is still. Unfortunately, still water is the worst place to be and you’re never going to have a completely full bucket unless you’re measuring and adding slowly until you’ve balanced the flow of water coming in and the water draining out of that hole. This image is simplified, but it’s pretty apt.

It is important for me to point out that any negative perspective I have regarding this paper may not be for any other reason than because a perfect, albeit figurative, cube was converted into an elongated box which poses as a cube.  I’ve been known to commit worse acts of hostility, but I’m just all about cube-equality.

The biggest point that I share with people is that technology is the cutting edge, and the very tip of that edge is security. This is becoming validated on an ever increasing increment with the growth of cloud computing and high-availability, online systems. Not only do IA standards address this, but they also encourage the constant measurement and addition of water. Google, Amazon, and all the other big players need to have this technology and need to assess it with respect to time and progress. While this paper did bring out those concepts, I don’t know how much this was solidified beyond existing standards. But I’m not too worried about Google missing the boat on this.

The entire movement to IA is quite interesting to me, and I’m looking forward to getting more exposure in the coming months. Most of my closest colleagues know that I’m much more interested in policy than your normal CS-geek. Actually, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that policy makers hold all of the power and still get to see a lot of the fun. My ideal job would be working for a leading, technology-driven agency and pioneering/expanding policy while getting to sit in on disciplinary and review committees to observe impacts of changes being made. At least that’s what I see right now; this ESM class will probably make or break it for me.

I don’t know how long it will be before I start to feel like this is where I’ve always been. It will probably be after I stop hearing about my accent, and maybe after I change my license plates. I hope it will come like the pentecostal flame, only giving me the strength to kill giant spiders instead of speaking in tongues.

There were a few steps to this journey, and I’ll probably document them for you in the next day or two. Without internet access or a working knowledge of Tulsa’s geography, I’ll probably be sitting inside a lot without much to do. It’s good, and I’m not trying to ‘fix that’.

But in summary: it’s now a week before my graduate courses start up in computer science, and three days before I find out just how small I am relative to the entering class of graduate students. These are major events, and major chapters that I’m now going to be exploring. I’m glad you’re reading this, and I hope you can find time to leave a comment or two on this blog series. I’d like to hear what other people are going through.