My now previous car, a 2001 Subaru Forester S Model, dark blue with grey leather had over 115,000 miles on the car. That is a lot of miles. It’s had a home in MA, VA, and NY with the furthest distance south in Central VA in Richmond Area and as north as Rochester, NY. East is Boston, MA and west… really Rochester again. So it has gotten around in the North East Corridor.

0 Miles vs. 116,000 Miles // Age 18 vs. Age 29

Besides the obvious age of the car, the car was mechanically sound after like two axle replacements, at least 6 brake and rotors combo replacements, head gaskets, air fuel sensor, and etc. This list could go on for two pages. I had hit a deer right before I got home once which busted up the front and the driver side headlight (the deer walked away). And some “unknown” accident when my sister was using the car after she got into an accident with mom’s car. It was getting expensive to keep patching up such an old car that could have just died while driving back, going to work, or die in a Nor’easter snow storm. Well… it’s not going to happen.

Introducing… Steel.

2012 Ford Escape Hybrid (aka Steel)

Steel - Introduction in Heavy Metal

Like all my crazy names for all my devices, this is named after the Super Hero Steel from the Superman Animated Series.

Since I am a techno geek, this car is fully loaded. It is the Hybrid Limited 501A package. The added features that I got were:

• In-dash Navigation System (Touch Display)
• Remote Starter
• Side Step Rails
• Park Assist
• 4WD

A pretty sick machine of metal. It was a very hard car to find available to get since production for this car stopped in October. I could not wait any longer for a new car.

The only place I could find the car was in Fairfax, VA. Didn’t I used to live there? Oh yeah. So I took a little road trip for the last time because I was doing a trade in with my Subaru. After the 4 hour drive to VA plus 5 hour day at the dealership, the car was mine and I was ecstatic to leave behind 115,000 miles of history and start a new one.

Parting Ways....

Until I get the title papers from the dealership I can not use my car for EMS runs, but I have my sister’s car as a backup. Until next time…

CCNA Results: 867 of 825 needed!

IT HAS HAPPENED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I took the exam today in Queens after 6 months work of taking the Cisco Networking Academy course at Queen College receiving an average grade of A in all four semesters of the class work, lab work, and exams. As you can tell, I am very excited and was also very busy to get to this point.

I told myself I could not get distracted and that’s why I been so absent from the WordPress community for such a long time, but now that I got my CCNA, you might start seeing some changes to this site and my activity level once again, however I have taken up to become an EMT-B in New York State and also start my CCNP on the 1st of October. So things are not really quiet here at the rabbit hole.

I like to thank a few people:

• Mom and Sister – They had to deal without me when I was doing all my lab work and/or exams.
• Jake Lehmann – Helped me when ever I asked, but it wasn’t that much.
• Co-Workers – They helped me traded days off for important study dates and deal with my non-standard schedule at work.

So what happens now? Well… there is always the possibility of finding a better paying job. Having your CCNA is a huge resume builder and being since I want to be working in the networking field this for sure helps.

In any case, from the WordPress/Programing side of my life I can now open up a bit and let loose the code that has building inside me. Although I can’t go back to my “playful” side, I have to work on achieving my dreams however many paths that must come before me in order to get there.

Here is to the future…

Now I am back in NY, back in the store, but I am going back to school starting Tuesday and Thursday nights in order to start my my even higher education. The first courses should end by November 2011. It also means that I am now going to be going back into WordPress Core Development which was really hard to do while I was in Minnesota for weeks at a time. I am also letting people know that I am ready to take on designing and website creation again using my newly acquired skills of ExtJS and Sechna Touch. Please get in touch with me if you want my services. I am still awaiting if I can use screen shots of my project for showcase work. If that is the case, expect them soon!

You will also see some changes to the design here at the rabbit hole where I been thinking about a major redesign for a while now since this design is over a 2 years old. A lot of the color scheme will stay the same, but I know for sure the flash header is going away and the layout of where the content is and how it displays will changes for sure. It will be a process and I sorta been working on it in my head.

Anyway, that’s all for now!

This tutorial should be good for both Unix, Windows, and Apple user’s although I am writing this as if you were a Windows user.

So the most basic requirements for this session you will need these programs installed:

• Modilla Thunderbird (Email Client)
• Pidgin (IM Client)

If you are using these right now, make sure they are at their latest version. If you are reading this just to see how it works, by all means download them and try it out yourself. You might have to configure the clients to work.

Download my key: My OpenPGP Key (265)

For encrypting you need to install:

• GPG/GnuPG
  • For Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 – GPG4Win – http://www.gpg4win.org/ (Needed for Pidgin; You can just install GnuPG if you are going to use just Thunderbird from this Suite)
• EnigMail Plugin (For Thunderbird)
• GPG/OpenPGP Plugin (For Pidgin, XEP-0027)

For those users who have Android phones:

• APG – On Android Market Place
  • Best one I found

Once you have everything installed for your operating system let take a look “under the hood”.

Concept

The concept of signing your emails and/or encrypting them is to allow a user to verify that the “email” or “file” they got is legitimately from you. Take this for example, I send you an email. When I send an email it goes through my computer, to my router, and internet provider. When it gets to the “internet”, the message is routed over a series of “nodes” (aka computers either hardwired with software or applications that send the “message”) and as it’s moving from one node to the other, it leaves it behind in-case there is a failure. At one point it will reach your server where you use your computer to download the message. Sounds simple right?

Now I am a hacker. I hack into one of those nodes and read all the emails or messages that go through it. That hacker what’s to modify my email/message before it reaches you. If I had not “signed” it, the message would seem legitimate and it came from me, but instead he has modified it to include a virus or something that I did not say. Now if I had signed it and you knew my “signature” and read the message after it be modified, it would say “This message is not valid.” because when I sent it I gave that message a unique code along with my “signature” embedded into it. Doing that prevents my messages from being hijacked. Of course this is if your are interpreting my emails when they arrive at your computer in which this tutorial will show you how to do that.

Encrypting works the same way except for one caveat. When I send the message I have to know your signature and you need to know mine. When I hit “send” it makes the message into a format that only a OpenPGP reader would be able to understand encrypting it with my “secret key” as part of my “signature” and knowing your “public key” does it generate the content in which I am sending it to. This way as long as the email maintains it’s formatting though out the entire process I described above, you should be able to get my encrypted email without anyone else being able to read it.

1. Counter-Strike Source – 149 hours
2. Magic The Gathering – 53 hours
3. Empire: Total War – 39 hours

These are the top three that I played since they started tracking game usage. The game that I used to play a lot of here was Team Fortress 2, but since it doesn’t run well on my laptop, I can not play it and there been so many updates since I last played, I really gotta re-learn the basics of the game. It doesn’t even show the stats where I played over 105 hours alone of just the class ‘Spy’. Oh well. Counter-Strike Source is nice, but the game is very repetitive and the “realistic” of the game has been lost. Some people would say “Hey. Play Call of Duty (COD4) to get some real action.”. I say “No one ever plays as a team in those games. It’s everyone for themselfs”. If Counter Strike Source was to ever update to where it could be like COD4 (in terms of graphics and game play) but matain the “fun” that Counter Strike has, that would be something to play.

Counter-Strike Source and Magic the Gathering play well on my laptop and that’s why they are up there because I played those games while I was in Minnesota, but more of the RTS games I played while I been here in NY. In the past two months I played:

1. R.U.S.E.
2. Civilization V
3. Sim City 4

All RTS games. Go figure. Any games that you may want to get me that is on my wish-list would be much appreciated. I would use this list instead of buying some random game and sending it my way. I may never play it. *cough* Spore *cough*