Every other post.
So, Docks is dead. It’s official. The hard drive that had all the tapes died. I still have all of the original tapes, but they’re messed up because of the skipping issue. Fuck. I can’t tell you how disapointed I am. I was really looking forward to trying to salvage this.
Here’s the script.
On page 33 of editing the latest Rice Tea draft. When its done, this will be the last draft. The changes are very minor this time round, having to do with correcting the grammar and sentence structure. My mom’s quite busy for the coming weeks, so her further editing of the book has been put on hold.
Meanwhile, I changed the page structure of the book. The first page of each chapter now has the page number on the bottom. There’s more spacing on the insides of the pages, facing towards the spine. I thought it would be a bitch to implement these measures, but OpenOffice makes it all very easy (once you know how to do it.)
Rice Tea has been all about the drafts. At first, I created a series of handwritten outlines. In the beginning they were short. The one I have on hand from 2006 was 6 pages. These grew with time. Six pages became Thirty. Thirty became fourty-five.
I began work on the actual content for the book pretty much as soon as the outlines were done. I started writing that in mid-July, and I had a first draft ready in early October. The second draft was finished just finished a few days ago, about a month later.
So this is where we’re at now. Next up is a revision of the book by my mom. She’s not a hacker, nor is she terribly savvy with technology. But she’s a kick ass linguistics teacher, and she can spot poor sentence structure from a kilometer away. Actually, she’s plain kick ass in general.
I’ve been looking at the logs for ricetea.ca, and if I’m lucky I’ll get one visitor a day. Eh well. The rest are just search bots. I have banned Websense bots from the site. I was tired of seing their bots bomb my site with fake user agents.
Picked up the new book by Mafiaboy. I thought it could give me some insights on how the RCMP handled it’s targeted hackers. To that end, it succeeded. However, I really could not recommend this book to others. The writing style is very sloppy, with poor sentence structure and an unending stream of redundant passages. There’s also lots of fluff that’s in there for what I can only assume to increase the page count. For instance, he devotes three pages to describing members of his old hacker gang, elaborately talking about every single one. Also a sore point are the numerous comments he inserts to shed off his scriptkiddy image, only to reinforce that perception at some later point with his own words.
If you want to buy the book, buy it for it’s comical value. He really tries hard to make Efnet sound like some kind of evil hackerz-0nly club. He also keeps talking about how good he was, how much damage he had caused, blah blah blah. He’ll quote CNN many times over. He’ll use superlatives when talking about himself. It makes reading this feel like some kind of ego-boosting exercise rather than a proper retelling of the events.
It’s taken nearly a month to do it, but I’ve finished the second full draft of Rice Tea. The entire text has been extensively revised.
For the most part, I found that I was being needlessly descriptive. I was also fairly technical about events in the book. Both counts have been addressed. I found that I could cut down on much of the jargon without affecting the content. I just won’t go out of my way to say that Seth downloaded the worm’s update from the repository of a honeypot project.
So our big neighbour to the south is threatning Canada with visa-only access into the country unless they get a say in our domestic security affairs. You know what I say to that? Let them. Let them require visas.
It’s a brash statement to make, then again, I don’t expect them to actually go through with the threats. The free flow of trade to both our economies is too important. But I do find this kind of armtwisting arrogant. There’s already a high level of intelligence sharing between the two nations. Discussions to heighten that is one thing, but to threaten us if we don’t comply?
I thought the passport-free entrance was a symbol of American-Canadian unity, of our shared values and a testament to our communal border security. We’ve progressed back to passport-only entry, and now we’re being pushed to visa-only entry.
It is the arrogance that fuels these threats which bothers me. America has a bad wrap here. It doesn’t help that they already have stations in all of our international airport. Or that they built a concrete barrier in the middle of my downtown’s busiest laneways, in the name of protecting their embassy. From bombs. As if somehow the existing bomb-proof glass, seperator, fifteen foot high fence, second seperator, and line of impact poles didn’t do the job already.
Why the Americans felt the need to build that military-grade fortress in the downtown core of my city I know not. But if their way to keep pushing policies through remains through pure bullying, and not even-handed negotiations, then they’re only going to continue to isolate themselves further.