ALDS Game 2 at Fenway Park

Posted on by grahams

Red Sox Nation sent out a dispatch last week about a first-come, first-served contest for tickets to watch Game 2 of the ALDS at Fenway.  This was an away game, so the party was being held in the State Street Pavilion, which are some of the more expensive seats in the park.  I replied right away, as did roryk , and we both got on the guest list.  coco_b  thought it’d be a fun night too, and so we all went over there on Friday night.

It was really a blast..  RSN was giving away some neat prizes, the ultimate being two box seats to tonight’s game (we didn’t win anything, but it was fun nonetheless).  The pavilion is basically a restaurant with glass facing the field, but when you’re actually at a game, you have seats on the other side of the glass to watch the game from.  There were TVs to watch the game all over the restaurant, and we were also welcome to go out and sit in the seats over the field (where there were also TVs).  The food was what you’d expect from a ball park, not great, but definitely a little better than the vendors in the concourse.  There was a full bar and table service, and there were probably about 150 people at the party.   We got pictures with the World Series trophies, but some of them are on Corinna’s camera, so I haven’t gotten them yet.  The ones I took with my phone are up, though.

The game was completely awesome, a little bit of everything..  Started out hot, Angels slowly crept back, the awesome jack by Drew to put the final nails in..  It was so great watching the game with such a group of hardcore fans…   Rory and Corinna really seemed to enjoy it as well, even though coco was pretty tired by the time the late night game ended…

Nerdy Security Discussion

Posted on by grahams

Ok, I’ve been having a debate in my head for about a week now, and so I figured I’d open it up for discussion:

Right now, I have three classifications of passwords:

  • "Secure" – A memorable, yet obscure base (would look random to most people) with host-specific unique data inserted within (via a mental hash function)
  • "Screen-door lock" – a simple mixed case alphanumeric password I reuse across multiple hosts.  This is for hosts (typically, random Web sites) where it would be mildly irritating if someone had access to my account…
  • "Who cares" – This is for the hosts that I don’t care about yet require me to input a password.  It is a completely insecure, throwaway password.  It could probably be brute-forced in about 30 seconds.

I began thinking about whether or not it would be ultimately more secure to have one classification of password (really secure, pseudo random noise) and store those passwords in a single, encrypted password store behind a single "secure" password.  This store would obviously be very backed up and treated as other personal data.  

Clearly, this is a single point of failure, so if someone compromises my password store, everything is compromised.  On the other hand, each individual password would be far less guessable…  

Opinions?



Knock Knock

Posted on by grahams

coco_b  and I decided to drive up to New Hampshire today to volunteer in Salem for Barack Obama.  I was really reluctant, but Corinna felt that since there wasn’t much to do here in Massachusetts to help him win, but NH is still up in the air, and even though it’s a small state, every state counts..   So I sucked it up, we woke up at 8am and drove to Salem to meet at the campaign’s field office.  After a little primer on how to approach people, we were given our list of 80 addresses and sent on our way.  It took a little while to build up the stones to really start doing it, but we just dove in and started knocking.  Turns out, not many people were actually home…  As to be expected, there were also a fair number of people who just refused to talk, although not a single person was rude to us.  For the most part, the people we encountered either politely told us they weren’t interested in speaking, or that they already supported one of the candidates..  We did encounter a few undecided voters, and we gave them the rundown and some literature.   I have no idea if we swayed them our way, but they seemed receptive.

At the end of the day, we ended up only doing 69 of the 80 addresses, as we ran out of steam and out of time.  When we turned in our packet, we were unsure how it would be received, it seemed like we only actually talked to a handful of people (maybe 20/69 tops, and 10 of them politely refused to talk).  This seemed like nothing to us, but the organizer though it was great that we made it through 69and with our final tally report.  Before talking to him were a little let down, but once we thought about it, our opinion turned around…   Of course there would be a bunch of people not home on a Saturday afternoon..  And of course there’d be plenty of people who didn’t want to talk to anyone at their front door, regardless of what they were pimping…

It was tiring and a bit intimidating, but at the end of the day we felt good about volunteering and actually putting something other than our money where our mouth has been…