Category Archives: Conferences and Travel

DefCon Day 2 and a bit of Day 3

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Well, alien Andrew is in full control. I was up at 4.30 am on Saturday morning, and again this morning. Unfortunately, on Saturday, I crashed about 8.30 am and slept to near 2 pm.

I went to DefCon at 3 pm to meet with Brenda from the Trike team. We had a good discussion on the approach to Trike for larger apps and how Trike might be suitable for inclusion into OWASP materials.

At 4 pm, I met with Meredith and Robert from the u. Iowa Dejection project. I went back to Meredith’s hotel room and we had a very long and interesting discussion on the future of their project and many other topics. I bounced a few ideas off them. All in all, this was the best and most useful part of DefCon for me – the networking with clueful people.

DefCon has been very disappointing. What the hell are folks working on? DefCon 13 has nothing really new or exciting. All the attacks I’ve seen (or reviewed in the PPTs on the CD-ROM) are derivative and boring. There’s so much web app sec stuff occuring and DefCon schedules not a single session, and yet has four back to back sessions on physical security on lame devices like door locks and safes. If we made encraption as bad as the average door lock or cabinet we’d be laughed out of the house. I can’t believe that people think that this stuff is bleeding edge.

So today, I’m going to meet up with some folks from newbeetle.org – Jen and Chris, rather than sweat it out in any of the remaining sessions. The CTF competition is winding down behind me as I write, and the drum and bass sound track is getting thin. The geek next to me is listening to his own stuff rather than be pummelled by the incessant driving bass. Defcon needs good DJs who are aware of the many styles other than D&B. I love techno music, and this stuff is repetitive crap.

The other thing that really really pisses me off is the smoking. WTF were the organizers thinking? There’s like 5% of the attendees smoking and they are making this room unbearable despite aircon working overtime. I’m going on a serious crop dusting mission soon. I love dropping my guts right around an active smoker. The dead thing emissions from my nether regions are nothing to the foul deadly particulate stream that I now stink of, thanks very much.

The worst part is that outside is literally just 5 – 10 metres away. They could kill themselves out there and not harm me and the other 95% of the participants.

If I come again, I’ll find a reliable source of onion rings so my crop dusting missions will be all the more fruitful. I have to spread the love.

I have to be at the airport for 5.45 to make it back to LAX in time for my late night 16 and a bit hour flight to Australia. I miss out on Monday altogether. Oh well. I had two Tuesdays this week.

Day One of Defcon

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I woke up pretty early. Obviously as I am not alien Andrew, it must be the jet lag has not caught up with me yet. I took a long slow breakfast and decided to let everyone rush to the first sessions of DefCon without me. I prepared Mr Laptop for a day at DefCon. I turned on the firewall logs, I turned off inbound UDP and blue tooth. I logged out of all my favorite websites which have a clear text equivalent hash (such as slashdot or even this blog). I confirmed that I was using SSL to grab my e-mail. I fear that it’s not going to be enough.

When I tried getting a cab, there was a queue a mile long. So I waited. It was 40 C at 9.30 am. Lovely.

I finally got there around 10 am when the first sessions were kicking off, and I realized that effectively, if you’re not in the queue 15+ minutes before a session starts, you’ve got buckleys of seeing that session. DefCon has become too popular; only about half the attendees can see any particular session. In fact, this means you can only see about half the sessions if you stay to the end of each. So pretty much everyone leaves 10 minutes before the end. This is very disruptive to the presenter.

I wanted to meet up with a bunch of people, so I gingerly turned on Mr Laptop and SMS’d a bunch of folks. I watched the sheep board to make sure I wasn’t exposing any passwords. Luckily, the answer was no. The Sheep board is a bit disturbing, they have a short film clip every time someone exposes a password in the clear whether by bluetooth (boy am I glad I turned it all off before I arrived). The film clips varies between the bunny being cleaned up by a Mercedes in a race, to a woman being mauled by a bear when she sits next to it and others. Each clips is only a second or so long, but you wish you hadn’t looked.

Sure enough DefCon is filled to the brim with freaks. There’s the guy in a large woollen trenchcoat with a laptop in a harness on his back with two very large aerials. No guesses as what he is doing. There’s the various goths and so on who are there to be seen in their resplendant black battle gowns. It’s now 42 C. There’s the guy who is wearing a black skirt trying to desperately to make it out as if it’s a kilt. No sir, it’s a skirt. Here’s what he looks like – in fact I think I might have found his source:

Skirts for freaks

Then there’s the usual sort of script kiddie trying to attack other computers. The firewall logs I have are completely lame.

One of the cool things about this DefCon compared to last time is that there seems to be more chicks. There’s like five of them. Unfortunately, four are goths, but the other one is pretty cute. I will keep you posted on this disturbing trend!

I went to a few sessions, but they’re all network attack tools. The state of the art here really hasn’t moved along as much as I would have thought. I will be selecting day two talks a bit more carefully. Which could be tricky as there seems to be a hardware lock picking stream, leaving just two other streams.

One talk I went to by accident was the NRMC. The tent was running late and the guy they had planned to present on the next generation of cryptanalytic hardware thought was presenting on Saturday. I stayed anyway as Simple Nomad was not presenting, which is good as Simple Nomad is a wanker of the highest order. After presenting a few tools and using only half an hour of their allotted hour, they started their Q&A spanking session. You could ask a question, but only if you had previously filled out their “ass release form”, which allowed them to spank you with one of four things:

  • “firm hand from any NRMC member of your choice”. They’re all blokes and only one looks like he could actually hurt you. The rest are weedy geeks
  • Paddle from a previous conference. Weedy geeks, shouldn’t hurt.
  • Copy of “Hacking Exposed, 3rd edition”
  • piece of paper with the words “Patriot Act” written on it. Gee, how funny is that?

I didn’t hang around as they seemed to want to make love to Mudge on stage and I felt that Mudge wanted man meat sooo bad. Normally, I’m totally into that, but I’d already seen the presentation and I had a meeting to get to. The tools weren’t too bad, but the tools on stage had a highly inflated opinion of themselves.

I met our new publisher, Bill Pollock from No Stach Press. He’s a really nice guy and he’s so totally on the same page as us. He took me to a Vietnamese chain restuarant (!), and I had some grilled sliced pork. I think we’ll get along just fine.

After that, I was invited to a party at Hard Rock (again), but honestly, I just didn’t feel like being smoked upon, so I tried to go back to my hotel. The taxi line was more than a mile long, with hundreds waiting. A cab came every 30 seconds or so. I looked in the distance and I could see Caesar’s Palace. The cab ride in the morning wasn’t too bad… So I walked it back.

Well, it took about an hour and was filled with bizarre stuff. These dogdy dudes were at a set of lights, and they wondered if I would buy their shitty old van, a bargain at $300. Yeah, riigggght. I kept on walking and nearly got cleaned up when I accidentally stepped on to the road without looking in the right direction. Luckily, the lanes are wide. Then near the main drag, I was being followed by a goth, and he was being followed by an extra from Mullet World. I looked with interest at the ticket window of Fashionistas, and waited for them to pass. And what’s not to like about looking at a hoarding of five beautiful women in fake wigs, knee high boots, riding crops and fishnets?

I stopped off at the Bellagio’s fountains about 45 minutes into my trek. They started playing “A song for Guy” by Elton John, and the 600 metre long fountains in the middle of this man-made lake were doing this water ballet routine. It was so Las Vegas – one of the best gay love songs ever written playing through speakers hidden inside fake 19th century gas lamps spotted every few metres, beautiful water fountains routine obviously synchronized by a friend of Dorothy or two, all the while huge police and fire trucks are zooming down the strip drowning out the music with their sirens.

I finally got back to the hotel room. I was bushed, hot and sore. Only one thing for it – I filled the spa. Any thought of going out to get smoky was eliminated when those gentle bubbles hit my sore feet.

Day Two of BlackHat

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The day kicked off fairly well, albeit tinged with disappointment and anger at Cisco for being Butt Heads.

I read about Michael Lynn’s legal problems with Cisco in more detail. I tried finding him to offer my support, but unfortunately it’s a big conference and I bet he was lying low. I for one will be making sure that Cisco products are off my buy list for a long, long time. If they really think that squishing security researchers is the answer, then they do not deserve business. Fix your damn bugs, morons.

I tried interesting the press in talking to me about web application security issues, but unfortunately, they seem to be curiously disinterested. I think the next time, I’ll ask Black Hat (or whoever) to organize a press conference as honestly, they are missing the major story.

Robert J. Hansen and Meredith L. Patterson’s talk on Dejection, a mathematical model to detect dynamic injection patterns was an eye opener. This was the best talk for me so far this conference. I later had lunch with Robert, and we’re meeting with both of them again on Saturday to go through how their work might be referenced in OWASP. They are seeking patents and working with a VC, so it might be tricky to go forward without causing either themselves or OWASP issues.

I bought a copy of Michael Howard, David LeBlanc, and John Viega’s new 19 Sins book during the first break.

I went to Phil Zimmerman’s talk. It was encrypted VOIP. He uses Macs and talked off the cuff, but despite that, this was the least technical talk I went to at BlackHat. In some ways, I should have gone to another session as I didn’t learn that much. I read the new book rather than tune into the VOIP demo.

I and about five others went to Tzi-cker Chiueh’s excellent if very technical talk on using x86′s segment registers to provide hardware array bound overflow protection. He was very thorough, but unfortunately, did not demonstrate the approach live. This is the sort of stuff that BlackHat should be concentrating on to some degree – preventing attacks using novel approaches. Unfortunately, too many people want to see the latest exploits.

After lunch, I decided to try out the turbo talks. I went to Mike Pomraning’s talk on “not validating”, which actually was about validating. :) I had a good long talk with Mike the night before, so I felt I should at least see his talk and heckle a bit :) I sat with Robert and Meredith and we sort of heckled.

I skipped a few of the next sessions as I didn’t really think they’d be that interesting (and more to the point, the CD-ROM materials had good presentations) to go read more of 19 Sins, after which I wrote up a preliminary review.

The last session I attended was the Jericho Forum’s challenge, which is a deperimeterized architecture group. They were handing out prizes for best papers received which furthered their aims. None of the winners were there, but the papers themselves are fascinating. I’d really suggest you go get them:

All of them are here:

The winners:

1. Balancing the equation
2. Reference Architecture, Galwas
3. Blind public key

I am retaining my reputation for piking on social events. For some reason, I just didn’t feel like being smoked upon at the nightclubs where most of the apres parties were being held. In fact, I don’t know why they still allow smoking in the foyers of the conference during the day. Only a few took advantage of the smoking – most in IT aren’t stupid enough to smoke, but it was enough to make me feel queasy. I complained to the organizers at the end when I handed in my card. I’ll follow it up with an e-mail.

Day One so far…

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Well, day one was just excellent. There is a reason that Black Hat is the premiere security conference in the world, and it has a lot to do with excellent speakers and great topics.

I woke quite early and was dressed prior to breakfast arriving. Yes, I know that there is an alien impersonating Andrew, the regular Andrew will be back soon enough I fear. Luckily, the organizers work on the basis everyone is sloppy drunk from the night before, and most days don’t really kick off until ~ 10 am.

Talking sloppy drunk, there was a VIP event last night I was supposed to go to, but I didn’t feel up to going out and sure enough, when I heard about the lap dances and the security consultant who missed all the morning sessions due to being still drunk, well, I’m glad I gave it a miss. Apparently he is sharing a room with a co-worker, and he only had socks on. Not nice. Oh well, plenty of time to get that sloppy drunk in the next few days.

The keynote was a bit disappointing. The guy ranted for an hour and wanted to kill people. Don’t we all? I think it was the worst presentation I’d been to since I went to a Simple Nomad presentation a few years ago when he was reading his Vogon poetry to a hot, bored and restless crowd in front of a psychodelic X screensaver.

Then of course, my excellent presentation was on, and we had a 3/4 full house, which was good as we were up against David Litchfield. Lots of people stayed on, which is even better. Got through the slides on time and had some good quality questions. I gave myself 5/5 on the feedback form. I’m sure the others will agree. :) I gave away the two packs of Tim Tams (Black Forest cherry, and Tia Maria), and I gave Simon Gerraty the vegemite. It’s a good thing than an ex-pat has the Vegemite as I know it would have been tasted once by a furriner and thrown away thinking I was trying to poison them.

Went to a few more sessions, all of them good. I liked the session on hacking hardware. The presenter, Joe Grand, really knew his stuff and I enjoyed learning just how crap the security is on the various devices.

I met with Jessica Goldstein from Addison Wesley in the afternoon. We talked about the Guide and the other book I have been sorta neglecting since 2001. Hopefully something will come of that soon.

Now, it’s time to go get sloppy drunk.

Black Hat – Travel

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It’s 7.25 am on Wednesday in Las Vegas.

The travel to Las Vegas was a monster. Not only did we stop for nearly three hours in Sydney, I had to go via LAX. Plus, United seems to have joined Qantas in using their oldest planes on the duopoly route. Our flight had the old style CRT overhead projectors (yes, with three bulbs), and old films like Miss Congeniality 2. Luckily, I needed to sleep – I had only had four hours sleep in the previous two days.

LAX, in how many ways may I hate thee? United baggage claim was on go slow – took about 45 minutes to get my bag, and then customs only had two desks open in the declaration area… when several 747s all landed at once. Took about another 30 minutes to get through even though I had nothing to declare.

I ran to the domestic terminal, and the new style TSA check ins were awful – brainless droids staffing the XRay machines enforcing rules which simply don’t work. There were in no particular hurry to screen people.

After clearing them, I ran towards gate 71b, only to see my connecting flight to Vegas leave through the windows. When I got to the gate, the next flight was another three hours away, at 4.11 pm (how do they know it’s 4.11 exactly?)

Waiting, waiting, waiting. I had been in the air for 21 hours so far, and I was a bit tired. I almost fell asleep just before the flight, and I missed the call to the unnannounced gate change to 71a. Luckily, that was right next to where I was dozing and when everyone else moved, I figured something was up.

The flight to Vegas was a bit adventurous; the A320′s brakes had overheated whilst taxiing on our extensive drive around LAX, and so they put them back down for a bit before climbing to the the cruise altitude.

If that wasn’t eventful enough, I had my only third only go around. We were literally meters from the ground when the engines roared and we zoomed off at a very sharp angle of attack. A few minutes later, the pilot explained a few minutes later that there was another plane on the runway. Close.

At least the day was clear, and the second landing attempt was fine. I was in Las Vegas at 6 pm, after 28 hours travelling so far.

Jumped in a cab to Caesar’s, and then tried to check in. After an hour, I finally get a smoking room (it doesn’t pong too much), but they upgraded me to a King size room. It’s pretty nice, but it doesn’t have mirrored ceilings like last time. Oh well. No scary photos!

Total elapsed time between leaving home to Las Vegas: 32 hours. Nasty.

I met up with some folks from OWASP and went to town at the buffet. They went for seconds. I don’t know where they put it.

We went through the slides in my hotel room and I retired for the evening. Luckily my “tire yourself out” strategy has worked, and I’m in the new time zone without jet lag. I’ll do that again next time.

Today… my talk is on in an hour or so. Should be fun! More soon

Frecyinet and Hobart

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Got up early and had breakfast twice, or more precisely, cocopops in the cabin and toast and coffee at the cafe.

At the petrol station, had the interesting experience of the service station attendant zooming off in his old Holden Premier before he served me. So I had to fill my own tank. There was an old lady in the office so I gave her the $20 and hoped that it would get to the dude when he came back. Probably.

After that, I drove down to Frecyinet National Park. I intended to do the saddle but knew I am out of shape. So I did the easier trails first to determine if I was fit enough to even try. The easier trails turned out to be okay, so I gave the lookout a shot.

After an hour, I made it. I’ve got the photos and sore legs to prove it. I’ll really pay for it tomorrow.

After descending, I was hungry, so I checked out Left Bank in Swansea, like my dining companion from Mt Elephant suggested. I had an excellent lemon tart and long black. I’m glad I did as Kabuki, an excellent guest house cum Japanese restaurant was closed for Devonshire tea. :(

Moving along, there were several really nice bays, but time was short. So I kept on driving. I even skipped Richmond.

Luckily, I was in time for the free beer! Yay!

Bicheno

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Had a slow breakfast, trying to find a suitable C route to get to the Pancakes place. The only downer was that the pancakes place was not on the map, which was alarming. It’s Elephant something, and it wasn’t there. After breakfast, I checked out and went shopping for some new CD’s as the ones I had been played to death. The chick in the music store was a bit weirded out by my choice of The Messiah, Mozart’s Requiem (a snap at $10), a 3 CD hard core techno collection, and a Paul Oakenfold CD (which was on special). I’m not terribly sure it was probably the best mix, but their classical music selection was pathetic, and I really didn’t want some Shostakovich as I’m not particularly familiar with his music. When you play the Requiem, the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. Amazing piece of music. Either that or I’m playing it too loud.

I needed real coffee, and badly. I wanted (and ordered) a long black, but the dude serving the coffee decided I needed a double espresso instead. My body really appreciated it. Wired me up for the drive.

I took the A3 out of town and crossed my fingers I’d find the brown tourist sign for the Pancake place along the way. If you’re thinking I talk too much about food, you’re right. My normal method of navigation in foreign parts involves McDonalds, but Tasmania is sadly lacking them. Plus when I’m here, I like C roads. So I’m always on the look out for the most interesting place to have a good meal, maybe take a photo or two, and not get gastro.

The A3 is an excellent driver’s road! It’s also a very scary road for mortal drivers. Unlike most main roads between towns, this one twists, bends, goes up mountain goat tracks, and down dale. It has 100 km/h speed signs right in front of 25 km/h 270 degree bends, sort of a road engineer’s joke to weed out stupid people. It’s like a 161 km advanced driver’s test. I loved it. I took some photos at various look outs, which will be posted here when I get off my big fat behind.

Unfortunately, Tasmania is being raped by the wood industry more than ever. They are merciless. They’ve taken to putting up signs about when the land was pillaged, and when it will be harvested again. They have no shame ‘ more than once I came around a corner to a lunar landscape of utter ruination (sort of similar to the famous photo of Tanguska where a meteor wiped out an entire forest, but this was worse as the low life humans don’t clean up properly), go around another corner and there’s beautiful lush rainforest of world class beauty. What’s even more offensive is they’re planting non-native fast growing uni-species pine where normally there’d be rainforest, ferns and ancient trees, plants and shrubs of zillions of species. Tasmania is wasted upon Tasmanians.

Feeling a bit down, I had an excellent lunch at Derby, which is a lot smaller than the big dot on the map. The old tin mine’s museum had a tea room, and I had a largish pastie with an even larger fresh salad. Nice, and set me up for the rest of the day.

Pressing on, I zoomed through St Helens, and saw the Tasman Sea (big salty water thingy) for the first time since Burnie. Theoretically, I could see it at one of the lookouts I stopped at, but the day was too gloomy and hazy to actually see Flinder’s Island and Banks Straight.

After passing Ironhouse Point, I had to make a pit stop as the baked beans (I was traveling alone, remember?) had kicked in good and proper. After using the facilities at a beach camp site (do you know there are free camp sites all around Tasmania? Some with facilities, like this one. Wow.) Anyway, my Evil Plan’ to moon the Pacific came to fruition. The water was cold though, so I gave that up as a joke before I had full retraction. I love absolutely deserted beaches. Enough said, or I’ll scare the more delicate readers.

Then I found the Pancake place. It’s on top of Elephant Pass, and has spectacular views of the coastline. I met and had pancakes with a lovely lady from Canberra who was riding around on a sorta holiday whilst her tame (or not so tame) scientists were dragging themselves around regional Australia, in this case, Tasmania, with a traveling science show. We had a good talk, and I gave her my copy of Salmon of Doubt as she mentioned she had nothing to read at night, and I know how boring that can be, even with baked beans for entertainment. I hope my book goes to a good home. I think so.

The lemon pancakes were every bit as good as I remember, but the semi automatic gunfire in the background wasn’t. My dining companion thought it might be construction, but no one goes ‘psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!! psht!!’ in less than a second with a nail gun. Not unless they’re very drunk.

Tasmanians. It’s wasted upon them.

The road leading up there is just marvelous. It’s part of the Targa Tasmania route, and for good reason ‘ it’s just one of the world’s best driver’s road ‘ if the Hume Highway or your favorite stretch of straight Interstate is a difficulty level of one (even including the need to stay awake from boredom and counting the speed traps and playing ‘spot the hidden cop car’), this is a difficulty level 9 road; no Armco, just little white sticks indicating the side of the road and a 100+ meter plunge into thick forest. The road quality is good without being brilliant, and just wide enough for two cars or one truck. Luckily, there were no trucks. As usual, the road was nearly abandoned except for me. I love that.

After descending this wonderful road, I dawdled to Bicheno. It’s weird letting people pass me. I’m in no particular hurry, and although my new car is nice and everything, it is not a 1.8 litre turbocharged hoon-mobile. So I let people pass me. Whoosh. I even let an old 1960′s vintage Rover pass me. He was really pressing on. Must have had an appointment with a fish or something.

Checked in to the caravan park. Next time I think if I’m not doing the bookings, I’ll mention ‘B&B’ explicitly rather than saying ‘I’m easy. Anything’. I’m glad I’m in a cabin, not a unit or a caravan or tent, though. B&B’s are about the same price as a caravan park’s self-catering cabin, and way nicer in most cases. However, I can’t really complain as I’m not paying for it, I suppose (this booking is part of my boat fare).

Bicheno is a nice sleepy seaside resort town. Lovely beach views, freezing cold water; English tourists would be right at home here. I had a choice of French restaurant or Australian pub meal for dinner. I took the pub meal. I tried eating outdoors, but there were too many feathered rats outside. Once the other two gentlemen drinking outside had tactically retreated indoors, it was like Hitchcock’s The Birds, but with seagulls. I had to move in or jealously guard my food and beer from the aggressive winged rodents. Oh well. Next time.

Launceston

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I should probably explain what happened after Sunday, but by comparison to Sunday’s excellent day, I didn’t actually achieve much on Monday.

Waking ridiculously early (for a holiday), I awoke to find it sort of snowing. I believe the term is sleeting, but it is just cold and wet to me. I slowly ate my cocopops waiting for the rain and sleet to stop. At 10 am, I checked out and started to drive towards the Cradle Mountain national park ‘ my intention was to check out the mountain and take some photos. However, the sleet had turned into alternatively heavy and light rain. I hate being wet, even if I have warm dry clothes in the car. So at the general store, right before the entrance to the park, I regretfully turned around.

I had to drive from Cradle Mountain to Launceston, using my preferred C road strategy. Which is not a problem when the road leading from the national park was a ‘C’ road for at least 25 km in the wrong direction and around 50 km in the right direction.

I drove towards Moiha, sort of aiming at Sheffield. After about 30 minutes, the sun came out and I kicked myself. I didn’t really have enough fuel (to be safe) to go back, even if I had the time.

According to the map, Sheffield has robot tigers, and who doesn’t want to see robot tigers? Taking the slightly longer route allowed me to dawdle nicely. I took some time out to check out Mt Claude, and got a great shot of the car against a quarry wall, and some more pylons for Paul, including one very untraditional style of pylon, which I am sure he will burst with excitement over.

Anyway, once I struck Sheffield, it turned out to be a bit of a washout. Most of the tourist traps were shut, and after a few too many ‘Closed’ signs, I didn’t even bother looking for the robot tigers. I pressed on to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth and I have history. On one of the first trips I took to Tasmania many years ago, Dad, me and my brother had to go from Launceston to Devonport to make a plane as we’d missed the one leaving from Launceston. If you ever wonder why I never miss planes, although I’m perennially fashionably late for everything else, it dates back to the traumas of standby staff travel with my parents in my childhood.

Anyway, instead of getting a bus, or anything really obvious like that, Dad decided that the three of us should hitchhike as we apparently had plenty of time. So anyway, after many hours, we had reached Elizabeth. Elizabeth is only 51 km from Launceston. Tasmanian drivers statistically never pick up hitch hikers. Whilst we waited for the bus we should have caught in the first place, we had some lunch at the Elizabeth pub.

I decided it was time I had lunch there again. Not a thing had changed d’cor wise. The food had changed from Australian pub meals to pies and pasties. The day I was there was the owner’s last day ‘ after some 60 odd years in the family, they had sold up. There’s a bit of history for you.

Work rang up on the mobile ‘ the first mobile coverage I’d had in nearly a day and a half and probably the last people I wanted to talk to. A customer who I am dealing with next week tried bringing forward the appointment’ via phone and on my holidays.   

I headed on the A1 to Launceston as I had a date with a hotel room. Driving in a relatively straight line is weird after all the squiggly bits. Driving at the speed limit was a sensation, as well. Bored now.

After checking in, not much happened, so I went and saw Kill Bill as an excuse to turn off my mobile phone. That’s a great film ‘ go see it. Afterwards, I returned to my hotel room with Chinese take away and read the rest of the Salmon of Doubt. Sad ending. Doh.

Tasmania

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Well, it’s like day three of my Tasmanian trip, and I’ve got a lot to blog, but as I’m on a piece of wet string I wont bother. Much.

There will be photos added when I get back, but for now, you’re going to have to use the power of imagination to fill in the blanks.

On Saturday, it came as a shock to various friends and family that I was going to Tasmania, so sorry to all and sundry if I managed to overlook this minor detail. :(

The main thing is that I’m here now. But like most decent stories, let’s start at the beginning.

On Saturday, Luke, Inger and Plaugue Boy (aka Brendan) came over for a few minutes to exchange the crackWest Wing editions. This it turns out is A Very Good Thing, and A Very Bad Thing. My addiction is now such that I have a strong desire to leave Tasmania immediately and see the beginning of Season 2 at Luke and Inger’s. However, I also know that although they might use thousands of hamsters in little generating wheels for electricity here in Tasmania, they also have a supply of the most addictive series I’ve seen for a while. Not even a backlit Willow in a translucent summer dress in a fond lesbian embrace compares. Hmm my secret shame.

Anyway, so I get on the boat, armed with Season 1.5. I watch Season 1.5. I go to bed. A drunk guy turns up and is apparently sharing my cabin. So much for secret plan titled “naked Andrew moons Devonport”. He’s not having a good time of it, and decides to go “brurrrrp … eewwww”. Well, I’m going ewwww as the beery burps are getting more intestinal as time goes on. Luckily, the dude doesn’t barf, as I’m known to want a sympathy barf if someone else doing it nearby and the fragrence d’barf wafts near me.

Come 5.45 am, muzak starts. I could kill Spirit FM, but I think karma would probably accrue negatively my way. Apparently the (male) DJ moons as the latte bitch at the Spirit FM coffee house (they do pancakes, too). I almost went there, but decided that without weapons it would be messy and I would still be decaffinated at the end of it.

Bought a road map instead and immediately used it to find the nearest McDonald’s and sort out where I needed to go. So I went on my little hoon down to the first of many waterfalls. When you see the images, there’s like waterfalls. And gardens. It was good, and I got a little sunburnt in the car as I had the roof open as it was a glorious Sunday morning.

After seeing Leven gorge, I found the nearest devonshire tea place and had a not quite Devonshire tea. It was these little pastry things with caramel, and for some unknown reason, they didn’t have Earl Grey. I thought that would be illegal in Tasmania, but apparently not.

So anyway, drove off in the general direction of the Wrong Way, and promptly had to back track. It’s not as if premium petrol is easy to find or anything. Luckily, the C roads in Tasmania are gorgeous and empty. I hate to have an accident cos cows can’t dial 000. Lots of cows and sheep.

Got some beautiful shots of pylons. Don’t ask. Paul will be excited.

Eventually got through to Burnie, and promptly decided to check out the paper factory. Closed. Checked out the cheese factory. Open. They had this great smoked cheddar I can get at my supermarket, but they had run out. Oh well. Denied.

Moved on the Annleigh Gardens, and had a great lunch there. After gorging myself stupid on a salady thing (plus a small shepherd’s pie), I checked out the garden. Photos here soon, promise. Let’s just say that the garden is very nice and proof that you too can have a major garden if you have five acres.

Zoomed along the C roads again until essentially forced to take a B and then an A road to get to Cradle Mountain. Being a sort of ski field some part of the year, I felt it a good idea to get there before dark as I don’t have chains. It turned out I didn’t need any, but I needed good eyesight just in case a cow or two was across the road, as it’s that part of Tasmania where there’s no fences, just griddles to stop the cows walking to freedom. Cows must be dumb.

Cradle mountain was good, but I had crap service at the devonshire tea place. Almost walked out before my scones came, but they came in the nick of time, and plus the time was passing quite quickly as no longer had any West Wing to watch, so I was reading “Salmon of Doubt” by well, Douglas Adams. I had bought this book some time ago in a 3 for 2 sale at Borders, and hadn’t gotten around to reading it.

<- kick self

Get this book – it’s excellent. The only bizarre – and I mean bizarre – thing is the service order at the back of the book. Douglas Adams was a raving, enthusiastic, proselytizing atheist. If atheists had such a position, we’d vote him Pope. After the little white puff of smoke, we’d have to … anyway, that’s not the point. He had a memorial service. In a church – St Martin in the Fields to be precise. I wonder who thought it be a mighty fine idea to bring the priests along? Obviously no one who actually knew him. I’d hate to be the priest writing that eulogy…

Anyway, finished the book tonight after the SAGE free beer thing, and feeling a bit down. Not only because “Salmon of Doubt” is essentially missing an ending, and an author, but there was no lesbian action in the Bill. Apparently I missed that on Saturday night’s episode. Always the way.

I find it extraordinary that someone like Douglas Adams turns out to be a bigger procrastinator than myself. He had a real fear of writing, and would often need people to put him up in hotels and stand guard to ensure he met deadlines. I wonder if they were good hotels in sunny locations.

Then again, reading the draft of the three books tied together for the beginning of the Salmon of Doubt, sometimes I get the impression that I could theoretically write better than that, given enough time.

bwwahahahhahahahahaha!

I wish.