Parisa's Blog

Hath all too short a date.

Rich and Sophia, cevans, Peter and I went up to South Lake Tahoe last weekend for some climbing and camping fun to end the summer on a happy last note. On Saturday we climbed an amazing 3 pitch 5.7 at Lover's Leap called Corrugation Corner. My shoes were killing me after the first pitch. I'm not sure if they are just too tight or are somehow awkwardly jamming my big toes, but I couldn't even bend my left toe or apply pressure to it from any direction on pitch two, which made climbing awkward (even as I write this, over a week later, I still can't bend my toe completely). So that kind of tainted what would have otherwise been a perfect climb, but it was still a lot of fun. After we hiked down, we hit up a Mexican restaurant and ordered five orders of steak fajitas and beer for everyone. Fajitas have become the tradional post-climbing meal for me and my cohorts this summer, so ordering is easy. After food, we headed to the beach to watch the sunset, and then drove to our camp site. We saw three very bright shooting stars once we set up camp for the night. I don't think I've ever seen a shooting star before, but I guess that early August is the right season for viewing, so it wasn't that uncommon of an event for the others. We couldn't have planned out a better day if we tried.

We slept in on Sunday and then tackled a few pitches on the Phantom spires. Marius, another Google co-worker, managed to find us despite no real direction or meeting plans and joined us for our climbs. He just kind of appeared out of nowhere wearing a big straw hat and dominated all of the climbs we ended up doing. I couldn't even get on the rock of the 5.8 side of the Shark's Tooth. The first piece was just within my finger reach, but I wasn't able to get any kind of hold on it, so that was a pathetic failure. I did manage to get to the top from the 5.10a side (with some stops along the way), which is the highest ranked climb I've done indoors or out. On the way back to Mountain View, we pulled off at some random exit in Fairfield in search of food and ended up stopping at another typical Mexican restaurant and finishing off six (+1 for Marius) orders of Chicken fajitas and beer.

This was my last outdoor climbing excursion for the summer, which is terribly sad. I'll have to get good this coming semester and maybe learn how to lead indoors so when I come back, I'll be in shape to get back to the mountains.

Made it back from the whirlwind tail of my summer research tour around the world, featuring stops in Oakland (California), Cambridge (UK), Vancouver (CA), and Las Vegas (NV). I spent Tuesday through Thursday at the USENIX Security Symposium to present a wireless fingerprinting paper I co-authored with some guys from Sandia National Labs. There was actually a similar result presented at Black Hat this year, along with an actual 802.11 driver exploit to a vulnerability in Macbook drivers. Their fingerprinting technique is based on the different proportion of duration values in MAC frames. I think it's less sensitive to network conditions than ours, but requires that a client associate to an access point to actually fingerprint the driver (admittedly, not a huge requirement). Anyways, it was very cool presenting to a large USENIX crowd and helping to bring greater attention to the security of driver code. I spent most of my extra time in Vancouver working on slide animations and some latent simulations for my MorphMix research, so unfortunately didn't get to loaf around the city as much as I wanted to. From my very brief tour of Vancouver, though, the city seemed extremely clean, the people were friendly, and the weather was great, so it's on my list of places to revisit.

Thursday night I flew to Vegas. Chris, Cheney, and Mike picked me up from the airport and we made it to the Riviera, the hotel hosting Defcon and our three day stay. Thursday night I stayed up late finishing research via Chris's 802.11-enabled wifi network; 8 Kbps upload rate baby, all to myself.

Defcon started on Friday, two hours later than planned due to some delayed safety checks. Instead of getting into the boring details of Defcon, I'll summarize the main points from this year's academic gathering: LED-enhanced badge, smokey hotel, too many attendees, mediocre talks, overpriced shwag, and scene parties (where my friends and I had a large presence compliments of bondage tape, fishnet, and many, many glow sticks). The conference itself is nothing extraordinary, Vegas is a pretty terrible place, and the Riviera has to be one of the smokiest and most depressing of the large casino-hotels on the strip, but the weekend was still a great (and exhausting) experience. We upgraded to the Treasure Island buffet for our annual Saturday night buffet dinner and I ate with Googlers at an amazing Mediterranean restaurant far off the strip on Saturday night. Everyone was mostly behaved at the black and white balls, though the dirty details of both nights are best kept off the Internet. I also managed to have my own mini-adventure getting home that involved a last minute plane ticket purchased at 2am for a 6am flight, a missed alarm clock, and a long standby list out of Vegas on Sunday. Everyone made it home uninjured and without major hits to their wallets. Aside from some embarassing pictures, another happy and harmless Defcon was had by all.