Of Love and War

June 14th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark

Hi, just a short update this time. I haven’t gotten to the stage in my projects that I’m ready to write about it in my blog. Save to say there’s a lot of stuff happening in my life now and I’m keeping rather busy. I wanted to talk today about something a little bit more substantial, so, “I’ll knock this one on the head,” as they say in Australia.

When you’re young and life is beaming there is not a lot you think about. The past is the past and that’s where it should stay. Someday, however, you get old and your death looks you in the face. Most people don’t question the purpose of their lives until they get to this stage. By then I’m afraid, you are what you were, and nothing can change that.

I managed to have a significant crisis in my mid-twenties that resulted in me asking many of the same questions that people ask when they’re nearing the end of their stint. I came to a lot of realisations very early and I’m thankful for the forces that be for the opportunity to resolve my issues while my parents were still alive.

If you don’t harness the opportunity to ask your parents about those questions that you have before they have passed away, you have lost your chance forever. It’s the punishment for not appreciating their struggles in life before they left you on your own.

I understand that my childhood was not picture perfect. In fact, it is a fallacy to expect your parents to live up to the ideals of the Brady Bunch. There is no parent in the world that has ever raised their child to such a standard that they can be considered the perfect parent. You can never be the perfect parent, so you should not feel that at the end of your life you’ve made some horrible error that has robbed your child of his or her future.

You can only do so much. The rest is up to the heavens and stars. Thinking that you can move it all for that one person that you value the most is succumbing to the fallacy of control. This piece is not really for the people that read my blog. It’s for an older audience. I’m hoping that someone will read this at those twilight moments and feel reassured that they have lived their lives to the fullest.

The journey of life is a complex and rewarding one, something that should be cherished when the full spectrum of your experiences are taken into account. I am not done with my life just yet but I feel very grateful that my parents chose to have me. Whatever issues I have with my parents, they don’t get in the way of appreciating what they went through to give me better opportunities. It’s not just my parents, but also my grandparents and their parents.

My last remaining grandparent died this year. She was a very old woman, but not disabled by her age in any way. She passed away with a quadruple heart attack. As she was lying in that hospital bed, a hundred miles away I was lying in my bed. I was thinking about things, when a voice from nowhere said, “Alright son, I’ll see you some other time.”

I heard it as clear as day, and 10 minutes after, the phone rang and sure enough the news was delivered that my grandmother had passed away. I wasn’t that surprised. You see, I have accepted long ago that religion might not be the outmoded relic that many people think it is.

I was struggling in my life, overcome by depression and despondency, when out of the goodness of my heart I donated my last $200 to a woman called Mary Stone who I barely even knew, for future earnings. That is to say, I paid my Zakat in advance to an American woman.

I’m Muslim, but the religion of Islam has been distorted in so many ways that what people practise and preach is so far removed from the core of Islam that it’s not even Islam anymore. Muslims are allowed to drink. They just cannot be intoxicated at a Mosque. Islam respects Judaism, far from what you’ve been led to believe. In fact, if things work out, I would like to marry a certain Jewish woman. The hate between Muslims and Jews is very unfathomable for so many reasons. The cultures are almost identical and the faiths are inter-related.

I thoroughly detest anti-Semitism in all its forms and would never take up arms against a Jew or a Muslim if given the opportunity. I am not a terrorist. My aim in life is to live to the best of my ability, respect my fellow man and make some lasting change in the world that benefits the human race. I strive to do this in my everyday existence, not just by focussing on things that I can control, but by extending my scope to the wider world and taking a view of what is happening in the long term.

These are my goals. I felt I should clarify for the people who know me on a personal level. Sometimes they involve questionable ethics. Peace sometimes comes at the end of a barrel, and I’m not afraid to fire the gun and let Allah guide my aim.

Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Social | 3 Comments »

The Harbour

April 26th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark

There we were,
Standing at port,
Talking of things,
I shall mention not,

She ascended without,
For I was too blind,
To notice that she,
Had left me behind,

Before I saw,
The ropes were called,
The sails were cast,
The planks were hauled,

It hath has not sailed,
This surly ship,
It floats on the shore,
And dances and whips,

I’ll pull it back,
One day I will,
I keep my hope,
For her still.

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Tweety

April 15th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark

I’ve been calmly watching the evolution of Twitter. I recognise the potential of such a tool but I don’t know if it has the right kind of interface to make it worth my while. The updates are via SMS or directly posted on the site.

The issue is that SMS updates cost a lot of money and SMS is a stateless protocol. There is no way to know whether your Twitter messages were posted in time, in order and reached the right people. In that regard, there is no way you could use Twitter for anything more than myopic information about yourself for friends.

Blog entries take a lot of time and thought, possibly even inspiration. This is, of course speaking personally. The journey of having a blog could not be summed up in one, or possibly even a hundred paragraphs of writing for me. It has exposed me to all manner of criticism, from its last incarnation to its current one. It’s hard putting yourself out there for public criticism. When the opportunity presents, everyone is a critic.

The arguments are old ones and tried for many generations. The message is, “You should conform”, however, living in a globalised society means that there are so many ethos to chose from that the longer one delays their own suppression of ego, the more prone one is to rambling under the guise of trying to please everyone.

It’s hard to find an identity in an ever changing world and harder yet to solidify that entity when the people that you rely on for emotional support are over moralising in their own right. The goal for me was to free myself of my own distortions about life, and in doing so I have come to have the same distortions again, but now I understand them.

I am a product of my upbringing. I am the fruit of my indoctrination. I am who I was but a little more me.

So now, Twitter. Do I expose myself even further to critics? Do I feel so secure about my life and myself that I would choose to expose my everyday thoughts in real time to the world around me? Should I moderate my Twitter so as to shield myself from what others consider right or wrong? I have been thinking about these questions before I adopt the technology. What I want to know is, I can do something for Twitter, what can Twitter do for me?

Many of my friends have subscribed to my Facebook and I am comfortable with that medium. Even though I don’t have 300 friends, the ones that I do have are valued and of long standing. I feel no threat to divulge my thoughts on my Facebook status because the people that see it are not the ones that will come back and haunt me for it.

There have been instances of my Facebook status messages being censored but the people responsible usually curtail their friendship. Most of the people that are on there seem to have no problem. That is why I post my political and religious thoughts on Facebook and leave the blog for something light more light hearted than fundamental social schema.

I undertook a process after 2003, after returning from my visit to my homeland, to learn all I can about others because I felt confident about myself. The sad reality is that learning about others tortures your ego and you no longer feel as confident about the things you say as you once did. I cannot categorically deny Jehovah, Allah or Jesus and pursue my academic and scientific career without a care in the world. To expose yourself to public criticism is to weaken your ego for higher consciousness. I feel venerated that I am able to tell people close to me exactly what I am about. I am able to take on new challenges that I had never thought possible and I am able to achieve outcomes for myself that should be out of reach. This in of itself shows me that I am doing the right thing for my own personal development.

Will I use Twitter? I think I might try it for a while to see how it goes. You can see my tweets on http://twitter.com/ravpup

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Rav Uncut

April 12th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark


(11:07:15 PM) RaVPup: I was thinking of a poem
(11:07:20 PM) RaVPup: How does this sound
(11:07:29 PM) RaVPup: Jennifers quite quirky
(11:07:34 PM) RaVPup: Gorky Park
(11:07:41 PM) RaVPup: Her waters are a little murky
(11:07:44 PM) RaVPup: Gorky Park
(11:08:06 PM) RaVPup: How strong is your arm?
(11:08:12 PM) RaVPup: At least one sputnik!
(11:08:22 PM) RaVPup: opinions?


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Are You Afraid of the Boogey Monster

April 11th, 2009 RaVPup | Bookmark

I’m a late starter. I didn’t get up for the blogger bus until April this year. I would like to boost the tempo on this blog and start writing about something other than undies, curious mathematical observations and the like but I’m not strategically placed at this point in time. So, instead, to satiety your appetite I’m going to write about my music collection.

I had quite a good music collection only back in December, 2007 which I deleted. Since then I’ve been rebuilding my music collection. I’ve only managed to get a few of the albums that I had before and none of the quality that I would like. The problem with the whole pipeline from my music to my ears is multifaceted. Firstly, I cannot get the full bit rate of 320kbps in my collection for every song that I have. This is not a problem in and of itself because the bit rate of a CD track is only 128kbps so the rest of the sample space is filled with noise. However, on a well produced CD the noise should be clean, without any white noise in the mix. This having been said, on acoustically recorded pieces there is a little thing called warmth that comes through on a well trained ear. I’m not saying this to shake my wood at you, I worked in the audio-visual department of a University for four years so I have some idea what I’m talking about.

The next problem that plagues me is that on electronica releases, there is the all too hideous gap between tracks which just kills the enjoyment of a nice trance CD. Trance is my favourite style of music by the way. I diverged from the genre at a turning point in my life but now I’m back to it.

Thirdly, the problem of categorising your music based on ID3 tags is a serious rectal assassination. The reason is that everyone has come up with their own convention for naming tracks on an album, myself included. This makes it difficult to say, engineer an electronic system to retrieve a playlist based on mixes that it can do by itself, and play those mixes back to you. Ideally, I am in the process of designing such a system. I’ve been doing it for about 8 years now so I don’t know if it will ever be completed but most of the software and hardware components are now quite readily available.

The final nail in the coffin is that I can only enjoy the sounds of my collection through an iPod, which disgusts me. The fidelity on the headphones of an iPod do not rival my 20th Anniversary Limited Edition Sony CD Player but it’s no longer convenient for me to carry around a CD player.

In essence, the only way to hear music is at a club or a concert with a professional sound system. I cannot believe how much I miss those days of clubbing and dancing, but I’m older now, and not quite as outgoing as I used to be, which brings me back to my music collection.

I’m in the process of rebuilding it. To give you picture of what I have in there, there’s the entire Gatecrasher series, Carl Cox, Derrick Carter, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Mozarts works and my personal favourite, Bach. Classical music doesn’t really give me that bump and grind feel but the quality of the recordings seems to be a lot better which is excellent for when I want to enter one of my creative phases and throw up a piece on this website, change themes, write some code or whatever.

Speaking of which, I was talking to Becy about getting back into producing my own tracks. I haven’t done that since 1997 and it would be fun to see if I’ve gained any knowledge or feel that see’s me producing better tracks. Anyway, it seems to be the in thing to fire up Acid and come up with some layered tracks to show off to your buddies on ITM. I might get Rebirth again and give it a shot. I hope I can get the sampler as well because that was the critical piece missing in the puzzle last time I wanted to molest my virtual ‘x0x’ device. Anyway, that’s my verbal refuse for the time being and happy Easter. A special mention to my friend Weev.

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Say Hello to My Little Friend

December 11th, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark

Short entry this time. I’ve been trading spot the last few months. Zed got me on to it with his incessant talk of currency pairs on #tribes. At first I didn’t really understand the system. That lasted about five seconds until I had the epiphany that it was exactly like stock which I had been trading a few years back.

The great thing about spot is that it’s a 24 hour market and that the data is delivered straight to your war desk, streaming, live and without the intervention of a dealing desk. The spot market started out a while ago and is held between various banks. This is quite disadvantageous at times because certain banks tend to have a really high spread. This is especially true during the Asian market hours, with lower liquidity and less volume, the spreads tend to widen considerably, sometimes to eight pips. I have had it mentioned by a notable broking house that pips have been as high as 100 in high volatility pairs, although I shudder to think anyone would trade with such a handicap.

I have developed my own particular style of trading, and judging by my performance I’m well on my way to being in the top 5%. I traded with simulated money for a month with relatively high risk, weakly thought out and untrained strategies and winded up with a profit of about $1000USD at the end of the day.

Trading with live money is a little different as the emotion comes into it. I have been trading with live money since October and needless to say, developing the discipline to be a good trader takes a lot of time and effort. I made a $200 profit with my first trade and then blew it all trying to snipe pips using technical analysis based on indicators that I had no in-depth knowledge of. After getting an education from a broker, I learned the ins and outs of the matter and I’m proud to say that I’m a much better trader.

Forex is like anything though, constant practice is required to perfect the skills you develop through training so that you can apply them to the market in a disciplined and profitable way. I hate using the word profit because Forex is not just about profit, it’s about keeping up with the times and knowing where the dollars are before they make it to your pocket. I do use a little bit of fundamental analysis and a little bit of technical analysis mixed into the fray. There’s no clear cut line between fundamental analysis and technical analysis with me, I don’t swing one way more than I do the other. I find to be successful at pulling in the pips I have to be abreast of a lot of information at the same time.

I’m at the stage where I am developing a trading book and talking to people to let me play with their money. These are hard times and there isn’t a lot of spare cash around, more so for the Australian market where venture capital is hard to find. Needless to say, my trading book is flawless at this stage. I haven’t blown a single trade, although the risk appetite for my official book and the risk that I take with the book where I pull in $1500USD a day is very different. I can guarantee consistent returns while sacrificing top end figures or I can aim for big top end figures with a massive risk to reward deficit. Either way, there are a number of strategies that I’ve developed that let me trade the funds to suit my investors.

On a parting note, I entered into the ING ‘My Dream is…’ competition and I couldn’t think of anything catchy to spend my money on, so I put up a silly picture and captioned it “Trade spot and become a millionaire!” The URL is http://mydreamis.ingdirect.com.au/?id=4995 and I hope you’ll vote for me, seeing as it’s three days to go before the end of the competition. Trading spot beats a plasma TV any day, and the look on my face is worth at least one million dollars!

Posted in Business | 2 Comments »

New York

November 26th, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark

Beautiful woman
Emotions on the trendline
They wither away

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Davy Jones Locker

October 3rd, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark

Is my IQ 140 or 155 and above? Do I give an Irishman in a flying canoe worth of thought to it? There was a time when it was a problem for me, thinking that I had the acuity of a mollusc but that’s the difference between others and me. I work on myself.

Aside from a hearty discussion with Becy about her tridachia, I enjoy nothing more than grabbing a cup of tea, sitting back and punching keys. I like typing. That’s a very primal urge of mine that keeps these pages forming, like a grain of sand that turns into a pearl.

Enough talk of the fathoms, or you might think that I live in a yellow submarine. Sometimes, I wish I did because the humour just isn’t translating. With fear of penning another piece in the same style as I’ve done before, ‘Master of his Domain’ wasn’t about Amy so much as it was about getting someone to pick up a God damned dictionary.

I write because its fun for me and playing little word games on these pages of mine are quite entertaining. I do in fact know Amy and she is into bondage but that’s beside the point. It’s Jennifer. She did it to me again. I have the constant need to show that I’m smarter that I really am, according to her. Not surprisingly, my self-image differs somewhat because I was sure I painted my submarine red. I am racking my brains trying to figure out how a woman so beautiful has the personality of a goldfish

So the question still remains as to why I write in such a sesquipedalian manner. The truth is I’ve always done it. I’ve been subscribing to www.dictionary.com and www.oed.com ‘Word of the day’ since 1998 and I have so many words in my vocabulary that I forget what they mean sometimes. The blog isn’t about language, vocabulary, mathematics, physics, psychology or any number of other topics. It’s about making you think. I was prepared to get burned at the stake for it, but the flames are ever so hotter when you’re in them. Aesop, said it well, “Please all and you shall please none.”

I’ll cut the apologetics short and focus on lampooning. What should I lampoon, if not for a lamp and a… Well I did start this with some topical humour and I’ll end it there so I may return to my lucubration. If you digested this short verbalisation without the help of Webster, call me up and I’ll buy you a red to go with that smile of yours.

Posted in Social | 2 Comments »

Master of his Domain

September 28th, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark

It must be the inaugural month of the lusty season. I met a submissive today. Well, more correctly, I met a submissive a few weeks ago but I didn’t know she was a submissive until she showed me a warm tanned picture of her in an evening dress with imposing pearls, and a black band around her mouth.

Curious, in a concerned way, I asked her if she was into bondage, to which she winked and replied, “Well. Yes.” Her steady aplomb assured me that she wasn’t emotionally scarred from the whole affair as I picture a lot of the sadism and masochism crowd to be. Bondage has always struck me as a sordid affair, something that takes place in the crevices of a seedy city existence, so it was with some surprise that the realisation dawned on me that perhaps my beautiful Singaporean princess was a little less then chaste in the whole affair.

I have not known her for long, but for many furlongs. She is an immigrant who plans to enrol in a nursing degree and she has been in the Western world neigh on two months. The sad situation with foreign students, and I know a few of them, is how to turn a dollar while they pursue their tutelage. Foreign students are always painted as the picture of wealth, with their expensive European cars, old money and hedonistic party lifestyles. I’m here to tell you that they are not all diamonds that glitter in the Sun, most of the time it’s tinsel.

I have known Amy for the better part of a few months. We met on some unmentionable dating site where she sent me an email. She was quite the aesthetic beholding, and naturally my hormonal urges took the better part of my reasoning and here we are. She has not been the most verbose person that I’ve ever met, but she certainly is on the more intriguing side.

In my short tridecadian life, I’ve met many people from many demographics and I can assure you that it’s not often that I am taken by surprise at the demeanour of a person. However, bondage is one of those things that I would never have pictured lay in the domain of her existence anymore than I pictured it would somehow find its way to mine. Let me be forthright in saying that I am not interested in the quirky pleasure of the sexual practise of pain. Through my own study of human psychology I am most sternly assured that both sadism and masochism are products of a malfunctioning pain pathway. I am indeed pathologising what many people have come to accept as a more esoteric form of sexual gratification, in the same way as homosexuality was considered a neurosis in the penultimate decade. Morally, I have no issue with what a person wishes to do in their own bedroom but I cannot participate in the ritual of acquiesced torture. Nevertheless, my curiosity begets me as it naturally has and I’m obligated to ensue with a full investigation of her personality. I would like to ascertain whether she does this for the coin or for the loin.

I have come across a study in my travels that states that a man and woman have a relationship based on the dominance and submissiveness of the courting pair. The extension of this study is that, in the copulative phase of the affair, the roles are reversed, and it is actually the most dominant of the pair that is submissive, vice versa. I do find the thought of bondage intriguing to some extent, but that interest stops well before the device of pain is administered. In essence, I am interested in women that are dominant in the bedroom. Perhaps, instead of a malfunctioning pain pathway, it is the exaggeration of the need to be dominant that drives Amy to engage in the acts of bondage. She assures me that she will not hurt me, but when your wrists and ankles are stretched to the posts it might as well be a rack that you’re laying on.

I had a professor once who told me that there are two primal urges of a human. One is the gratification of sexual desires and the other is the drive of aggression. These are Freudian ideas, and from his work in analytical psychology he also theorised that what is forbidden is attractive. In other words, is it trendy to be sexually deviant in today’s society, or is it another more pathological desire that drives a sweet and attractive girl like Amy to engage in this behaviour.

Although I would never engage in the administration or reception of pain willingly, there is something about her nonchalant admission of her atypical sexual escapades that I find worthy of discussion. It’s not often, and I doubt many people have had the pleasure, that you meet someone that is interested in such a niche area of salacious carnal expression.

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El Fillipe

September 18th, 2008 RaVPup | Bookmark

I’m in the mood for slamming down another wad of text so I thought I’d blog it. I seem to have gotten a little bit of flack from the computer security community for my self-serving piece in the last article but truth be told, I had to try it. It’s everything at once; indulgent, grotesque, camp and beautiful at the same time. I’ve never publically acknowledged that I was a hacker, and I’m not doing so now. The only thing I attest to is, with a security community filled with the likes of the people I’ve seen, that I am in fact the Fabio of #phrack.

As much as I would like to disclose accomplishments as long and impressive as Robert Wadlows arm in this article, Heps old adage of, “One disclosure, one bullet,” holds true. I am no longer doing any productive work in the arena as can be seen by my constant idling in IRC. I’ve pretty much resorted to chasing hacker women because of my dashing good looks and charm. I’m having quite a good response with snow, with her amorous bitch-x idle notifications. Unfortunately, any woman who wants me has to share me with Hep. That’s something that cannot be negotiated out of the equation.

Serious business aside, it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of the situation. I retired from pursuing a largely underground career in the security community because of two reasons, one of them being boredom and another being the need to divert my attention to other areas in life, much like most other people my age are doing at this stage. I do not have the volition to sit there and write code for hours or set up labs to assess the effectiveness of vectors, nor read up on the constant barrage of advancement that is the industry at this stage.

Having been gaming the geese since the 80’s, I have built up a tolerance to computers that I feel may benefit from interest in other areas of life. I’m mainly focussing on social aspects now. I have a side interest in psychology and psychiatry that stems from an episode in 2006 where I ate the forbidden Guatemalan insanity peppers, but mainly it is a method of gaining insight into my own psyche.

There is the opportunity to do creative work in the community if I ever progress to the stage I want to in my personal life first. I’ve always had the habit of giving up on computers for a little while, only later to return when my latest diversion has concluded. For someone that was doing SQL injections back in 1995, it’s not a hard stretch to catch up with the current state of things. For now however, I seem content to chew the fat with the lads and lasses of the security community and build contacts that I’ve never had. I’ve only been talking to like-minded people for the last three years, preferring in my earlier years to mainly work by myself.

I have the feeling at some stage that something inspirational will come along and I will be swept back up in the glamour of it all, right back where I started. For now, I’m content being El Fillipe, Heps cabana boy.

Posted in Security | No Comments »