Under the Cloak of Darkness - West Ashgrove

I went out at around 10pm last night to attempt a new geocache called Under the Cloak of Darkness - West Ashgrove. I really wonder why people bother placing caches like this... its located in a garden bed beside a take away store/corner store/etc. The garden bed is waist-height and is about 30cm wide by maybe about 6m long. You can't access most of the garden because of bush that is growing in it... in the areas you can push the bush aside you can see that it is full of condom wrappers, bottles, other discarded rubbish, cockroaches and ants. I didn't manage to find the cache but even if I did I suspect I wouldn't be any more impressed with the hide... I mean... why was I bought here? Isn't there a million other places around that would be nicer to place a cache than in this garden bed?

Christmas day

Christmas day was a big event with the whole family gathering together at our house. We had a big lunch and snacks all day with tonnes of leftovers - just how Christmas should be :-)

None Riding on This etc

We had a fun day out geocaching today. Caroline decided to brave the shops to finish off the Christmas shopping so the rest of us took a trip up Caboolture way to do a few caches. We started off with None Riding on This which was a decent walk - about 600m as the crow flies which probably turned into 800m-900m each way the way we tackled it. It was the perfect day for this sort of walk & while the kids complained a bit at times they really did enjoy it - oddly enough they used to do much longer walks than this for caches in the past without complaining, maybe its summer or maybe they're just used to all the urban micros :-)

After successfully finding that one we headed up to Jacrel's Bridge which looked like it had some DNFs, although I suspect now that most of them were from when the co-ordinates were wrong. The kids didn't help search at all at this cache, but its probably for the best as there were a tonne of spiders and wasps around under the bridge.

Then we headed on up to Good Old Days which was just a drive by - you couldn't miss this one, but its in a nice spot. I hope some people visit the historical village because of it. We then continued on to Ducks on the Mor's and there certainly were plenty of ducks there too! This proved to be an easy find and gave the kids a playground to play on which they deserved.

By the time we'd done all of that we were ready for lunch and Caroline was finished at the shops so we came back into town.

It's always tempting when a new cache comes out to go and grab it and On the edge of the Enchanted forest..... came out this afternoon and looked like the sort of cache that may be difficult to find in the daytime so I raced out and grabbed it just on dusk.

Speaking of temptations, Phone a Friend just got published - I really want to grab it tonight but think I'll do the right thing and go to bed instead.

MS Showtime Security Presentations

I've been watching some MS Showtime Security Presentations from TechED IT Forum, they are these below. I'm only part way through at the moment, but so far they are good.

Knowing the Enemy - A lightning demonstration on how hackers attack networks
Marcus Murray, Senior Security Architect, Truesec

Advanced Malware Cleaning
Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow, Platform and Services Division, Microsoft

Windows Vista User Account Control Internals
Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow, Platform and Services Division, Microsoft

Defending Layer 8: How to recognize and combat social engineering
Steve Riley, Senior Program Manager, Security Business and Technology, Microsoft Corporation

Windows Vista Kernel Changes
Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow, Platform and Services Division, Microsoft

Windows Vista Firewall and IPSec Enhancements
Steve Riley, Senior Program Manager, Security Business and Technology Unit, Microsoft Corporation

Crazy security

You've got to love some peoples idea of security. In my building security is a fairly serious matter and they've always had a policy of not being able to drop off parcels at the front security desk... of course you can't leave something there for someone to pick up either - while this may be done so as not to burden the security staff with parcels the main reason behind it (I suspect) is that they don't want you dropping off bombs or other harmful packages that would disable the guards.

But hey... its Christmas - so don't worry about dropping off your bomb with the guard... just bring it in the door wrapped in Christmas paper and leave it beside the tree (that is right next to the guards desk) where they are collecting children's gifts for charity!