Brad's Cactus Shack

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Tuesday, June 18th, 2002: Today RijilV and Chris visited me, on their way to Arizona from Michigan. We spent the day harassing Hardees frequencies, Target frequencies, hanging out in downtown St. Louis and trying to start up a UFO hoax/scare. Here are a few pictures…

They arrived early in the morning, parking their cars all over my lawn, despite more then adequate street parking. As I went out to greet them, RijilV was sitting in the lawn with his laptop, attempting to break into my wireless network.	One of them snapped a picture of me and Payton swinging.	RijilV and I under the Arch.
RijilV and Chris under the Arch	Shopping for UFO hoax materials at Wal-Mart	Chris and I, constructing our “UFO” out of bags, straws and candles
UFO Flight attempt and failure #1	UFO Flight attempt and failure #2

Tuesday, September 11th, 2001: Terrorist Attack Day! I’m writing this entry on 11/19/2003. Since the attacks have happened, I’ve been asked many times by various friends what I was doing on that day. So…I was up and getting the kids ready for school. I came upstairs to my office to check email and I heard the DJ on the radio (the MJ & BJ Morning Show) talking about planes hitting buildings, terrorist attacks and asking what the hell was going on. So I flipped on the TV to CNN to see if there was anything about it on TV. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me at first, I just thought it was some kind of weird accident and didn’t think it was actually a commercial plane. On CNN they’re showing pictures of just the one tower hit and a lady is on the phone talking about what had happened. Then she stops and says, “Oh my god, another plane just hit the building!” At the time CNN didn’t have a very good camera angle on it but after a few seconds you can see that a 2nd plane has hit.

I watched for a few more minutes and then went downstairs to show my daughter Emily. She didn’t care and just got mad at me for turning off her cartoons. She was just in kindergarten at the time, I don’t think there was a way to explain to her that it was real and not just a TV show. So I come back upstairs and call my mom at work to tell her about it. At the time she was the manager of a grocery store so she puts the radio news on the PA in the store so all the customers can hear it. I think I called a few more people to see if they’d heard about it, then I went downstairs to finish getting the kids ready and took them to school. All the moms dropping their kids off were going on and on about it. I just wanted to get back in the car and keep listening to the radio to see if anything else had happened.

When I got back home I didn’t get any work done at all that day. I just sat at the computer with about 4 chat windows open, talking to everyone about stuff as it unfolded. I stayed on fark.com and watched CNN all day. It was a bizzare day, listening to everything unfold. There were tons of rumors going on like the Washington mall being on fire and planes falling out of the sky all over the country, a plane hitting the White House, etc. One thing I really wish I’d done that day was pop a tape into the VCR so I could record the entire day of CNN so people could remember how it all unfolded. Watching it all happen live was quite surreal. It seemed like a big budget movie, seeing the explosions happen and New Yorkers flee as the buildings collapsed. It was hard to believe any of it was real, especially with all the false stories popping up and then being retracted.

So that’s it, that’s what I did. I sat in front of a computer all day, mesmerized by the events that were happening. Any time that I had to leave the house, I would hurry to the car and turn on the radio just to be sure that I didn’t miss anything new happening.

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Friday, September 7th, 2001: 2600 Meeting. Guess it’s been awhile since I wrote about the meetings. Damn, 7 months since I wrote about the meetings, even though I still attend nearly every month. The first thing I noticed when I came to this meeting when I sat down was that bumr was over at Fazoli’s standing in line. As he got closer to the front of the line I called the manager of Fazoli’s and said, “Hi this is Tom from the mall office. We just wanted to alert you to a guy passing counterfeit bills in the mall. He’s wearing a white ball cap and a purple shirt.” We couldn’t see the results, but when we told bumr about it he said that she had held his $20 bill up to the light and studied it closely.

The rest of the meeting was rather uneventful. Elonka showed everyone a bunch of cool vacation photos and bumr gave us all a great history lesson on how much of the the h/p scene all began in St. Louis which many people didn’t seem to be aware of. We argued over the frequencies of red box tones and ate lots of breadsticks. And Spuds wasn’t there because he seems to think ham radio events are more important than 2600. Bad Spuds.

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July 2001 – Defcon 9: This year we turned our Defcon trip into a semi-family vacation. We packed up a minivan and brought Emily with us, driving about 1,300 miles to Nevada. We left Payton at home though and he did okay. We put some food in a dish and left the Cartoon Network on TV for him. I should have some more pictures up here when I get a little more time.

Colleen Here’s a picture of Colleen being very happy on the way to Las Vegas.

SlapAyoda and EvilCal Proudly holding up their PLA Con passes.

PLA Table Colleen being thrilled to sit at the PLA table.

Pinguino Pinguino from Flippersmack.

SlapAyoda SlapAyoda at the Flippersmack table which was on the other side of our table. Notice that PLA stickers are on everything and everybody.

Halibut Stickers The guys who sell Halibut t-shirts had a table next to us. They decided to be lazy and not show up on Sunday but leave their stickers on the table. So we put the stickers into 2 different stacks, one labeled “FREE” and one labled “$1.00” to see which stack disappeared quicker. Most people looked at it and just didn’t get the joke. We later stuck a sign on it stating, “Out to lunch. Please leave money on table and take correct change.” There ended up being $5.00 on the table by the end of the day. People are dumb.

PLA Stickers This lady thought it’d be a good idea to wear PLA stickers on her boobs so I had to walk up and ask, “Say there, would you mind if I took a picture of your breasts please?” and she was more than happy to pose for me.

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Here’s some pictures from the 2001 Pagan Picnic in St. Louis Forest Park. (Note, I don’t know exactly what day this picnic was on, so I’m pretending that I’m certain it was on June 15th.) They’re mostly from the play area since that’s where I spent a lot of my picture taking time that day, while Colleen & friends wandered around the events. At some point, these 3 drunk guys sat down on a bench by the park and cheered on my kids as they played. They were laughing and yelling as if the kids were the greatest entertainment ever. They also thought my digital camera was the coolest thing they’d ever seen and posed for a few pictures for me, just so they could see themselves on the screen. Here are the pictures…

Emily pushing Payton around the park	Emily and Adelena jumping – this one kind of looks like Emily is flying	Emily and Adelena, taking a break	More jumping – you can see the happy spectators in this one
Spectators posing for me – note all the alcohol around them	These are the happiest 2 men in St. Louis	Payton – the drunk guys told me he looks like baby Popeye

Spuds looking lovingly at his ham radio.	5/2001 – This is bumr. He thinks he’s cool just because he runs devfarm.com.
Elonka showing off the side of her Goon Squad tshirt.	This is bumr’s ankle xray. He was trying to do a table dance for some hot chicks at the 2600 meeting but he fell off the table like a doofus and broke his foot.2

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April 2001: As a kid, I went to a grade school called Francis G. Blair Elementary School in East Alton, Illinois. Throughout my 7 years there, a friend and I planned many ways to bring the school to it’s demise. We designed elaborate blueprints of exactly how we would bomb the school so that everyone would be free. Then we started designing blueprints of a plan to blow up the world. Anyway, my point is that my childhood dreams have finally come true – they recently closed down the school and they have destroyed it.

I was looking through my yearbooks for any references in the signatures about my school-bombing plans because they were widely-known at the time, by both teachers and students. But the closest I can find is where Chris Laboube wrote something about me blowing up the world which is pictured below. These days if a grade school kid talks about blowing up the school they’ll send him to prison for 20 years. Back then blowing up the school was an normal & acceptable topic of conversation. What’s WRONG with the world today!?!

Picture of Blair from the yearbook	Another picture of the front of the school	One of my yearbook photos	A signature from a classmate about blowing up the world
Front of the school destroyed	Back of the school destroyed	More of the back	Total destruction

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April 2001: I attended my first Rubicon in Detroit, Michigan this year and it was a very entertaining event. I managed to drag along St. Louis 2600 attendee Wraith with me. From St. Louis it was a 9 hour drive to Detroit so we woke up around 4am so we could get there around the beginning of the con. The drive was more or less uneventful. We listened to lots of CDs and our average speed was 80MPH. With the time zone change (losing an hour) we ended up arriving at the con around 2:30pm. We only took one wrong turn once was got into Detroit, quickly recovered and found the Ramada Inn easily.

Everyone seems to have this horrible picture of Detroit in their minds, like it’s the most dangerous city on the face of the earth, you’ll be dodging gunfire immediately as you enter the city, you’ll get your ass beat if you get out of your car, etc. This, of course, isn’t true and Detroit isn’t much different than any other city in the States.

Rubicon’s Ramada Inn, however, wasn’t located in the nicest part of town you could hope for. And I can’t say it’s the nicest hotel I’ve ever seen. It looks like it was last decorated in the late 1970’s. Only 2 of the six elevators worked so we ended up taking the stairs a lot. The stairwells smelled like piss, the lower floors smelled musty like basements. This hotel was huge, it was just a little ghetto looking. But this was okay since con attendees spent a lot of time tagging the walls and causing minor destruction. The hotel staff probably didn’t even notice much out of the ordinary.

We didn’t do a whole lot on Friday, just kind of walked around meeting people, listened in on a few of the talks (well, Wraith listened, I mostly played MahJongg on my Palm) and hung around in the network room hooking up my laptop and playing around on the net. I felt kind of retarded for driving 9 1/2 hours to sit around and surf the net. Wraith broke open our room’s phone jack and there were an extra unused 10 or so wires inside the box. We hoped that at least one pair would give us the dial tone for another room but had no luck finding anything.

I got to meet RijilV, Jim and a few of the other con organizers and they were nice enough to pimp my lame PLA tshirts all weekend for me. Then later when we saw people walking around wearing the PLA tshirts we would laugh at them, point and throw things at them calling them stupid PLA lamers. We made 2 people cry and we got beat up once.

We had a lot of fun doing immature, juvinille things like bouncing super balls out of our 11th story window to see how far they’d bounce. After using them all up we ran across the street and retrieved most of them from the grass in front of the AT&T building. Then we duct-taped some fishing line around one and started bouncing the ball continuously off of all the other windows around us. But nobody ever stuck their head out to yell at us so that got boring. Eventually we started lowering the ball to the ground level trying to whack random people in the head but Wraith got the fishing line wrapped around some high voltage wires. We pulled as hard as we could but it was stuck for good. Wraith let the string go and the ball is probably still hanging from some lightpost wires today.

On Saturday night my room got rooted. Me and Wraith were hanging out in the room and causing the usual problems for people down on the sidewalk. We decided to go downstairs for awhile so we left our room and headed towards the elevators. As we rounded the corner about 7 people passed us heading the other direction. We hear one of them say, “Hey, was that Redboxchilipepper??” I reply quickly, “No, there’s no RBCP at this con!” and quickly press the elevator buttons to go downstairs.

One of them comes back around the corner and says, “Wait a second come with us! We have something to show you..” So me and Wraith obeyed them and followed them down the hall. They led us straight to our room and let themselves inside with a key. I was suddenly glad that I came with them. I never did really catch any of their names, but they hung out in the room for awhile and then we all left. It turns out that one of them must have gone to the front desk and said something along the lines of, “Hi I’m Brad Carter. I lost my key and I don’t remember what room I’m in.” The front desk people apparently weren’t the brightest people on Earth and happily furnished them with a spare key and my room number.

Several hours later I found out that my Yahoo email had also been compromised. Someone wrote my username and password on a wall near the network room. Throughout the weekend I’d been hooking my Windows 98 laptop to the network and checking my Yahoo mail. I realized at the time that this was a bad idea, being that I was on a network full of hackers and I was running ’98. But I did it anyway and changed my password each night. My current password was written on the wall though and a broke down in tears as I read it crying “WHY?! WHY!?!” Then I immediately called home and said, “Er, um, Colleen could you log into my Yahoo account and change my password for me?” The hackers were at least nice enough not to change my password and lock me out of the account. That would have been a pain in the ass. So anyway, I think that I hold at least one record at Rubicon – Person Most R00ted In One Weekend!

The few talks that I actually wanted to attend I didn’t get to because the schedules seemed to be all messed up or running behind or something. Hopefully I’ll get to listen to them on mp3 when rubi-con.org gets them up there. We decided to leave rather early on Sunday since we both had jobs to be at on Monday morning. Overall I had a great time and met a lot of interesting people over the weekend and I definitely plan to attend next year.

As we arrived into Detroit this Ameritech truck passed us.	One of the first things we noticed at the hotel was that the mouthpieces were ripped from the pay phones.	This is the first thing we saw as we got out of our car – the hotel’s side door. Didn’t give us much comfort on what the hotel would be like on the inside.	We stayed on the 11th floor of the hotel which this picture of Wraith clearly proves.
Our first order of business was to open up our room’s phone jack and see what we could find.	There were a ton of extra wires inside the wall but none of them were hooked into other rooms dial tones like we’d hoped.	A little floor by floor exploring led us to an unlocked phone closet on the 21st floor.	A random shot of the network room.
Another shot of the network room.	And one more of the network room.	Wraith’s elite laptop running Red Hat.	My Windows 98 laptop getting sniffed by many hackers all at once.
Here’s a view from my window as I’m using my laser pointer on the people below. A lot of people shouted at me to “cut it the fuck out” that night.	A ball hanging from the power lines	The AT&T building across the street from the con.	Before checking out of our room we hung a half-filled bottle of Mountain Dew from a fishing line about 8 stories below our window. Here’s a picture of it hanging as we head to the car to go home.
Here’s another shot of the Mountain Dew	As we were just 30 minutes from home our tire fell apart and the hubcap went flying across I-55. Wraith thinks it’s because he stole the bible from our hotel room.

Friday, January 5th, 2001: 2600 Meeting. I can’t believe the phone company, they screwed up the lines again! This time they managed to forwarded all of a movie theater’s recording line phone calls to PhusionBYTE’s cell phone. You’d almost think that we were somehow planning this out. But we’re not okay? Oh no, we didn’t have anything to do with it! It’s just weird, the phone company keeps forwarding random business phone lines to random cell phone users at each 2600 meeting. So we felt it our civic duty to help the customers who called in for the next hour and a half.

• “Yes, we’re playing Dude, Where’s my Vampire 2000, Police Academy, Police Academy 2, Police Academy 3, Police Academy 4…”
• “Tonight we’re required by state law to tell our customers about a little problem with the popcorn….”
• “What Women Want is really kind of stupid. How about you see Dude Where’s my Car instead? Well I don’t want to tell you the times to What Women Want because it’s a bad movie. Look we have 5 other movies here and I don’t think you should see that one okay?”
• “Thank you for calling ….. Cinema where tonight is free Milk Duds for everyone. Can I help you?”
• “You need to know the showtimes? Don’t you have a paper? They’re in the paper. No? Well do you have internet access? You can get them from www.yahoo.com instead. No? Well is there a convenience store nearby? You can go buy a paper for just 50 cents. ”
• (to cute sounding girl) “I’m the assistance manager and I’m running the whole show tonight. So I tell you what – you come to the movie and bring a few of your friends and I’ll let you in for free and I’ll get you free popcorn and I’ll get some alcohol and we can all sit together.”
• “So are you coming to the show tonight? You are? Well stay away from the JooJoo Beads.”
• “No this isn’t the theater, this is the fire department. Look man, you better quit prank calling the fire department because this is a serious offense. Bullshit, you called here on purpose. You’re too old to be making these prank calls. Maybe I WILL call the police on you!”

Earlier this week the Riverfront Times did an article on Spuds and the 2600 meetings which you can view by clicking here. We were hoping that this would greatly increase attendance but it didn’t do a whole lot this month. There was ONE guy who showed up because of the article. We still had a pretty good turnout this month, probably 30 people or so. Bumr kept making fun of me and throwing things in my hair. I went and told the security guard on him so he had to stop. But then he kept staring at me and told me I couldn’t sit with them because that was the cool peoples’ table so I had to sit by all the Highland retards. That sucked.

I don’t know this guy’s name. So why am I putting his picture up here?	“I’m sorry that employee was rude to you ma’am. When you get to the theater ask for the manager and I’ll give you 5 free tickets.”
Here’s the bag I ate breadsticks in at the meeting. Cool, eh?	This is machine stuffing his face.
That’s Spuds in the background. He’s going to be a moviestar someday and he’ll think he’s too good for us.	This is PhusionBYTE adjusting himself.
This is Pyrotech and bracket hacking the planet. Click for a different view.	PhusionBYTE generously answering phone calls for a local movie theater.