P90X DVDs

While you can certainly carry your set of P90X DVDs with you when you travel, I generally don’t want to waste the space required to carry the discs, nor do I want to risk damaging the originals. As such, I’d suggest you immediately grab a copy of HandBrake and rip your DVDs to MP4s that you can then conveniently store on your iPod or iPhone. Although the screen on the iPhone is a bit small, once you’ve gotten used to each of the P90X routines, it works in a pinch. If you have video output cables for your iPod, you’ll find that most newer hotels have nice big flat-screen TVs with accessible inputs, which makes watching your videos easy and convenient. Otherwise, if you’re also carrying your laptop, simply plug in your iPhone and play the videos full-screen.

Equipment

Dumbbells and Bands

Because P90X works well with both dumbbells and resistance bands, I immediately sought out a set of resistance bands that were inexpensive, lightweight, highly portable and extensible (those that can be used in conjunction with one another to increase resistance). While Bodylastics seems to make the band of choice (esp. the Terrell Owens Super Strong Man System), I found a reasonably inexpensive set of 3 bands (w/ requisite door attachment) in increasing resistance that can be used individually or together to create a wide range of resistance levels for all P90X exercises at national chain SportsAuthority. Nothing fancy, but they do the trick well, weigh less than 2lbs and come in a travel pouch. A second option is a set of inflatable dumbbells, like the AquaBells Dumbbells.

Pushup Bars

While pushup bars are ostensibly lightweight and moderately easy to pack, most are still a bit bulky and unnecessarily heavy for the frequent traveler, so after a bit of research and some hands-on testing, I picked up a set of the Perfect Pushup Mobile Units. In hindsight, however, the PPMUs weigh almost as much as a [significantly less expensive] set of standard bars. As such, I’d consider both to be viable options, though I do appreciate the ultra-portability of PPMUs.

Supplements

Note: I am not a physician, dietician, or health practitioner of any kind! As such, the information provided here is based on my own personal experience and feedback I get from my own body. (In other words, these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA, blah blah. Over the years, I taken a myriad of supplements, and although I’ve found some to produce more noticeable changes in my feelings of health and well-being, overall I find it difficult to prove or disprove the effectiveness of any one brand of vitamin or mineral supplement. Recently, I’ve switched to Centrum Performance, which is a multivitamin with increased dosages of B vitamins and the addition of Ginseng root. Because they are available at Costco, I get them inexpensively and have generally found them to be of good quality and composition. I also take Gingko supplements, though I’ve found no one brand to be significantly better than any other, and when I’m feeling less thrifty, I’ll occasionally add Phosphatidyl Serine to my diet. When I began P90X, because I have knees that seem twice as old as I am, I began taking Glucosamine and Chondroitin supplements, and am currently taking the Schiff Move Free Advanced brand (available at both Costco and CVS), which my body seems to be responding well to.

When I first began P90X, I ignored Beachbody’s suggestions to supplement with their own P90X Recovery Drink, until after two weeks of daily muscle soreness, I took Hoff’s advice and sought one out. Like most supplements, there are a variety of “recovery drinks” available on the open market, though I have at least temporarily settled on the PureSport brand, because I found it in convenient single serving packages at SportsAuthority and got it at a great price. If you can’t find a good powdered drink in single-serving pouches, you can easily buy in a bulk container and make your own single-servings with the world’s most useful travel tool.

Because the body also needs a significant amount of protein during the early stages of lean muscle mass development, I’ve also found a few protein supplements that I like and eat/drink on a daily basis. These include Nature’s Plus Spiru-Tein, Jay Robb’s Whey Protein, and Fruitified ZonePerfect Bars, all of which I’ve been able to source at local grocery and retail chains (notably Kroger and Target).

General Tips

Tip 1: workout according to your own schedule and preferences. I prefer working out in the mornings. Before starting P90X, I did a week of Tony Horton’s 10-MInute Trainer, and really enjoyed the quick morning workouts before I got on the road. That said, I’m not really an early morning person, and with the length of P90X workouts, I’ve had difficulty getting up early enough to workout, shower, eat and make it to meetings by 8a when on the road. Unless you’re a hardcore morning person (like to get up at 4a?), I’d recommend doing your workouts immediately after work. When you get back to your hotel room, don’t think twice or even turn on the TV; just change clothes, workout, drink water, shower and relax. If you workout too close to bedtime, you may find that increased cardiovascular activity can actually make it harder to fall asleep (even though you may otherwise feel physically exhausted). Also, when on the road, I recommend melatonin supplements, and have personally had great results with Midnite brand sleep aids, available at CVS, Walgreens and numerous other retail pharmacies in the States.

Tip 2: Stick with it! Until starting this program, I was basically sedentary. While it’s been difficult for me to convince myself to go from zero exercise to working out 6 days per week for an hour per day, I must say that I feel better, look different, and absolutely have more energy throughout the day, every day. P90X is no introductory aerobics routine, it’s serious ass-kicker of a workout. It’s also incredibly effective, and once you’ve gotten through the first two weeks, I’m certain that the changes you’ll see will prove to be extremely self-motivating!

If you have any other suggestions that you think might benefit the traveling P90Xer, I’d welcome your comments below, and or your feedback via email.

Part problem dissection, part solution discussion, part political rant, peppered with a bit of humor and wit.

This talk explores the death and subsequent re-birth of the penetration test. Comprised of conclusions drawn from the collective experiences of two seasoned pen-testers, our talk is filled with facts, fun and rhetoric. We will describe the landscape, the problems, and offer real solutions…

In our talk, we will explore the problems with modern-day pen-tests and pen-testers, and ways to stand out amongst the frauds selling their lackluster vuln-scan services under the guise of a true penetration test.

We discuss penetration tests that are overly tool-driven and/or lacking in methodology as well as pen-testers who lack the experience and creativity to identify the architectural problems that real attackers frequently exploit.

Along the way, we’ll discuss the difficulties faced by real penetration testers and complement these with real-world war-stories to provide both context and comic relief.

Most importantly, we’ll discuss how to solve these problems, through contributions to open methodologies, transparency in process, and shifts in technological paradigms. We’ll tell you how to deal with the latest technologies, even those that change day-by-day. For those that take penetration testing seriously, this talk will be a fun, informative and enlightening presentation on the things we need to do to keep pen-testing worthwhile. Attendees will learn how to perform pentests accurately and obtain compelling and valuable results that ensure real return on investment for their clients.

Carric and I presented to a full room, and we got lots of good feedback and close to an hour of q&a in the after-preso breakout session.

The presentation is approximately 52 min in length, so grab a cup of coffee, settle in and enjoy! If you’d like to discuss any of the issues we raised in our presentation, please feel free to opine below, and / or email me directly (all perspectives welcome)!

In this post, I’ll focus on three specific travel-related web-sites that I’ve found useful in preparing and managing my itineraries and organizing my travel, and in some cases coordinating meetings and events with other travelers along the way.

The first of these resources is a web-site that originally began as a tool designed to manage and organize itineraries, but has evolved over time into a social-networking tool that also encourages cross-coordination of travel. TripIt is a site (service?) that allows you to either enter your itinerary manually or forward your travel confirmation emails to automatically build and create nice, printable itineraries with all of your travel events categorized, organized and displayed chronologically (along with weather, maps, directions and in some cases, events for each of your destinations).

I began using TripIt around this time last year, and ignoring a few minor glitches, have become rather enamored with the service. What’s nice about TripIt is that in most cases, creating your itinerary is no more complicated than forwarding a few emails and hitting print. In most cases, TripIt will automatically recognize and extract information from confirmation emails provided by most major airlines, hotel chains, rental car agencies and more. Further, early this year, TripIt added support for reservations made through OpenTable (which I mentioned in a recent blog post on low-cost dining for frequent travellers), which means you can now forward OpenTable reservations directly to TripIt to add dinner plans to your itinerary, a minor but effective organizational detail.

While I’ve managed to connect with a handful of friends using TripIt, I have also found many reluctant to sign up, due primarily to the site’s new focus on social networking, and for those who are already inundated with requests to join MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc., the thought of signing up for yet another social networking tools is daunting. IMHO, TripIt is quite useful individually, and if you never connected with a single person, it’s still quite effective for managing and organizing your own itineraries.

For those less interested in itinerary management, but who are interested in the social networking / travel coordinating component of TripIt, a self-described luddite friend later directed me to Dopplr, another web resource that ignores the finer details of your itinerary and instead focuses simply on where you’ll be, when, and who you know that might also be there. In fact, with Dopplr, all you need to do is specify a destination and a date, and you’re done. Since I have friends that use one of the services but not the other, I’ve maintained a presence at both, though it was becoming a bit tiresome to maintain my schedule at both web sites on a regular basis. Fortunately, hackerjoe pointed me to the new Dopplr feature that allows Dopplr to be subscribed to calendar-based RSS feeds for input, and since TripIt provides such an RSS feed… all I have to do now is maintain my itineraries in TripIt and Dopplr automatically picks up on where I’ll be and at what times.

Last week, as I began my migration from an old Nokia E61 to a new BlackBerry Curve (ick), I stumbled across another old resource that’s been given a fresh new face, and a feature-set that virtually mirrors that of TripIt. For any of you not previously familiar with WorldMate, they’ve launched a new update to their service, now dubbed WorldMateLive. Previously, the service consisted of a smartphone client that allowed you to check flight status and weather, do currency conversion and a bit more, but the upgraded service now also provides itinerary management akin to TripIt. In a similar manner, you simply forward your confirmation emails to WorldMateLive, and they will automatically build your itineraries and keep them in sync with your smartphone.

While I generally prefer TripIt, due to its popularity and the number of friends and colleagues with whom I’m already connected there, WMLive is a compelling alternative, and with their very attractive smartphone client, it may eventually encourage me to migrate. Unfortunately, the “free edition” of WorldMateLive is largely an up-sell to their Gold Edition, which at $99/year is yet another travel expense I don’t need for the simple privilege of being able to check flight status and book flights through their client (things I can already do quite easily with my existing travel providers’ SMS and mobile web interfaces).

That’s it for now! In point of fact, it’s time for me to run upstairs and pack for my trip to Fort Lauderdale this week (you can find details at TripIt, Dopplr, and WorldMateLive if you also plan to be in the area :), so I hope you found at least one of the above resources to be interesting if not useful, and maybe I’ll see you in one of the myriad destinations I have planned for this year and next!

For those who know me, you’ll know that I travel quite a lot. It’s only July, and I’m already Platinum on Delta and Diamond on Hilton for the year, so suffice it say, I spend a lot of time away from home. [sigh]

Traveling a lot generally means eating out a lot, and I’ve managed to hone a few techniques to both reduce my dining expenditures and generate occasional rewards. Specifically, I’m a member of two services that have proven to be quite effective at saving me money eating out. While I don’t want this article to appear to be a blatant marketing pitch for either service, I figure I would be remiss not to share this tip.

Over time, I’ve come to really appreciate RewardsNetwork (formerly iDine). The basic premise behind the service is that within most major cities, they have a handful of restaurants that offer “dining rewards” in the form of cash back on purchases. Although the rewards vary by restaurant, there are numerous restaurants in most major metropolitan areas that offer as much as 10% - 20% back on purchases, and that’s after tax and tip!

In addition to RewardsNetwork, I’ve also begun to really leverage OpenTable within and around my own home city as well as while out of town. If you are not already familiar with OpenTable, it’s primary function is as an online reservation service, allowing you to pre-book reservations at a wide variety of restaurants, and features the ability to invite guests, add reservations to Outlook or iCal, etc. Furthermore, when dining at restaurants booked through OpenTable, you receive dining “points” which ultimately add up to enough value to produce cash-value dining certificates as rewards. Basically, 10,000 points gets you a $100 gift certificate at any restaurant that uses OpenTable (and there are quite a lot of them).

The kicker here is that there are several restaurants within major cities that are members of both RewardsNetwork and OpenTable, which means you can get as much as 20% cash back for dining, plus as many as 1,000 points for making a reservation, which essentially translates into 20% of your total bill plus $10 towards future meal purchases. All in all, it’s an easy and effective way to not only save money, but earn yourself some free meals at any of hundreds of very nice restaurants in your own home town.

Hope this tip proves useful for some of you! And for those of you that are members of either TripIt or Dopplr, maybe I’ll see you at dinner sometime!

Update:

I neglected to mention that when dining at RewardsNetwork / OpenTable restaurants, I always use a rewards credit card, generating me additional points, cash and/or miles for all of my restaurant purchases.

1. Admit that you are powerless over bots.
2. Believe that a power greater than yourself exists and is necessary to identify and eliminate malware, botnets, and the Windows hosts that contain them.
3. Make a decision to turn your will and your life over to ShadowServer, Malfease or another similar volunteer effort.
4. Make a searching and fearless inventory of your Windows machines.
5. Admit to another security expert that you [have/do] run Windows.
6. Demonstrate readiness to remove Windows from your PC.
7. Humbly ask other experts to remove Windows from your machine.
8. Make a list of all other machines you’ve infected.
9. Make amends to those infected, i.e. with Mac OS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD or similar.
10. Continue to inventory remaining Windows hosts, and when infected, format & re-install.
11. Seek through prayer, meditation and continuing malware research to improve your understanding of the growing malware threat as we know it.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening, carry this message to other Windows users.

Please enjoy and disseminate widely.

While I’ve long debated the real value of professional certifications in the IT industry (I’ve known numerous highly-certified ignoramuses), it would be ignorant to refute the hard data that demonstrates the perceived value of certification and the resulting remuneration benefits.

Further, not all certifications are alike, and since I have approximately a dozen certifications myself, I can tell you conclusively that some effectively demonstrate proficiency, while others are barely worth the paper they’re printed on.

This blog topic was actually prompted by a very interesting post at TechTarget entitled The Value of the VCP (VMware Certified Professional). Personally, I believe the VCP is amongst a very few certifications that do a good job of testing and proving proficiency.

In his post, Joe Foran draws the conclusion that the single-test VCP certification by itself actually holds more value than any other multiple-test vendor certification (including those from Red Hat, Citrix and Cisco)! Joe’s post was certainly an interesting read, and if you plan on pursuing professional certifications, you owe it to yourself to pay attention to his sources.

Disclaimer: I am a VMware Certified Instructor, and teach VI3 VCP courses. So, don’t just take my word for it, do your own research.

I’m off to Anchorage, Alaska tomorrow to teach a VMware VI3 class, and am actually quite giddy about it. Alaska remains one of the few place in the US that I haven’t yet visited, but still want to. I emailed Bruce Potter looking for recommendations on things to do in Alaska, and his [summarized] response was: “Drink and eat. seriously.” Seems the food there is outstanding and good venues are plentiful. He specifically suggested several great restaurants and bars, and quite a few natural sights to see as well.

I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll manage to see some northern lights while I’m there. Based on my lovely wife’s research, it looks like I may have to drive a couple hours north for maximum visibility, but if the conditions are right, it will be well worth the trip.

Look for pictures upon my return…