I have been to everywhere (legally) in Nevada.

I have lived in Las Vegas for exactly three years. In about two months, I will no longer live in Nevada.

Years ago, I observed an interesting pattern when reading about places in Nevada. The Las Vegas strip? It’s not in the city of Las Vegas. It’s in the unincorporated community of Paradise, in unincoroporated Clark County. Summerlin, where the Las Vegas Aviators play minor league ball? Also not a city, it’s another unincorporated community in Clark County. Real-world places found in my first few hours playing Fallout: New Vegas, such as Primm, Goodsprings, Nelson, and Searchlight? All unincorpirated communities in Clark County.

After reading up a bit, I discovered that, despite having over three million people and being the seventh largest state by area, Nevada only has nineteen cities and seventeen counties. Nevada only allows for places to incorporate as a county or as a city. Most other states have other types of municipalities, such as “towns” or “villages”. Nevada law appears to not make such allowances.

With only thirty-six places total and a desire to get to know Nevada better, the first thought in my head was “why don’t I just to to all of them?” It’s a silly idea. It’s an incomplete way to experience Nevada, as, beyond its living cities, Nevada has tons of nature, hundreds of ghost towns, and sizeable unincorporated towns that wouldn’t be included on this list. Following this list meant I’d be stopping in cities that lack a single museum, but skipping the entire Nevadan side of Lake Tahoe.

The idea stuck. How many people have visited every incorporated place in a any state? Sure I’ll have plenty of time in Wisconsin, and I’ll be in California for a few weeks at a time visiting my parents for the forseeable future. But Wisconsin has 72 counties and California has 58, and they have far more cities. Why not just visit all of them in Nevada? How hard could it be?

This trip’s dumbest, but most philosophically direct inspiration is the Eddy Burback video “I ate at every Rainforest Cafe in the Country” and its follow-up piece “I ate at every Margaritaville in the Country“. Both stem from the very absurd idea of visiting all of the things. As with Eddy Burback’s misadventures in gastronomical overlanding, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I set out, but ended up finding a lot to think about along the way.

There’s no thesis statement to this series of posts. Photos will be sparse and Spartan as I 1) had to travel at an absolute breakneck pace as we’re a one-car household with one person who commutes to work and 2) I have an extreme aversion to getting in anyone else’s way while taking photos, and 3) I frequently had to hit the road before 5AM each day of travel, so I was a little bleary-eyed when setting up some shots. Further, I realized midway through my first stop that, even under ideal conditions, I’m not particularly adept at taking photos of myself or posing for photos.

That having been said, here’ a list of incorporated places in Nevada, in the order that I visited them:

PlaceType of PlaceIf County, County Seat LocationNotes/comments
Las VegasCity
Clark CountyCountyLas Vegas
MesquiteCity
North Las VegasCity
HendersonCity
Boulder CityCity
Esmerelda CountyCountyGoldfieldYes, it is named after the character from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Nye CountyCountyTonopah
Mineral CountyCountyHawthorne
FallonCity
Churchill CountyCountyFallonNo, it’s not named after that Churchill. However it is named after a distant relative of Winston Churchill.
LovelockCity
Pershing CountyCountyLovelockYep, named after that Pershing.
WinnemuccaCity
Humboldt CountyCountyWinnemucca
Lander CountyCountyBattle Mountain
CarlinCity
ElkoCity
ElkoCountyElko
WellsCity
West WendoverCity
ElyCityRhymes with “wheelie”. NOT like the name “Eli.”
White Pine CountyCountyEly
CalienteCity
Lincoln CountyCountyPioche
Eureka CountyCountyEureka
FernleyCity
SparksCity
RenoCity
Washoe CountyCountyReno
Storey CountyCountyVirginia CityDespite the name, Virginia City is not legally a city.
Carson CityCountyLegally, it operates as both a city and as a county.
Carson CityCity
Carson CityState Capitol
Douglas CountyCountyMinden
YerringtonCity
Lyon CountyCountyYerrington

I’ll be writing a series of posts about planning and exploring everywhere on this trip. Because it was conducted at breakneck pace, with early mornings, minimal stops, and a low budget, this will not be any sort of food blog.

Lunch at Mesquite City Hall parking lot.

I cannot stress the extent to which this series of posts will not be a food blog. I had one meal at a restaurant in all my travels, whilst delusional with altitude sickness after a grueling 12 mile run in the hills around Tonopah at 6,000 feet.

Anyway, here’s photographic evidence of me at every incorporated place in Nevada:

I couldn't get the text on the capitol building to show well in the light
Me, at the State Capitol building. Clear evidence that I have unambiguously been to Nevada.
took me 20 min of walking to find the pedestrian entrance
Las Vegas City Hall, in the historical LV downtown area.
The Clark County admin building, also near downtown/the convention center. Clark county stretches from Mesquite on the border with Arizona all the way to Primm on the border with California and to the tri-point border with California and Arizona near Laughlin.
Mesquite city hall. Right on the Arizona border.
North Las Vegas city hall. NLV is so patriotic that I couldn’t frame the shot without having the flagpole obscure the NLV city hall signage.
This is part of a huge pedestrianized area in downtown Henderson.
Henderson city hall, the only place which I visited via ebike. Henderson, not Reno, is Nevada’s 2nd most populous city.
If this photo looks better, it's because it's the only photo someone else took of me. Thanks, Emilie!
Boulder City’s city hall. Despite being the largest city in Nevada by area, BC has a great little downtown!
Esmerelda County courthouse in Goldfield. The least populous county in Nevada (approx 730 people).
Nye County seat in Tonopah. I was so out of it with altitude sickness that I thought this shot was framed correctly.
The old, historical courthouse in town is much cooler.
Mineral County seat in Hawthorne.
Fallon city hall.
Churchill County Court, in Fallon.
Once again, the old historical courthouse is MUCH cooler than the current building.
Pershing County seat in Lovelock. Across the street from the park containing the original courthouse.
There is a "Lovelock" town where you can do the lovers' lock thing on the way into town.
Lovelock city hall.
The most fun city name to say in Nevada.
Winnemucca city hall.
Humboldt County courthouse in downtown Winnemucca.
Lander County seat building, in Battle Mountain. The Dance Gavin Dance album “Downtown Battle Mountain” is named after this community, though the actual downtown is a mile and a half northeast of here.
Carlin city hall, probably the physically smallest city hall I saw.
I think this is the only photo in which I am seated.
White Pine County court, in Elko. There were SO MANY old casinos I didn’t have time to visit in Elko.
Right next to the big park in town.
Elko city hall, right by the main city park.
Wells city hall.
West Wendover city hall. This is the only city in Nevada that observes Mountain Time, due to its position on the Utah border and the volume of business done with Utah residents.
Got a few looks from court workers and avoided eye contact with the people getting bailed out of jail for the weekend LOL.
White Pine County courthouse in the city of Ely. I unknowingly stopped at the court on Saturday morning when people were actively getting bailed out of the drunk tank.
Ely city hall. Much like Elko, the old downtown had SO MANY old buildings and casinos I didn’t have time to check out.
Caliente city hall, in the historical train station. Definitely one of the coolest city halls in the state!
Lincoln County courthouse in Pioche. The original courthouse is even cooler!
The docents at the opera house and at the Eureka Sentinel museum were INCREDIBLE.
Eureka County courthouse. Eureka has cold mornings year round- there was snow on the ground in August on the way into town!
The city hall of Nevada’s newest city, Fernley.
Sparks city hall. Unfortunately not named after Bubba Sparxxx.
Reno city hall. Truly bizarre how different Reno feels from Las Vegas, despite being Nevada’s other population center.
Washoe County courthouse in Reno.
Despite its name, Virginia City is neither a city nor is it located in Virginia.
Storey County seat in Virginia City. The historical downtown is really, really cool and the admin building doesn’t do the rest of town justice.
Carson City city hall. Carson City operates as both a county and as a city, and hosts the state capitol and governor’s mansion.
Douglas County courthouse, in Minden.
Lyon County admin building, in the city of Yerrington.
Yerrington City Hall. The little downtown area is a lot more photogenic and welcoming. The volunteers at the Lyon County Museum were great!

I learned so much about the Transcontinental Railroad, the Pony Express, the first Transcontinental Phone Call, Nevada’s role in the Civil War, and so much more. I’ll have some more thoughts about planning this absurd trip all around the Silver State in future posts. After all this travel, I’ve realized that there’s so much more history and nature to this state, even after all my travels.

Risk Posture, Literally.

I find myself talking about concepts like “risk posture” and “security posture” more and more. Most people politely nod along like they understand the terms. However, “risk posture” has a specific meaning – where an organization as a whole and its assets (things with value) stand relative to risk (likelihood and impact of a threat exploiting a given weakness).

Someone loves this motorcycle. I’m not a cruiser person, so I can’t tell exactly what model it is, but someone took a Harley, converted it to a more extreme chopper style bike, repainted the tank and rear fender, set up exposed drivetrain, and made a decent number other stylistic changes.

Despite all that work, at some point in the last few years, the original kickstand disappeared and the owner had resorted to using a piece of scrap wood as a kickstand.

If you’ve never owned a motorcycle, motorcycles are heavy and unstable when stationary or being dismounted and parked. Everyone who owns a motorcycle has either dropped a motorcycle while parking it or working on it, or will drop a motorcycle at least once in the future. Putting the kickstand down won’t necessarily immediately stabilize a motorcycle when parking – my first motorcycle, a Honda CBR300R, had such a tall kickstand that it frequently almost tipped over if parked on any surface that wasn’t perfectly level and smooth. My current motorcycle, a Royal Enfield Himalayan 411, has an aftermarket shortened kickstand because the previous owner felt that the original kickstand was too tall to safely park the bike on any sort of incline.

The owner probably doesn’t think that carrying a loose 4×4 around in lieu of a kickstand is a big deal. However, this decision influences risk posture in terms of literal posture. Substituting a piece of scrap wood for a kickstand takes a risk that already has a high probability of occurrence (dropping a bike) and further increases the probability of that risk.

The impact (literal or figurative) of dropping a bike isn’t that high. You might break a clutch lever or a mirror, which are neither particularly expensive nor difficult to replace if those parts are available. You can have issues from fluids spilling/settling where they shouldn’t (especially with a carbureted bike), which are also relatively easily resolved with the proper tools and spare fluids.

Taken in the context – this picture was taken in Virginia City, Nevada, which is about 14 miles from the outskirts of Reno. A broken clutch lever in VC isn’t that big of a deal, but traveling any further away from Reno or Carson city would put you hours and hours away from any shop that might have replacement parts if you dropped your bike and broke the wrong part off.

We all have things like this kickstand. People think that having one service account excluded from standard security policies, or having one server use SMB 1.0 isn’t a big deal, because that “temporary” solution or minor exclusion has been in place and ignored around for months and months and decision makers have become complacent. But, to a hostile third party, those seemingly minor decisions can be exploited to have a sizeable impact. A tip-over that breaks a clutch lever in the Honda dealership parking lot is a complete non-issue (other than embarrassment). Breaking a clutch lever or, with terrible luck, snapping a shift lever off or other worse damage halfway between Virginia City and Tonopah in August weather can turn into a serious issue where, at best, you’re riding for hours and hours with controls that don’t quite work (risking a crash at speed) or at worst, the bike is fully immobile until replacement parts are available. Risk posture needs to be undestood both in the context of an organization as a whole, and evaluated by a new or third party set of eyes to ensure that complacency doesn’t leave an organization hanging out to dry on the side of the road in the desert.

Ben’s New Word List

A few months ago, I read the 1997 New Yorker article “Trump Solo“. Politics aside, it’s a long-format article profiling then-businessman Trump at a turbulent time in his career and personal life. “Trump Solo” is a great insight into the world at a time when I was pretty oblivious to pop culture and politics. As I read the article, I was struck by how the article refrained from unnecessary brevity or simplicity, and did not go out of its way to keep the reader entertained. Furthermore, I found myself having to look up a surprising number of words in the article. Not to toot my own horn, but, in my adult life, it’s pretty rare that I encounter a word in English and am largely unable to define it.

This article used so many words unfamiliar to me that I started recording them, with the intent of updating said list as I kept reading other news articles and books. Currently, most of my reading is suggested articles from The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals, along with news sites like BBC World News or The Guardian. For better or worse, I haven’t been reading nearly as many books in recent years.

However, I’ve observed something interesting, if not concerning. As I read other articles that popped up in my suggested feed in Facebook and Instagram and on the /r/news and /r/politics subreddits and other feeds, the list of new words remained unchanged. A reading diet that consisted primarily of contemporary articles in different mainstream magazines and news sites failed to provide any new challenges for my word stock.

Finally, last week, I read the New Yorker article “A Loaded Gun“. It was lengthy. It was not a particularly easy read. Most importantly, I found two words I had to Google! At the end of the article, I looked down at the publication date: It had been published in 2013. My list had finally been updated, but by an article old enough to grow peach fuzz.

After all that, here’s the list, as it stands now:

The List

WordSource Reading Material
palaverTrump Solo
prefatoryTrump Solo
unpropitiousTrump Solo
peregrinationsTrump Solo
noblesse obligeTrump Solo
putativeTrump Solo
perspicaciousTrump Solo
prevaricateTrump Solo
doyenneTrump Solo
pied-à-terreTrump Solo
freebooterTrump Solo
arpeggioA Loaded Gun
imprimaturA Loaded Gun
acciugheA Hamptons Influencer’s Husband Died Millions in Debt. What Happened to the Millers?
macher (Yiddish borrowed word, not the French word)A Hamptons Influencer’s Husband Died Millions in Debt. What Happened to the Millers?
garrulousIn Praise of Slowness
prandialIn Praise of Slowness
lugubriousNow That Steve Albini is Dead, Let’s Reflect on His Admitted Love (and Promotion) of Child Pornography
rouéMy Silent War
charladyMy Silent War
asperityMy Silent War
orotundMy Silent War
offingMy Silent War
beard (v)My Silent War
desultoryMy Silent War
cavilFlorida Catholics slap down state AG by rejecting religious vaccine exemptions

Who knows how I’ll go about updating this list. I’m not much of a WordPress user, so I don’t know if I’ll pin it somewhere or just post updates periodically. Until then, happy reading!

A New Start

It’s been a year and a half. I’m taking a new approach to this blog. Since then, I’ve gone through a few life events and the values of human labor and thought have completely changed with regards to technology. In light of that, some goals for this new iteration of this blog include:

  • To post more frequently, even if it means posts aren’t fully fleshed out
  • To post about things that are not as directly correlated to my primary field of work
  • To write posts about being human and human thought, troubleshooting, and experience

The Turing test has been passed and passed so decisively that it has been rendered moot. If anything, the Turing Test can be applied by evaluating a chat agent’s or author’s communication and analyses for a lack of flaws, as AI agents are better than humans at so many things. So, if a new post appears to be written by a real mouth breather, rest assured, because this human wrote it.

Two and a Half Hours

  • Fold laundry
  • Wash the dishes left out from making pizza for last night’s dinner
  • Do yoga
  • Wash more dishes
  • Do more yoga, and exercises to strengthen my recently-strained MCL
  • Read some of the 50-100 tabs open to Economist and Atlantic articles I’ve been meaning to read for the last four months.
  • Rearrange boxes of Christmas decorations and miscellaneous items in our apartment’s storage area

These are all the things I did while I listened to about two and a half episodes of David Cross’ podcast, Senses Working Overtime with David Cross, last Saturday morning. I discovered David Cross had a podcast shortly after I opened my laptop for the morning. IIf you’re not familiar with David Cross, he played Tobias Funke on Arrested Development. If you’re not familiar with Arrested Development, you’re not alone – almost no one watched the show when it aired, and that’s why it was unceremoniously cancelled after three seasons in 2006.

Please note: There’s a much, much longer and more detailed version of this post where I expand on these points, however, it’s also borderline unreadable. Here’s the abridged version for the meantime.

Here’s how I consumed two and a half episodes of Senses Working Overtime with David Cross:

  • I opened my computer, opened youtube.com in my browser, and Youtube suggested five videos and one ad in a 3×2 grid, and started autoplaying the David Cross podcast when I hovered my mouse over it.
  • None of the five videos were from a channel to which I had subscribed, but somehow, Youtube intuited I would probably watch a video from David Cross.
  • If I had Youtube installed on my phone, once I installed Youtube on my phone, I could resume the video where I left off.

Consuming media in this way is an extremely recent development.


Prior to the advent of consumer grade internet and websites reliably hosting audio and video, consuming media in this way would have been well-nigh impossible.

If a comic started some sort of an interview show, I’d have to be in a radio market where the show were broadcast, and catch the episodes individually as they aired live. If I wanted to binge on multiple episodes, I’d either have to order cassette copies of the show, if the station made those available, or find a friend who had recorded the original broadcast on cassette tape and was willing to duplicate or send a copy of their tapes of the show. If the station didn’t sell tapes and I didn’t have friends who had recorded the show, I’d be out of luck.

The near-immediate availability of everything that has ever been made has fundamentally changed our relationship with media. However, the way I spent two hours Saturday morning wasn’t the result of me seeking out a specific piece of entertainment and then bingeing it, e.g. searching for Arrested Development and rewatching it for over two hours. Rather, out of the hundreds of millions of hours of content on Youtube, the site suggested a specific hour-long video, and subsequently showed me another two hours of content that I didn’t even know I would watch.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a nice weekend.

Anyone can call themselves a roofer.

Wisconsin does not have any licensing requirements for roofing. Anyone – and I mean anyone can declare themselves a “roofer” and start a roofing company.

If you’re having roofing work done, you could have a seasoned professional redo your roof, or you could have someone’s nephew show up with a bucket of tar, a nail gun, and unearned optimism. Unfortunately, you’ll never know whether you hired the right person until the middle of the next heavy rainstorm.

Likewise, anyone can claim to be a cybersecurity expert. That includes highly public figures, such as Rudy Giuliani. In January 2017, then President-elect Trump named Rudy Giuliani as his administration’s cybersecurity advisor during the transition period.

Back in 2017, I remember being surprised by the announcement. I had no idea that Giuliani ran a security company, let alone a cybersecurity company. I wasn’t the only one caught off guard by the announcement, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one curious about Giuliani Security.

Curious users promptly investigated giulianisecurity.com and discovered that the site had many vulnerabilities and was impressively out-of-date, as discussed in this r/technology thread. The site exposed SSH and MySQL to the public internet. Based off of the joomla! and OpenSSH versions installed, the server had not been patched in years. Whatever Giuliani believed about cybersecurity, he clearly didn’t practice those beliefs to his own site.

Anyone can call themselves a roofer.

Hours after news broke regarding giulianisecurity.com’s many vulnerabilities, one of the admins for that domain responded. As a self-identified cybersecurity professional, Giuliani knew his organization had to respond to the vulnerabilities on the giulianisecurity.com site. Would the organization could mitigate the risk? Would they transfer the risk to another party? Avoid it? Accept it?

We’ll never know for sure the intention of the admin in question, but someone left the site unpatched with the same ports and services exposed, but removed the A records that directed queries to that particular site. I suppose this was a misguided attempt at risk avoidance, but the server – with all of its potentially private info, and likely itself inside giulianisecurity.com’s DMZ – remained up and accessible. To this day, Giuliani Partners LLC still has the giulianisecurity.com domain registered, and, to this day the A record for the root domain has never been restored. Fortunately, , the former WAN IP for giulianisecurity.com has since stopped exposing ports 3306 and 22 to the public internet.

However, the story of Rudy Giuliani’s misadventures in web hosting are far from over. According to SecurityTrails.com’s DNS history for the domain, on October 21st, 2021, someone pointed the A record for www.giulianisecurity.com at a new Azure site.

The comedy of errors continues:

  • Whoever decided to make the site accessible via DNS again remembered to add an A record for WWW, but forgot to provide a record for the root of the domain. giulianisecurity.com gives you nothing, and WWW gives you the new (as of 2021) site.
  • The site is still vulnerable to SQL injection and XSS, and lit up a free security scanner like a Christmas tree:
  • The site does not redirect HTTP connections to HTTPS, but at least it serves HTTPS connections now upon request.
  • While the site does provide a HTTPS connection, the site still doesn’t have a valid SSL certificate installed for the domain. The certificate returned is for *.azurewebsites.net, rather than for www.giulianiservices.com.

Anyone can call themselves a roofer. No one will know if they hired the right roofer for the job until after the leaks have started.

POSTSCRIPT: To Mr. Giuliani’s credit, giulianisecurity.com’s SPF record is set with a hard fail by default (-all) and has been set with -all since 2016 per dnshistory.org, so at least there’s that. Additionally, the new site has cleared the hadopelagically low bar of closing 3306 and 22 to the public internet:

Day 2 update

It turns out that it’s far easier to open 28 new tabs about ideas for new posts than it is to radically change my relationship with technology overnight.

As is tradition on Thanksgiving and on Super Bowl Sunday, I watched the game live on honest-to-goodness TV. Since college, those two days are the only times I watch live TV.

I remember reading in a trivia book or perhaps the newspaper as a kid that the average American adult watched something like five hours of TV a day. We’ll revisit that statistic, and some other statistics regarding TV consumption, in a later post. Until then, go read a book or enjoy being bored.

About the tagline…

For some people, history can be defined entirely by specific moments. For others, history’s most widely-known events may be viewed as inevitable small parts of greater political, economic, and cultural patterns. Some historians would say that World War I burst out of the barrel of Gavrilo Princip’s pistol after his shot struck Franz Ferdinand. Others would point to the decades of growing tension between major world powers and argue that just about any event could have set off the Powder Keg of Europe, irrespective of one young man’s actions on a particularly fateful day in Sarajevo.

I often times find myself in the latter camp. Whether discussing global history or the history of technology, an individual with the right ideas at the wrong time and wrong place, or groundbreaking technology introduced a little too early can sputter out and fall far short of their potential impact. Most trends – the adoption of color television, the popularization of the car, the popularization of personal computers, etc, don’t have a single event to which we can point and say “that’s when technology changed for everyone”.

There is one event and one time period in particular where I can point to such a sudden change. Jonathan Haidt characterizes this type of change as producing “hockey stick” charts – one where there’s minimal linear growth, and then, at the end of the shaft of the hockey stick, a sudden, immediate change in slope (some may call it a non-differentiable function) after a certain point in time.

These events happened in 2006, give or take a little.

In 2005, 2006, and 2007 we have:
2005

  • Youtube founded.

2006

  • Steve Jobs announces the iPhone, immediately changing the perception of both smartphones and touchscreen UIs.
    • Prior to the iPhone, smartphones were often synonymous with Blackberry devices. These devices were for business use only. The iPhone was clearly a product for the masses.
    • Touchscreeens now work well enough for the average person to use.
    • For an excellent depiction of the mobile internet and highly capable smartphones contemporary to the iPhone’s release, take a look at Maddox’ post about the iPhone and the Nokia E70.
  • Facebook opens account registration to the general public and introduces the News Feed. Social media goes from usernames, avatars, and profiles to real photos and the News Feed.
  • The Nintendo Wii is released, outselling all previous Nintendo consoles and establishes casual gaming as a major pillar of the gaming market.

2007

  • Google, the world’s most popular search engine then and now, acquires what would become the world’s 2nd most popular search engine, Youtube

This is the first post in a multi-part series. This post sets the stage for the coming sea change in how we spend our free time and to what we give, and often surrender, our attention.

NOTE – For argument’s sake, some things fizzled after being introduced too early in 2005. After years of joking that NetBSD ran on everything but a toaster, Technologic Systems brought the first instance of NetBSD on a toaster to life. Unfortunately for our toaster, time was ripe for the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, but IoT was a few years away from widespread adoption. I’ll revisit IoT in a later post series.