Tired of I.T!: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bicycle

By Dave Conroy

Spend every waking minute staring at a computer screen. Throw in some self destructive habits. Stir. Repeat. This weekly routine nearly killed him. In a moment of insanity (clarity?), Dave Conroy quit his computer job, sold his belongings and, buying a bicycle, set forth around the world. He hadn't been on a bike in nearly 20 years but you never forget, right?
This is the story of someone who, finding himself caught up in the daily struggle for happiness, took the bold move to step outside his comfort zone. Leaving behind family and friends, he took the first step to reprogram the mind and find inner peace.
For anyone interested in taking that step away from the daily grind, the hustle and bustle of structure, burned out from Information Technology, wanting to embark on a long term journey by bicycle this should appeal to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave Conroy
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780991899135

Dave Conroy

In 2009 I sold everything I owned, quit my job working with computers, and bought a bicycle setting forth for a round the world journey.

Book preview

Tired of I.T! - How I learned to stop worring and love the Bicycle

By Dave Conroy

Published by Dave Conroy at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Dave Conroy

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

While all the information in this book is factual, some names and places have been changed from their original in order to protect the privacy of those involved. Purely protection for those who have become good friends and may become a bit red faced.

20130827

Cover Design: A. Girdler

Edits & Feedback: A. Nyirenda, S. Stanley, A. Hryhorczuk, B. Otieno, D. Luther, A. Mwanza

First Release, 2013

ISBN 13: 9780991899135

www.tiredofit.ca

Tired of I.T!

(How I learned to stop worrying and love the bicycle)

To Dana, who has never said Why me?

While all the information in this book is factual, some names and places have been changed from their original in order to protect the privacy of those involved. Purely protection for those who have become good friends and may become a bit red faced.

START

In 2009, I quit my job, sold everything I owned and set forth for a long term, multi-year bicycle journey around the world. I'm not looking to set a record, to make a name for myself or to raise attention for a charity interested in hopes that a cure can be found for (x) disease - I'm doing it to reset.

There comes a tipping point when things start to change. We've seen empires crumble due to greed, industries fall due to natural and technological evolution, and current events dictating cultural shifts forever affecting the way people base their idea on what survival actually means. My downfall came because of the one thing I loved doing the most, playing with computers.

You see, my older sister was born with a birth defect known as cerebral palsy, told that she would never be able to sit up ever in her life (never underestimate the power of the human body). She received some extra care and attention while going through primary schooling in a sleepy little town in British Columbia, Canada. This was the early 80's when the world had just started to see technological advancements such as the Laserdisc, and its younger but more popular brother the audio Compact Disc. Computers had moved from the size of once taking up entire rooms, requiring separate ventilation systems to process what would be regarded today as basic mathematical functions, to being able to occupy minimal spaces on desks in offices, schools or if you had the money - in your home.

Because of the special care she received from one teacher, I was able to enter into this wonderful world of technology at a very young age. While other six year olds were playing in the dirt with miniature cars, I had managed to procure large technical manuals outlining the intricacies of diverse personal computers, memorizing the contents and enabling the opportunity to poke around the nether regions of these fascinating devices. Games weren't my thing, although I dabbled in them sometimes. I was more interested in how things worked and wanted to be able to program the computers  to accomplish time saving functions, access the internal language of the computer to make graphical ‘blits’ appear on the screen and multi toned squawks to come out of the speakers.

I recall a Christmas pageant where my class was performing, after my short part of reciting a memorized segment I immediately ducked out into the small lab used for special education in the school. This set panic to my parents and others inside the school until I was found huddled alongside the special needs teacher, watching his every keystroke and what was appearing on the screen of the computer. It was then that they found out what I was doing in my spare time in and out of school.

It came to the point that when this teacher, and others who required assistance working with logic functions, operating a program, or troubleshooting some unknown problem would call for my assistance. I would help them with the process of working backwards to find the source of the issue, satiating my hunger for problem solving. You see, the computer is a dumb device that only knows what you teach it to do and therefore, any problem with a computer is not the machine's fault but entirely man made. Only when you get past that one hurdle and realize that the issues are caused by fellow human beings can you then begin to understand how these devices work.

One Christmas day, we were brought downstairs and into the basement to a lit area showing our brand new personal computer, complete with colour screen, a whopping 512KB of memory and these new funky hard shelled discs about 3/4 the size of the ones I had been used to. My parents bought it as a family computer; Dad to practice flight simulation, us kids for writing papers for homework, and Mom found use with it to fuel her crafty nature through basic desktop publishing. Likely some of the longest moments of my entire life were the 45 minutes after I cast my eyes on our home computer having to watch a video outlining its features, what it could do and how to use it. I thought the video was nonsense and didn’t care about its slow pace of introduction – I wanted to jump right in and explore, fumbling my way through prompts seeing where I could end up.

I should probably comment that computers are not the only things that have sparked my interests. I've been wide eyed about how things work since an early age; I have always been curious to how things worked, moved and were assembled. Exploring each device or artifact opened up a whole new set of components and tools, and if it wasn't for the supersonic hearing of my mother I likely wouldn't have made it past the tender age of four. She woke up in the nick of time in the middle of the night to find me utilizing my new toolkit, given to me from a relative, taking apart all of the electrical outlets in my room trying to understand the concept of electricity.

Back to the computer - This thing was magical! While people in schools, offices and homes struggled with their green screens; I played with a full colour palette of 4,096 colours. Their speaker squawks were no match to our 16-bit stereo sound and while most were fumbling with a blinking cursor on the screen, forcing their users to use cryptic commands to navigate the system, these simple tasks were performed by a Graphical User Interface that paved the way to where we are today. Pricewise, it was still $1000 cheaper than the most commonly used computer systems, with a healthy local support network for at least the first 2 years.

I can't tell you how much time I spent using this system in my younger years, but if you were to imagine a chart depicting the time that it came into my life vs. the interest I had in other activities including school it might paint the picture a bit clearer. I wasn't challenged in the slightest bit in school, eventually I gave up trying to fit in with the status quo of getting good grades, dealing with homework, along with giving up any form of physical activities. Baseball was great until I managed to get one in the face, Karate seemed to be doing it for me until I received a chop to the stomach and a bouncing basketball to the tip of the finger slammed the door to sports once and for all. It didn't matter; I had a computer that I could get lost in, keeping myself occupied for hours on end.

I didn't focus on just one facet of computers, I wanted to know it all - I dabbled in programming, building games and utilities. I understood the underlying features of graphic design and desktop publishing, and taught myself music composition by means of many hours testing what would happen with a new idea of command. I had friends, lots of them, but eventually started to tighten my circle to those who shared the same interests as me. Most of our times was spent sitting in front of each other’s systems either showing the other what each had discovered, or exploring together, notepad in hand eager to try it alone privately so that the next time we met we could show how much farther we had taken the original concept. It wasn't competition, it was learning, and we were all challenged.

Eventually, support for this original computer system started to disappear; it became a victim of technology and popular culture shifting towards the systems that had the most market share in offices and those which could put more advertising dollars to attract the masses. Sections of stores that once sold periodicals, manuals and software soon shifted their business to new brands of computers or simply closed up shop all together, unable to compete with larger corporations leaving us adopters of this system in a lurch.

Feeling a bit lost that I could no longer stay current on what was happening with the computer and its architecture; I discovered a new tool that was available to me - a modem.

BLACK HAT

So finally after pleading with my parents on the benefits of being able to access resources outside of the little room I was holed up in, I received a modem for my birthday. I suppose all the time I spent talking about the benefits of the device, I neglected to mention that it would eliminate any possibility for anyone in the household to use the telephone while I was logged on. I used it a lot. One of the other family members would pick up the phone only to hear a digital squawking coming through the other end which would upset the data transmission that was occurring elsewhere in the house. While I could have just cut my losses and allowed them to complete their 2 minutes on phone, I would reset the connection, try again and start the process all over again. Imagine the frustrations that went on!

First, it was an opportunity to connect with others in our small local calling area, two cities to either side of where we were living. Other computer enthusiasts (in these days called Nerds) offered their computers to respond to my connection attempts providing the ability to share messages and files with other users through Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). BBS's had been around for almost 9 years by this time and were growing in popularity each day. Some sites offered multiple lines for users to connect enabling the ability for real-time messaging, online game playing and rudimentary file sharing between each other.

I was hooked on the ability to communicate with people from far, yet quickly exhausted the resources of the local calling area, as I found the sites were mostly focusing around interests that I had no part in.

My childhood friend who shared similar interests had the luck of having both parents as real estate agents, and they used their own family computer system to connect to a larger computer outside our local calling area, via a local access number to bypass any telecommunication fees. These were known as Packet Switched Networks and they offered businesses and corporations the ability to interconnect branch offices and provide remote worker access to the mainframes in the Head Offices.

While I wasn't able to use the real estate agents user IDs and passwords to their system, I was however able to capture the telephone access number which anyone could connect to and end up on a blank screen. Once at the blank screen, they would get disconnected from the system after 1 minute of idle time. A new challenge beckoned me!

It didn't take long to figure out that with a single keystroke the system replied with a brief welcome message and an alphanumeric code which turned out to be a temporary unique identifier. It's probably just as easy to explain that if you lived in a city and wanted to have someone send something through the postal service, you would provide your street number and address. You'd then be given more time to type in something for the system to continue working, luckily it accepted numbers not letters which would have added more significant time to understand how it worked.

Typing in as little as seven numbers would generate either an error, or a new message–connection succeeded – nothing short of a jackpot! Typically, this would connect to another computer somewhere else which would legibly respond asking for user ID, password, or other credentials. This started to open up many doors for me and I quickly put together a program that generated a list of numbers in order to capture any responses upon connectivity, so that when I woke up in the morning I would have a fresh set of systems to explore.

Most of the systems that responded were secured, but a large number were not – allowing one to roam their systems using cryptic commands such as ‘FULL’ to display the files available, ‘TYPE’ to display the contents of a file or even something as simple as typing ‘HELP’ to provide more attempts at learning how to navigate the system. If you were lucky, you would find something that acted as a springboard taking you out of the initial data network itself, but into an entirely new network along with a completely new set of commands to learn, new numbers to try, and more systems that were not just local to Canada. 

In the back of magazines I would read about the advent of interconnected systems in the mid 80's - Services like GEnie, CompuServe, and Prodigy were subscription based systems which acted very similar to a BBS, but with a larger user base and thousands of members online at any one time. All of these systems offered trial evaluations of their network at no cost, but once the trial was up payment details by credit card was required. Something I would not have legitimate access for another 10-12 years. Not a problem, I had hundreds of other systems and networks that I could explore in hopes that I’d find access to one of these commercially based systems. So thus began the exposure to different systems in various parts of the world – the problem was just knowing about them wasn't enough, I wanted to find out how they were built, what they were doing, and continue to satisfy my hunger for learning.

Around the same time due to population growth in my area the local telephone company lifted their limited 20km radius calling boundaries, lumping us into the Metro exchange area, opening up another seven cities to your calling radius at no extra charge. By this time I'd moved from the shared family line to a private line to keep myself occupied, and stop the other family members from having an all-out meltdown with an earful of digital squelching when trying to make a voice call.

With this expansion of telephone access came more BBS’s, which contained mostly the same information and mediocre chat. A few, however, were quite advanced in their technologies and offered access to the Internet long before the website, browser, or streaming media content that we are so used to in this day and age.

Members to this system were able to sign up for their own email address, request listings for files stored on various computer systems around the world. You'd put in an order for a specific file, placed in a queue when the systems operator had the time to download it for you, before being made available to the entire public of the BBS for a short amount of time. Grabbing files took an awfully long time. We were still dealing with 2400-baud modems and if you had the money to support your hobby, you could move up to a 9600baud.

Not only that, hard disk space was limited, as the technology was still in its early years, with the units taking up large spaces, emitting significant amounts of heat, with the price being multiple dollars per megabyte compared to today’s pennies. Barring this drawback, it helped open up doors to allow communication with other people, like minded individuals who had left their contact information in documents that I had requested through this service, or in the credits of a game where the copy protected had been circumvented, or people involved with creating demos - solely focused on showcasing their programming, artistic, and musical talents while pushing the computers capabilities to the limits. These were mind-blowing times, accelerating at a fast pace due to the competitiveness of everyone involved.

Locally, there was also a BBS that catered to the underground/dark side of computer communications. The members comprised of a range of people who had anywhere from a slight interest to users who spent every waking moment learning how to circumvent security systems pertaining to computers, telephones, electronic devices and also participated in many aspects of counter-culture. Hell, some even had long hair and listened to Pink Floyd. Yup - the outcasts of the computer systems, and I found my place in the networks immediately.

I met some of my closest friends then, whom I am still in contact with on a regular basis to this day. Weekends were when we would all step away from the computer to meet and greet - usually getting into trouble by ingesting something weird that someone had brought along, fire off an explosive that someone had made in their garage and generally just be silly adolescents and adults - with our ages ranging from 13-30. I was usually the youngest around.

It seemed each person had their own interest in computers, and were more than happy to share some information, that is if you had something that they could learn from in return. Whether you looked at it as a ratio or just straight up reciprocity - for those looking to learn about varied bits of information and continue evolving that knowledge it was an excellent mechanism for growth.

You may have heard the quote A criminal goes to jail with the knowledge of what crime they committed, but exit a master of what everyone else did, and that's exactly how this ball started rolling. Trading knowledge between these people (known as hackers - for they were the ones who poked and prodded at systems and devices, and phreakers - the ones who spent their time dealing with communication systems, like telephones and satellites) I managed to garner just enough information to get started in a very thrilling environment - tonnes of virtual doors just waiting to be knocked on, checking to see if they were unlocked or a window was left open for a period of time so that I could explore the contents inside.

I learned about being able to circumvent the security of international telephone systems. First by calling overseas direct numbers, setup for international travelers to speak to their telecommunications provider back home, finding a hole that enabled free calls around the world. This was all virtually untraceable once you made it past the first phase of security numbers. We would typically bounce around through various countries and satellite systems almost like a game, to see who could get the most latency when talking (it was a quarter of a second delay on the first hop and then eventually graduate to echoes of 6-7 seconds when transmitting from endpoint to endpoint) just to make a simple call to someone down the road from where I resided.

Payphones were an easy target; by emulating the sound that is emitted when a quarter drops into the slot, one could theoretically put $10 at a time into a payphone for international calls thus being able to roam freely without fear of ever being caught in one location. By gaining access to the computer systems running the phones, one was able to alter the way that phone lines operated - A fun trick to be played on someone was changing the type of phone service one subscribed to. With the telephone prompting the residential homeowner to insert 25 cents to complete their call, this was left for people we really didn't like, a type of bullying if you wish.

Being able to roam around the telephones mainframe systems allowed one to join numbers together, creating a party line of sorts, free for dozens of people to call in. These were advertised around the world for other phreakers to join in typically turning into a knowledge sharing session and other shenanigans for hours at a time. I related better with some of these remote people that I was sharing knowledge with than with my physical friends and family. I can remember annually on Christmas Eve, when my family, relatives and friends were all conversing downstairs in the living area I would be upstairs in my room laughing away talking about the memories of years past with people from Canada, USA, Scotland and Sweden and many other parts of the world.

Each night we’d continue to test large chunks of telephone numbers to see what was on the other side. We did this in hopes of finding businesses that didn't take necessary steps to secure their phone systems and use them as jumping areas for additional free calls or going as far as taking over the entire corporation's voicemail system. We used spare mailboxes as a sort of currency for the trade of other information, nuggets of knowledge or additional tools to circumvent phone security.

Rerouting a charged per minute 1-900 to a toll free 1-800 number gained you instant credibility from people worldwide, often operating for a month before the business owners would realize what had happened and reconcile their books.  If the automated systems proved to be fruitless, we'd switch our hours of probing from the nighttime to during the day. We would speak with first line receptionists using social engineering techniques, aimed at getting further down the line to log names of executives, people in various technical departments. We would then use this information to hone in on a specific area, usually resulting in someone on the other end wilfully releasing access codes or other useful bits of technical information to their secure systems, with just a friendly few minutes of banter and knowing the right things to say. You can probably imagine how knowledge hungry I was at this stage, with thousands of targets to work from on at any given point in time.

On the systems front, I continued to work my way in. corporations with multiple branch offices selling furniture, companies that provided credit to consumers and businesses, and a handful of banks. Each had their own system of unique commands, nooks and crannies to investigate, documents to scan through, corporate communication and training materials.

I hate to say it, once you made it past the initial gateway it was like being a kid in a candy store - things haven't changed since then. It’s 20 years after those times, in 2013, and internal security is still one of the areas that is lacking in most organizations. If you hit a wall and could not go any further, the organization may just have had an office in a 50 km radius. This prompted a late night sifting session in the office’s dumpster, through the many piles of discarded notes, corporate memos and operations manuals. If you were lucky, you would find pieces of hardware that had been haphazardly thrown away, often with corporate data still residing on their storage media.

Trading information, as one would trade hockey cards as a child; I lucked out with someone local who provided me with credentials to a highly accredited University not far from where I lived. The access codes didn’t do much, simply dropping you into a small jailed segment of a mainframe normally used for researchers to perform computing tasks at a fee, basic document storage and to collect email. This was during pre-mainstream Internet boom when everything was still in text and the World Wide Web's infiltration along with streaming video, audio or real time voice communication was still a long way from becoming even available for those who had access.

Services existed like Gopher - a menu driven information system which detailed the services that other connected organizations institutions offered, with few personal pages to be found - blogs were non-existent. Newsgroups, still active to this day acted as a syndication service allowing people from all over the world to discuss topics of various subjects. If your interest was cars, you would read the alt.cars digest. One could also use this service for transmission of binary files, such as programs and pictures - as I mentioned it's still used to this day and typically offers faster download speeds from other hosts as a replica of the files stored on each Internet Service Provider's (ISP) server are local to you. FTP, another file sharing mechanism is also still used frequently. Although not as common as in the 90’s,the server you were connected to offered huge caches of files to people with the appropriate login credentials relating to