I let her off the leash for a bit and she went ape shit nuts running around me.

Once the sun came up Olivia decided she wanted to go on beach patrol and look out for the early morning surfers.

I call this photo “No Lifeguard on Duty”

Today was our Anniversary so Alicia and I hit the JR line and decided to head out to Yokohama. It was a bit overcast but we weren’t going to allow it to mess with our trip.  Alicia planned this whole day out herself and it really turned out great.  I love getting out to this coast side town and checking out what the city looked like and some of its history.

The reason we went to Yokohama was to check out their China town area.  It was a very large area and there was an enterance right when we left the train station.  Before we went into China town we decided to cross over into Motomachi Street in Yokohama to give it a look.  It was a just starting to rain but it wasn’t going to stop us.  Motomachi St. is kind of like the Ginza Area with high end stores but without the high rise street.

I didn’t know that Alicia had more for me than just the shopping district.

We get to the end of Motomachi St. to a long set up stairs that take you up to Minato-No-Mieru-Oka Park.  This lovely park overlooked Yokohama’s port and some of the city.  This photo was taken by a very nice old man who wanted to do Alicia and I a favor

The web album shows a bunch more photos of this area. Up in the Minato-No-Mieru-Oka park there is a rose garden that the Yokohama retirement crowd likes to visit and do drawings and water colors of the views. Actually seeing all of the people practicing their drawing and painting It made me come back home and dig out my drawing/art tools.  From this trip it has inspired me to start drawing and doing a bunch of other things I have been holding off on.

Here is the fountain in Minato-No-Mieru-Oka park.

It started raining on us pretty good by this time so we ducked under some trees at The Yokohama Forigen Cemetary.  Which wasn’t really open for much viewing but this is where Forigeners (US and UK) in this cemetary.  Once the rain kind of broke we made our way done a couple of long back streets to The China Town area. We then found a great restaurant with really good noodles and food for our lunch.

We ended up at the Harbor where the Hikawa Maru YokoHama is docked for tours.  This is a great cruse ship that used to do trips from Yokohama to Seatle, WA before WWII. It was used as a medical ship in the war.

So we got a view of these huge “Worlds Biggest” Ferris Wheel from the quick boat trip (the Sea Bass)  We hopped off of the boat and made our way to Cosmo World where the ferris wheel was located.

Then we had to take a ride on the Ferris Wheel of course.

So we made our way back to Yokohama station and heading back to Ginza.  We had to get back to Ginza because tomorrow is Mt. Fuji

KANPAI EVERYONE!!!!!! See you when we get back.

While walking down the streets we noticed a cat that just popped out of a random hole between two buildings it was the oddest thing.  It was like it came out to say hello to us.

Read on for more about this day it gets better when we get to the SUMO!!!

So the Japaness love them some happy cartoonish looking figurers.  So outside of some of the stores in the area we decided to pose by them.  Here is Alicia with a Maneki Neko or a Beckoning Cat They are all over Japan and if you follow the link you can learn more about the history of them.  I myself found a very happy Foo Dogish looking creature.

So after walking around a bit we find our wa to the Tsukiji Fish Market.  Which is huge but for the most part it was already later in the day and most of the shop were closed down.  I guess the early buyer gets the best fish so the market is flooded in the morning time.

While walking down the banks of the Sumida River Alicia caught a photo of a crazy water bus.  I would love to take this thing to the sandbar.

So later that day Alicia and I get to the Sumo Turniment which turns out was really fun.  I had a great time there and learned a bunch about Sumo and fan supported sports in Japan in general.  I guess even if your guy doesn’t do good you don’t boo the other guy.  They say things like try better next time.  There are tons of photos from Sumo and the whole trip at Alicia’s Picasa Site.

Here is me outside the Sumo Arena.

Painting of 1st Sumo Fights in Japan.

Sumo fight!!!!

So we get to the Shinbashi Station in the Ginza district of Tokyo.  This is the closest station to our hotel and we use it several times while in Tokyo to get to other areas.

So Alicia and I are starving and wanted to grab something to eat.  We wanted something quick but didn’t want to stop at one of the 1000s of McDonalds (God Bless the Big Mac) in Japan instead we wanted local food.  So standing around in the area pictured above we noticed a guy purchace a ticket from a vending machine.  He then took the ticket into a small noodle shop and they gave him a bowl of noodles.  So Alicia and I walk up to the machine and find a picture of something that looked good the toss in like 600 Yen (about $6.00 US).

So then we are off to the Harajuku District to see the sites for the day.  First of all Alicia takes us to the Meiji Shrine which is pretty much across the street from the shopping district.  Which was really cool for our first trip back into Japanesse history.

So we made it to the Shrine it was actually very impressive for the first shrine we visted.  It is in the middle of a bustling city and still pulls in crowds of people.

So we make it back out of the Shrine then cross the bridge over to the Harajuku shopping area.  You will see some of the wildest things ever with the young Japanese crowd there.  It’s like they wake up in the morning and tell their friends to pelt them with 30 different color paint balls and then toss a hand full of glitter on themselves.  It was for sure a busy area packed with people.  I quickly figured out Japan was way more busy and packed than any other large city I have been to (LA, London, NY, Seoul).

So we took off from the Harajuku district to head back to Ginza and we noticed they close the street down for several hours at noon on the weekends.  It was cool this street Ginza is very busy on an average day and they close it down just so people can walk down it and do some shopping. To bad every store happens to be a high end store.

After quite a long walk Alicia and I find a Garden/Park area close to our hotel called Hama-rikyu Gardens.  It is about 300-500 Yen to enter.  This was my first walk into a traditional Japanese Garden/Park area.  It was really interesting to see all of the trees and how they were grown.  There were 300 year old pines that do not grow like here in the US as you can see in the photo across the pond.

So this photo is of Alicia and I on some park benches that were located with the skyline and the lake behind us.  After taking the photo I read a placard about the site it was where tea house had once stood before WWII it was destroyed in a bombing run.

Here is another view of the sky line from Hama-rikyu Gardens in Tokyo’s Ginza District.

There was also a very small but quite Shrine in the Hama-rikyu Gardens.  It was nice to just set back here and reflect on how people used to live here in Tokyo.

So we get back to the hotel and just had to find our email

After we reached the airport Alicia picked up our Japan Rail passes and it was on our way to the trainstation in the Airport.

This post is going to run on a bit so to check it out here you go.

So once we got out of the tunnels and on the tracks we quickly noticed that outside of the Airport it was mostly rice files and “country style” homes.

Now if you ask me even the areas of farm land aren’t secluded and away from it all as it is here in the states.  It really seemed like the cities and the farm country ran together there.  I am sure there are more remote areas than that off of the train tracks but that’s just how I precieved it.

Well we get into our room at the Courtyard by Marriott in Tokyo and then we took off down to grab some grub.  The meals at the hotel were very expensive but we figured hey its our first night in town so lets splurge a bit.  This is all for now more on tomorrows post.

As time has went on some application developers don’t even try to host their servers on other ports they just write them for TCP port 80.  Guys started configuring self ran mail servers for mail on port 80 and games were quick to start using the port also so you could meet up with your buddies.  Now days VoIP providers use it for their customers behind firewalls.   I haven’t done any hard number crunching on this but I would bet up to 10% of your outbound port 80 traffic isn’t even HTTP or web page traffic.

Now on to how I think Botnets could use the port 80 as a way of controlling the Bots.  Now I wouldn’t doubt that the majority of the Botnets out there are using port 80 to call home from their bot clients to their controllers to get their commands.  Seems easy enough and I bet the Botnet guys have already thought of this but why not use all of the 1000000s of web servers out there that have forums or open ways of posting HTML (or owned sites) and place Botnet commands inside of HTML comments that won’t be read or noticed by the average web user.

The craziness is anyone could startup a predefined “call home” server name or IP have the bots execute small HTTP GET traffic throughout the day and if it doesn’t notice any commands or anything it just goes back to sleep until the next time it needs to call home and look for commands.  I guess you could even work out tags in your botnet call that would look for something like home-server. It would tell your clients to change the name of the server they were calling home to this will help keep people off of your tracks.

Looking at this you can even make it past most proxy devices out there.  You could also use the SSL port (443) if you were behind a network that didn’t have an HTTPS proxy in place.   If an SSL proxy is in place it would work but you need to make sure you client/server is using SSL encryption and this might be a bit to much overhead to run on your botnet clients and setting up new SSL servers all the time could be work too.  I guess no one said running a botnet would be easy.

With these botnets and people tunneling out of large enterprise network its only going to lead to more and more networks becoming very locked down over time.  Either that or getting used to answering up to other companies’ legal departments.  I have always been a fan of an open wide west network and I am changing in my old age.