Year: 2004 (Page 3 of 5)

Back in high school, I found a turtle walking down the street, and ended up taking him home. After awhile, he ended up dying, and I’ve been wanting a new turtle ever since. Well, Katrina decided to give me one this year for my birthday. Actually, we didn’t just get one, but two. Both of them are Red Ear Sliders, which are fairly common sea-turtles, and we bought them when they were only a month old. Their shells are about an inch and a half long, but they are growing incredibly fast.

Naming them wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. We thought of the name Pokey first, just as a joke…but then I thought of the famous clay-mation characters that I loved to watch as a kid and thought that if one was Pokey, then the other could be Gumbi. So that’s what we called them. There are two ways we can tell them apart. Gumbi has black spots just around the outside of the bottom part of his shell, and Pokey has black spots in the middle of his shell in addition to around the outside. Also, the top of Pokey’s shell has a pretty large ridge of yellow, where Gumbi’s is mostly green.

Anyway, here is a link to some photos and videos of our new buddies.

My wife, Katrina, and I recently had the pleasure of visiting San Diego for a week. Katrina had a conference that went for most of the week, and I decided that I wasn’t going to let her go without tagging along. It gave me a lot of time at the beach bodyboarding, which was great because the beaches here in Arizona aren’t that nice (too much sand, not enough ocean). 😉 The last time I had been bodyboarding was last summer when I took my boards out to Hawaii (again, for a conference that Katrina had out there…how come development conferences aren’t in such great locations?).

Anyway, we both had a lot of fun, and I came back with some pictures of our trip. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked because the battery charger for our digital camera broke and I had to make do with a set of alkaline batteries.

Here’s the link if you’re interested: Our San Diego Trip.

I thought this particular piece of SPAM was rather amusing. Apparently, their interest rates are as random as the list of people they send this crap to…

RND_DATE_TIME

 Sir or Madam:

Thank you for your mortgage application, which we received yesterday.
 We are glad to confirm that your application is accepted and you can
 get as low as 2.7RND_DIGIT% fixed rate.

I believe this was posted in the last few days on Slashdot, but there are a couple of guys that are starting to make quick videos on different topics relating to hacking. The show is called thebroken, and they already have 3 episodes out so far. Think of it as a 10-15 minute show that covers a couple of topics that might be covered in a magazine like 2600, except a little more watered down, slightly younger, and a lot more fun. For example, the first episode has information on how to go out war driving for WiFi hotspots (including the process of cracking a WEP key), and finished up with showing how to use social engineering to get a free pizza. 🙂 The third episode is pretty good as well…learn how to fry your computer pretty easily “just in case” and see an interview with Kevin Mitnick.

Just a disclaimer, I don’t endorse any of the activities that are shown in the episodes. I’ve always found it interesting to learn about the possibilities of hacking randomly without ever really acting on them. That said, if you dig this kind of stuff, check it out.

As Michael McCracken commented in the writeback of my First Blog Posting, he wrote an app called Blapp to post to Blosxom blogs from a very handy interface. This is my first time giving it a go, so I hope this works. 🙂 So far I am very impressed. The main application window is a Blog Items view. Here you get a listing of all your posts, organized by date. Optionally, you can switch to the Files section and it will give you a hierarchical listing of your blosxom directory. Double click on an entry, and a blog posting window shows up. Each blog posting window is split up into two sections. The top is where you write your HTML, and the bottom gives you a live preview of what it will look like when it’s rendered.

This is definitely cool, and I recommend checking it out if you use blosxom. <Publish>