The Simpsons Movie

Went and saw it last night (pre-screening FTW).

I started laughing when the 21st Century Fox logo came up (you’ll see why when you watch the movie) and didn’t stop till the credits started rolling.

They make fun of themselves being a movie on a few occasions. For example the opening sequence (similar to the one for the TV show) has Bart writing on the chalk board “I will not steal this movie”. They do however, take the liberty of being rated PG-13, instead of the typical TV rating they have.

The story is pretty much what you’d expect, but expanded. They even pause 1 hour in with a “To be continued…”.

Anyway, I enjoyed it and might go see it again when some of my friends go.

Can You Resist?

Bannanna Phone

Its a set of viral video’s I seem to have missed in the past. So in case you did to, here are a few. Enjoy

Oh my god I want one

There comes a point in every nerds life when he must make the choice. Drive a car, or play with a computer. Well now, you don’t have to make that choice.

Actually, this isn’t anything new in concept. Just new in its particular design. Carputers, computers designed specifically to go in your car, have been around for a long time, and have a fairly large following. Just check out http://www.MP3car.com . However, the typical way to build/buy a carputer was to have a screen in your dash, and a separate processing unit (the computer) mounted somewhere else. And installation required at least a little bit of computer and car knowhow.

The Infill G4 is the first (that I’ve seen anyway) double din, fully integrated carputer that is as easy to install as any other double din car stereo. And I’m in love. It comes with a heafty price tag though, about $2500 configured the way I would want it. But how awesome would it be to have this thing installed on your computer running a full version of Windows XP.

You can check out the ad from Infill, but just be forewarned, its an English translation of a Korean ad. You can also check out their website, which had me drooling.

Playstation 3 Home

I am an Xbox 360 Owner. And damn proud of it. I’ve certainly played with the Playstation line, but it never suited my fancy and the PS3 completely disgusts me on multiple levels. But I digress, because this little video is the first thing I’ve seen from the Sony world of any interest on the PS3.

Its like the bastard child of Myst Uru and The Sims, on steroids. And its a level of social engineering I’ve yet to see executed well, but in todays world of Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Groovr and other social interactive junk, who knows it might just work.

Anyway, I’d be interested in poking around it some day. (But I’m still not buying a PS3).

This Shrinking World

Take yourself back in time. (If you see cave-men or dinosaurs, you went to far)

1983: The Nintendo Entertainment System was released, Microsoft released the Microsoft Mouse for its very new DOS, JC Penny would soon start issuing its own credit card and the first TCP/IP WAN was functional when the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone.

In 1983 I could have booted my computer, and opened a document with a list of phone numbers, one of them being JC Penny. Called JC Penny and ordered a game to be mailed to me for the Nintendo, and I would have to wait probably a couple weeks before getting the game.

Now fast forward to today: You can log into Amazon.com, find a movie you like in their Unbox selection of titles and have it immediatly sent to your TiVo. Total transaction time (including time to download the movie), only a couple of hours.

Interconnected systems are here, they are what makes this world smaller and smaller every day and they will only continue to grow. Remember the old addage that your bathroom scale will one day tell your fridge how much you weigh? Expect it… soon.

Delayed Christmas Writings

I feel kind of bad that I have been slacking so much on keeping you up to date on things. Chadd on the other hand has been doing an awesome job, so hopefully he doesn’t mind if I yoink chunks of his posts to quickly write mine.

I had four Christmases this year, first a week before the actuall Christmas with the Klaus family (My Dad’s side, obviously), one evening with my roomates and then I spent Christmas day with both my Mom’s side of the family, and Kerry’s family.

Klaus Family Christmas (12-16-06)

Christmas is just a week away, and every year the Klaus family (my Dad’s side) gets together to exchange gifts, stockings, eat and, any time you get a Klaus group together, play cards. This year it was at my cousin’s new house in Sacramento. Jason did most of the cooking, with some help from Angela doing the dessert (a very tasty dessert I might add).

While we waited for the stuffed meatballs to cook (also very good, and very filling), we handed out stockings. One thing that my Dad got in his stocking was a bag of army men, and let me tell you, give my Dad the right toys, and he’ll turn into a kid again.

From the stockings, we all went to the table when the food was ready. For dinner we had a plate of two Lingonberry Stuffed Meatballs on Terragon and Sweet Pea Puree layered over Truffled Garlic Mashed Potatoes. Most people couldn’t finish eating both meatballs, but every agreed that it was very good. For our dessert that evening we had Lemon Brown Sugar Bread Pudding. It was more bread than pudding; something that you could eat with a fork.

-Chadd

We did a fun gift exchange this year, basically a white elephant exchange but with a $40 budget per person, and thus, more interesting gifts. I opened a shop vac, which then got stolen, so I stole an ice cream maker. When Chadd’s gift got stolen, he in turn took my ice cream maker and I ended the night with a really nice crock pot.

In all it was a fun time, and it is always nice to see some of the family that I dont get a chance to see all of them all the time.

Roomate Christmas (12-22-06)

We had a nice little thing at our house for Christmas with the roomates, as well as Kerry and Candice. If I had realized that Cody and Becca were going to be gone, I would have done it at a diffrent time and had them over too, my bad.

Anyway, I decided I really wanted to make it something to remember, so I scoured the internet (not really, google is awesome) for the recipie to that dinner that Jason had made above. And wouldn’t you know, its really not all that hard to make. For those of you interested:

Lingonberry Stuffed Meatballs Recipe
Tarragon and Sweet Pea Puree Recipe
Truffled Mashed Potatoes Recipe

I got a chance to use my new crock pot as well, filled it with a gallon of Apple Cider which was almost gone by the time the night was over.

I’m really quite proud of how it all came out in the end, a really nice dinner with some good wine, good friends and lots of laughter.

Blanchard Christmas (12-25-06)

Every year the location that we will all go to for Christmas alternates between my Grandparents’ house and my Parents’ house. This year it happened to be at my Grandparents’. On Christmas Eve, we pack all the presents under our tree at home into as few cars as we can manage, and head up to my Grandparents’ house. Now, I’ve always thought it is cool that I can say honestly, “over a river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house I go.” Sure, it may only be a small creek, and trees are probably not packed close enough for some people to classify them as woods, but it’s close enough for me.

Once we arrive, we make several trips to and from the house with armfuls of gifts. We take these presents and pile them around the tree. The tree ends up with about a three foot radius of presents around it.

…

After some snacks were munched on, and a game of magic was played with my cousin, I ventured back into the main part of the house to find a (practically) family tradition being played on the table. Every time we get enough people together from my mom’s side of the family, we break out the Rummikube game. Vaguely similar to Rummy played with cards [that my Dad's side of the family seems to play religiously], only this game is played with tiles, and there are a few differences in how you are allowed to play tiles.

After Keith arrived carrying the rest of the Playstation 2 that I left at home, we plugged it all in and started up Guitar Hero. Unfortunately, we only had one guitar controller, so we had to take turns playing. I did manage to make Kyle look somewhat like a rock star in this photo.

Kerry had come up with me to visit with my family, but she wanted to be with her family, and particuarly in her bed (since she had been house sitting for a few days prior) for christmas, so I took her home around 10PM. Unfortunatly, I was tired too and laid down on the bed and ended up falling asleep for a few hours. I didn’t make it back up to my grandparents until just after midnight and had to move around by flashlight to get to bed.

People started moving stirring about at around 7 in the morning. When everyone was inside the house (some slept in the motor home outside) we started handing out stockings. After we all sifted through our stockings, we started to open up gifts (here are some of the pictures). Kyle left after opening presents to bring Kerry up so that she could open hers. Kyle almost missed his favorite meal. We had delicious biscuits and gravy (I had jam instead, not a big fan of the gravy) for breakfast.

After we all played around with our new toys and other gizmos and gadgets, we ate [an early] dinner. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy; can’t beat a great combination like that. Afterwards, we had to try to gather up everything and stuff it all back into the car. This time we had an extra person to ride in the car since Meghann had to leave to go spend time with her family, taking her car (and Keith’s ride there) with her.

All in all, it was a great Christmas, and it was nice to see some of my cousins again. Next year should be at my parents’ house, and if this moving out thing goes according to plan, it should be quite fun.

Bosch Christmas (12-25-06)

After leaving my grandparents house, Kerry and I headed back to her house to enjoy the rest of the evening with her family. Liz made a wonderfull dinner. I had Lamb for I think the first time. It had a very familiar taste, but I can’t think of any other time I would have had it. The best part though was Desert. Liz makes this thing called a Pepermint Crisp Tart. I dont really know what all is in it, but its delicious.

Kerry and I left her house not to long after dinner to go back down to my house where we tried to watch Batman Begins in High Definition (Both the movie and player were christmas gifts), however with my serious lack of sleep and a busy day, I couldn’t stay awake.

Donner, Castle Peak & Truckee

What is this … A post that ISN’T a week late! Yeah that’s how I roll (well from now on). Now the only challenge is to try to keep it short and to the point (don’t count on it). As always, you can see my whole gallery of pictures here.
This weekend I joined Jessica, Elpida; Becca and Cody on a trip up to the Hoffman cabin at Donner Lake. We left early Saturday morning to head up. Cody, Becca and I drove up in one car, Jessica and Elpida in another.

Once we got up the cabin I meet Cody’s dad, Kyle, who was at the cabin taking care of a few things around the place. The girls all sat down and picked out a hike for us to do, and probably an hour after getting to the cabin we were off again, headed to Boreal ski resort to get to the Pacific Crest Trailhead that is there.

Before I start though, I have to admit, I’m somewhat disappointed in my pictures from this trip. Not that the pictures I took were bad, just that because of the running that Becca and I have been doing, my knees are what they used to be and I had to borrow Nicks trekking poles to take some weight off of them so I couldn’t keep my camera out. So my solution is going to be to hijack pictures from other people’s websites. So basically if you see snow in the pictures, I probably didn’t take it. There is also a great little bit of info about the hike/ski conditions from SummitPost.org.

The hike starts off as a very nice trail, and as such was fairly popular. We passed quite a few day-hikers from all ages. The trail was well marked and even had a few signs pointing out things of interest. Starting at around 7200’, the trail was very gradual until it came up to Castle Pass (~4 miles) where the trail heads up steeply for the last hundred yards or so to the pass which is at 7660’. After that it got a bit crazy for a group who hadn’t hiked in a long time (with the exception of Jessica, who is an animal). From the pass to the peak, is maybe a mile and a half, but probably closer to a mile and rises from 7660’ to 9103’. Obviously there is no easy way to do this, you just go up.

I was able to find Castle Peak on Yahoo Maps, so if you wanted a satalite picture of the peak, you can see it here.

We went up some of the way, and stopped for lunch. I think we probably took a 45 min lunch, which was really nice. I actually nodded off a little after I ate and it did a great job to rest me and my knees before the steepest part of the climb. It was almost a scramble to get up the rest of the way, and defiantly was for the last 30 feet or so. But the views from up top always make it worth it.

A quick thanks to Jessica for pushing the rest of us to summit!

The hike back was fairly un-eventful, the trekking poles came in extremely handy to keep me from slamming all my weight down on my knees, but I wasted a lot of energy trying to make a delicate decent and I got a little dehydrated by the end. I pounded a Nalgene of water when I got back to the cabin and tried to drink more throughout the weekend and all was well.

When we got back to the cabin, we all took showers and had some beers. We played a game of Yatzee which included tequila shots whenever you got a Yatzee, as well as one before we started for good measure. Cody won the game, but we all had a fun time of it. After that we watched the movie “Sideways” which was pretty funny. The guy getting married reminded me of one of the guys I work with so it was fun to watch.

I’m not sure what time we all crashed, but I’m fairly certain it was before midnight. We were all dead tired and I know I personally passed out only a few seconds after my head hit the pillow.

Sunday (today, can you believe it) we got up and Becca made banana and peanut butter pancakes. We headed over to Cody’s Aunt’s cabin which is on the water, and we chilled (almost literally) on their doc for a while. After an hour or two of that, we got back to the cabin, got everything packed up and headed over to Truckee, parked the car and walked around the town poking our head into the shops.

One shop in particular held our attention for quite some time. I forget the name of the place, but it was your typical outdoor sports place. But they had a ton of stuff on sale. Jessica picked up a really nice pair of Solomon’s for $40; I picked up two Dutch Ovens (a 2Q and 8Q) for $35 and Cody and Becca grabbed some Cast Iron pans for dirt cheap as well.

We ate an early dinner at the Truckee Diner, and then parted ways to head home.

In all it was a great trip, my legs are a little tight at the moment, but surprisingly my knees are doing great, better than that have been in a few days actually. Makes me want to start pushing hard to get other people involved in backpacking/hiking so I can get back out there and start doing it again, reminds me of some of the things I miss.

Picture Sources:
KevinGong.com
SummitPost.org

Choosing a Good Password

Introduction

Your password is what tells the computer that you are who you say you are. Until we can do retina scans like in James Bond movies, the password is the best thing we can do. But, because you password is like a key to your account, you need to safeguard it. Anyone who has your password can get into your account, and your files. Anyone who can guess your password has it. Anyone who has your password can pose as you. Therefore, you may be held responsible for someone else’s actions, if they are able to get your password. You may not wish this to happen.

Tips on safeguarding your password

• First and foremost, NEVER give your password to anyone. “Anyone” means your coworkers, your spouse, and your systems administrator. In the event of an emergency, the sysadmin can change your password. Your systems administrator never has a need to know your personal password. If someone needs to get onto our machines, and has a reason to be there, do not give them access to your account. Speak to the systems staff about setting up an account for them. We would be very happy to give them one.
• Make your password something you can remember. Do not write it down. If you really, honestly forget your password, we can easily give you a new one. We’d rather set your password once a month because you forgot it than have someone find it written down and gain unauthorized access to your account.
• Make your password difficult for others to guess. This is not as hard as it initially seems. See the section below for choosing a good password.
• DO NOT Change your password because of mail from someone claiming to be your systems administrator, supposedly needing access to your files!! This is a popular scam in some circles. Remember, your systems administrator never needs your password for any reason. If someone needs to ask you to change your password so they can gain entry to your account, they do not have a reason to be there.

How not to choose a Password

Here are some of the types of passwords that will be picked up by our crackers:

• Words in the dictionary
• Words in any dictionary.
• Your user name.
• Your real name.
• Your spouse’s name.
• Anyone’s name (crackers don’t know that your aunt’s middle name is Agnes, but it’s easy enough to get a list of 100,000 names and try each one).
• Any word in any “cracking dictionary”. There are lists of words that crackers use to try to crack passwords: passwords that a lot of people use. Some of these include:
• Abbreviations, Asteroids, Biology, Cartoons, Character Patterns, Machine names, famous names, female names, Bible, mail names, movies, myths/legends, number patterns, short phrases, places, science fiction, Shakespeare, songs, sports, surnames.
• Any of the above, with a single character before or after it (“8dinner”, “happy1”).
• Any of the above, capitalized (“cat” à “Cat”).
• Any of the above, reversed (“cat” à “tac”), doubled (“cat” à “catcat”), or mirrored (“cat” à “cattac”).

We use to tell people that thinking a word and substituting some characters (a 0 (zero) for an o, or a 1 for an l) made a good password. This is no longer the case. New crackers have the capability to crack things like this, in certain situations.

Words like “foobar”, “xyzzzy” and “qwerty” are still just plain words. They are also popular passwords, and the crack programs look for them. Avoid them.

Any of the sample passwords, good or bad, mentioned in this document.

How to Choose a Good Password

I know that coming up with a good password can be difficult, so here are some guidelines to use.

• Choose a password that is at least six characters long. This should be long enough to discourage a brute-force attack. In general, a good password will have a mix of lower- and upper-case characters, numbers, and punctuation marks, and should be at least 6 characters long. Unfortunately, passwords like this are often hard to remember and result in people writing them down. Do not write your passwords down!
• The license plate rule: take a phrase and try to squeeze it into eight characters, as if you wanted to put it on a vanity license plate.
• Some people like to pick several small words, separated by punctuation marks of some kind.
• Pub a punctuation mark in the middle of a word, e.g., “vege%tarian”.
• Use some unusual way of contracting a word. You don’t have to use an apostrophe.
• One of my favorite passwords was “kEp*-h&y”: “kEp” à “keep”, “*-“ à “laser”, and “h&y” à “handy”; “keep your laser handy!”
• You can use control characters. Just bear in mind that a lot of them have special meanings. If you use ^D, ^H, or ^U, for example, you might not be able to log in again.
• Think of an uncommon phrase, and take the first, second or last letter of each word. “You can’t always get what you want” would yield “ycagwyw”. Thor in a capital letter and a punctuation mark or a number or two, and you can end up with “yCag5wyw”.
• Deliberately misspelling one or more words can make your password harder to crack.
• Use several of the techniques above.
• Something that none one but you would ever think of. The best password is one that is totally random to anyone else except you. It’s difficult to tell how to come up with these, but people are able to do it. Use your imagination!

EDC Weekend ‘06

In my true posting fashion… this post is a whole week late, and will probably be way to long

The weekend of the 8th – 10th of this month was the third weekend in a row that I’ve been gone on vacation, but this was probably the best one yet. I’m actually writing this from class (yes… I’m paying attention too).

Anyway, this weekend was my company vacation in Tahoe. Just about every year Electrical Design Consultants takes all the employees and a guest somewhere for a weekend. Usually it’s Tahoe, matter of fact only once has it been anywhere else and that was the year I started when we went to Vegas.

The vacation started Friday, which we all had off so that we could easily drive up there in the morning. I had asked Melinda if she wanted to join me, but she was going to be in North Carolina for auditions (hmm, need to call her and find out how those went). So instead of going up by myself or trying to keep up with Joe in bachelor mode all weekend I asked Kerry if she wanted to join me because she had been before and knew what to expect. Anyway, back to Friday. I meet up with Kerry at her house Friday morning and we both headed up the hill. I made a stop at my parents to drop off a few things first and chatted with my dad for a few before continuing on.

We had brunch at Mel’s Diner in Placerville which was nice, but that place is really starting to fall apart . I think we finally ended up getting to Tahoe and the hotel around 3 pm, and were luckily able to check in early. EDC put us up in the Embassy Suites hotel, which is always nice. The rooms are suites, so there is a bedroom (with two beds this trip), and a separate living room complete with dinning table and mini kitchen (no stove).

We got our things settled in the room and headed out to walk the shops. I think just about every time I’ve gone up to Tahoe, there are new shops. It’s probably going to slow down now since the major construction around the gondola area is done, but its a really great place to just walk and poke about in small shops if you like that sort of thing. I ended up buying a shell necklace from Del Sol. If you’ve ever been to a Del Sol store, you know what they are all about. Everything they sell in the store changes color, or gets color when exposed to UV light (daylight).
Embassy Suites has complimentary drinks in the evenings, so that’s where we headed around 4:30 and meet up with the rest of the group. I had a drink called a Cactus Bite, which was a lot of liquor but quite tasty. After that drink though, I stuck to beer.

In the evening, we had dinner at the Chart House overlooking the lake. They originally put us in this great little room that was kind of in the basement, but still had a decent view of the lake, and was completely empty except for us and the wait staff. It was AWESOME! BUUUT… it wasn’t what John and Debbie (my Boss’) had asked for, so they moved us upstairs to the bar area which was loud, cramped and not nearly as awesome. Oh well… they were paying, so they get to do whatever they want.
I seem to have rubbed off on Kerry with the whole Surf and Turf dinners, because we both ordered Filet Minion, mine came with shrimp, and hers with a lobster tail, and we shared the surf portion. It was delicious.

After that, I was pretty beat, and had eaten so much food that Kerry and I both just went back to the room and crashed. I purchased “Cars” the movie in the room, but Kerry fell asleep before the opening credits, and I didn’t last much longer than that.

We got up at 7:30 Saturday morning to try to hit up the gym before we got the day started, but the diehard’s had already filled the few machines that the hotel had. So instead we just relaxed in the hot tub for a little while. Which I must admit, is quite a nice way to start a day.

Embassy Suites also has a really nice breakfast every morning for free to its guests (including cooked to order foods). So after breakfast we headed out to the docks, where EDC had rented 3 ski boats. This was really the only potion of the trip I had my camera with me, so its the only pictures I’ve got. Kerry and I were looking for a fun time, so we got in the boat with Joe who is a fun loving boat bum (he owns an alcohol burning race boat) and hauled ass over to Emerald Bay where we stopped for a nice lunch. During some no-wake time in the bay, Joe and I figured out where to best trim the I/O on the boat so we could REALY get some speed, and we defnalty made a difference. We sped across the lake at about 55MPH, with Joe jumping wakes and making hard turns. The girls (Kerry and Angelo’s wife Kelly) were sitting up front and got tossed around quite a bit. It was pretty funny to watch, Kerry was holding her boobs in one arm to keep them from flying everywhere, and holding on to the railing with white knuckles on the other hand.

After the boating, Kerry and I went up the Gondola, but didn’t spend much time because on the way up Kerry remembered that she wanted to see a movie that was starting soon. We made it back down and in the theatre only a few seconds after the movie had started back up.

We watched “The Covenant” which wasn’t bad. I don’t think I would waste the money on seeing it in the theatre (but I have a hard time with that no matter what) but I think its worth watching. Kerry loved it, and I have no doubt that it had something to do with the fact that there were 4-5 very good looking guys who spent a good portion of the movie without shirts.

After the movie, it was free drink time again at Embassy, where we once again meet up with some of the EDC crew. Joe, Chris, Alice, Greg, Kammy, Kerry and I all decided to head over to “Fire and Ice” for dinner, and although we had to wait an hour and a half the food was WELL worth it. The place is Mongolian style cooking, but the food and atmosphere is very American. Big chunks of Angus steak, mahi-mahi, seasoned chicken, muscles and an assortment of vegetable and sauces made up the menu. For $19 a plate for an all you can eat place like that wasn’t bad either. The guys doing the cooking put on a show too, flipping their utensils around, throwing empty bowls off the wok into bins etc. If you’re up in Tahoe and looking for a place to eat, I highly recommend “Fire and Ice”. The only downside was that their jalapeños were extremely hot and I spent like 10 min just trying to recover my mouth.
Kerry and I headed back to the room again after dinner to call it an early night (~11PM). We did finish watching “Cars” though, which was a pretty good movie. We wanted to try to get some sleep in before our adventure the next day.

Sunday we got up at 6:30 so that we could check out and head up to the Rubicon trailhead for an ATV excursion. I didn’t take my camera because I didn’t feel comfortable with all the dust, but it was the same basic than to what we did last time, except that Kerry and I were all alone with the guide, and we did a much longer trip this time. We went down through Dollar Hole, which was really fun because it was much more technical than only going to Miller Lake was.

After our ATV’ing we basically just headed home. Kerry wasn’t feeling well, so she slept in the car, and I took highway 88 home to keep myself entertained. It was a nice drive with almost no traffic, and some pretty views. I think I finally got home around 3 PM, and was dead tired. I played around with the new Pool Heater that came in the mail over the weekend and finally went to bed. But I’ll leave the pool heater for another discussion.