I give you my strangest search request thus far: naked operation flashpoint. Yes, I do play Operation Flashpoint but never naked. Ok, hardly ever naked.

This was certainly something interesting to return from vacation to. Apparently Blogger was h4x0red the day after Christmas by some heartless bastard. No major damage, but since they may have been able to get all the stored FTP passwords I decided to go ahead and change mine. Since this also happens to be the password for my CIS account, I thought this would be a Good Thing. Needless to say, I don’t plan on storing my FTP password in Blogger anymore. Probably wasn’t too smart of me to begin with. Of course I’ve used the same password for that for so long that its probably going to be tough to make the switch mentally. Anyway, keeping the same password for 4 years probably isn’t the most secure thing in the world. I guess its probably best that I finally changed it. Changing passwords is never that big of a deal for me, since I use a pretty easy but (hopefully) secure system to pick them. I’ve got a memorized numerical prefix and suffix that I always affix to a character string, which is usually something easy to remember such as the initials for a long movie title or band name. For instance, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. &ltparanoia&gtAlthough I guess I won’t be using that one now…&lt/paranoia&gt

I’m back in Dayton until Tuesday night for the holidays and what have you. Every time I go back to Dayton, I remember how glad I am I don’t live in Dayton. Reason #347: Dayton is a very nu-metal sort of town. Linkin Park, anyone? That just sort of grates on the nerves after a bit. Still, I’m glad I came home. I haven’t seen my family much this year, and I just realized that I hadn’t slept in my old room at all this year before now. Also, some of my extended family on my mom’s side (aunt, uncle, cousins, etc) stopped by for a brief visit on their way to visit other relatives. It was cool to see them, especially since my cousins are also into the rock and roll much like me so its always fun to talk to them.

It’s stories like this one, about a computer tech at DeKalb Tech in GA who was fired and is facing criminal prosecution for running distributed.net on school computers, that are making me really think about joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation. More and more often, it seems like poorly designed, vaguely worded legislation intended to prevent actual computer crime is being wrongfully applied by prosecutors who seem to be woefully unaware of the issues and concerns involving computer security and even computers in general. This case is of particular interest to me because, *shhhh* I’ve run the exact same program myself on several computers belonging to the Ohio State University. Did the guy deserve to get fired? Probably so, if in fact he had been previously warned that installing such programs was against university policy (the dubious merits of such a policy not withstanding) Criminal prosecution? Not even close.

I just got back from clearing the last load of crap out of my ex-computer lab in Converse Hall. That’s right, I’m now a supervisor without a lab to supervise. A ronin in the feudal Japan that is the public computer sites if you will. (You probably won’t, but that’s ok. Its my lame analogy and I’m sticking with it.) The College of Business decided that they wanted to take over the site in Converse, and apparently the capitalist pig-dogs can take whatever they lay their greedy bloodstained fingers on. Bastards. No, actually I’m quite fine with this. You see, I get to keep the same supervisor pay without actually having any of the responsibilities. I’m just going to be working in the office now, which will actually be much more interesting than just sitting in a lab by myself all day.

I’ll freely admit it, as if it wasn’t obvious enough from my last post, I’m hardly a die-hard Lord of the Rings fan. I mean, I just finished the first book yesterday. Nevertheless, I was really excited about seeing the first movie today, and I wasn’t disappointed. Honestly, I can’t recall ever seeing a better book-to-movie translation. Almost all of the differences between the two didn’t detract from the feel of the book and were probably necessary to fit the different medium. My only major complaint was that they revealed things in this movie that didn’t happen in the books until the 2nd novel. Sort of a spoiler for me, but I guess its my own fault for not having read all of them sooner, eh? Strictly visually speaking though, I thought the movie was stunning. It made just about every other fantasy-type movie seem hopelessly cheesy in comparison. Of course, plenty of them look cheesy on their own merits, but still.

Stopping off in the bathroom after the film, I was incredulous to seem someone take a cellphone call while at a urinal. I was just a little disturbed by this. Who does this? I’ve heard of this from other people, but I didn’t think people really did this. There are some times that I just don’t want to be reached, and honestly I’d rather not have the sanctity of my post-film bathroom break violated by taking a phone call. What would that conversation be like anyway? “Oh hi mom! *flush* Hold on, I’ve just got to zip up here!” I’m not sure, but I think this is what voice mail was designed for.

I’m off to a late start, but I’ve finally started reading The Fellowship of the Ring today. I don’t have much time, but I just can’t go see the movie next week without having read the book first. It would be wrong.

Yesterday I found TrackMonkey, a Winamp plugin that does just what I’d been wanting to do for a while now: send the song title of the currently playing song to a script on a server so that you could then do things with it, like add it to a web page for example. Unfortunately, after looking into it my suspicions about the OSU CIS servers were confirmed. No user CGI scripts allowed, no PHP either. Looks like it might be time to think about moving elsewhere, which I would have to do in a few months anyway.

Ahhh…. Hear that faint hissing sound? That’s the sound of my brain letting off all the extraneous knowledge I picked up this quarter as I approach my nearly-vegetative winter break state. Quick, ask me a question about the stress/strain properties of ceramics. I don’t know! Ask me something about the Motorola 68HC11 simulator. Not a clue! Yes, I’m having a great time doing nothing but rotting my brain with these crazy electronic “video games” the kids are so fond of these days. However, not everything is perfect. There’s the little matter of that graphics project I was so worried about last week. Yeah, that. My group royally screwed ourselves by trying to write our own data structures from scratch in no time. We tried to re-invent the wheel and uh, didn’t do such a great job. Fortunately, our professor was really gracious and gave us an incomplete and time to finish it over break and get a better grade. Its a good thing, but now I’ve got to work on it over break.

Trisloth – The Jawbox Project. Here’s the deal: 11 Jawbox songs (well, 10 and a Tori Amos cover) arranged for the cello and recorded on 4-track. Brilliant! I’ve had these mp3’s for a while, found on Napster or Kazaa or something, but it wasn’t until now that I got around to tracking down their point of origin. I have no idea what would prompt someone to try something like this, but I’m glad they did.