No, I won't post yet another video of Birthday by the Cruxshadows. I've done that the last few years, and I figure everybody could use a break. So, I put together a Youtube playlist of music that I listened to a lot last year. Open it in another tab or a new window and plug your headphones in if you've a mind to. Just click the "Play All" button.
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Good, you're back.
I can't say that I expected the last year to turn out the way it did. I always said that I try to demolish …
Rather than stay home for my birthday (which I've done for the past few years) I decided to make things interesting this time 'round the sun. Sitwon and Haxwithaxe had secured a hotel room and passes for Shmoocon in downtown DC last weekend, so I threw my hat into the ring more or less at the last minute. Shmoocon is an excellent hacker conference, don't get me wrong, but I don't ordinarily get much out of it. It is, as they say around here, above my pay grade. That said, I decided to go solely to see what I could …
In the abstract, it's always been easy to figure out what to post on my birthday. I can think about it in the car on my way in to work and have some ideas of where to go and what to say, but when it comes time to put fingers to keys to actually write something, words scatter like dust in a sunbeam. Funny how that happpens, usually with really personal things. So, time for a little nonlinear text editing, where I scribble random ideas, and go back later to rearrange and flesh …
Well, another year has come and gone and it's time to look back once again across the calendar and see how things have changed for the Time Lord. This past year is likely one of the busiest of my whole life and shows few signs of slowing down or grinding to a halt. To put it simply I don't have the time or space on the database server to outline everything from 2011, but suffice it to say that the world is undergoing some profound changes outside of the control of the existing system, and in some small way I've …
As a late birthday gift, AJ (who flew into DC last night) gave me a gimmicked chocolate bar that rickrolled me the moment I tore the wrapper open. If you look carefully you can see a speaker glued to the foil. The circuitry consists of a solid-state audio chip that can record a few minutes of sound, the necessary driving circuitry for the recording chip, and a miniature amplifier that boosts the recording to audible levels. A cleverly placed nonconductive tab was pulled out of position when the wrapper was peeled back, closing the circuit and dropping the bomb on …
