Lyssa and I packed up our stuff and set out around 1100 EST5EDT on Saturday morning in the general direction of Rockville to Laurelinde’s place, where we picked up Cate and Tori (after a cup of coffee, of course, following a rather rude surprise early that day) for an afternoon in Maryland. We set off toward College Park for lunch at Plato’s Diner because it happened to be within spitting distance of our eventual destination. Tori was turning sixteen and as her gift we’d all chipped in to get her ears re-pierced at Curious Tattoo on the …
I’ve been sitting on some photographs that have piled on Windbringer’s hard drive up over the past couple of weeks and finally found the time to get them resized and uploaded.
A couple of photographs taken at P. W. Singer’s presentation at HacDC. There are also a couple of shots of fun with night vision goggles later that evening in that set.
Lyssa and I started off our Valentine's Day by getting up far earlier than should be allowed by law on a Saturday morning to go to our local H&R Block office to finish getting our taxes done. That morning marked our second trip to get our finances straightened out in Uncle Sam's eyes. I'm sorry to say that our combined medical expenses for FY 2008 weren't enough to earn a deduction, though the repeated trips to the thrift store to get rid of stuff appear to have come in handy. There is a question these days over how many …
Last Friday seemed to be the day of the ice storm that wasn't really. That morning, sure, the cars were coated with ice (as I discovered at the same instant that I found I had no gloves with me) and the roads were wet, but in truth they really weren't as bad as everyone made them out to be. I had little difficulty making it in to work that day, and even less trouble returning home that evening. For this reason, I find it quite strange that so many offices in NOVA were understaffed that day, but then again what …
I know that I didn't make a big deal out of it, and that wasn't out of any shame or wanting to keep things low-key as it was I've been really busy lately and didn't have time to post about it anywhere. The company I work for has pulled me from fieldwork for at least the next couple of months after what happened in Tuscaloosa. I've been moved to another project much closer to home and I spent all day Friday in the field with my cow-orkers getting stuff set up and running …
The Washington Post ran an interesting article about the one-year anniversary of the release of the Storm Worm botnet agent about two weeks ago, possibly the most successful and virulent malware agent yet released on the Net. The Storm Worm beastie is unusual in that the botnet is a decentralized collective, i.e, all of the infections don't report into a single C&C channel but instead use a peer-to-peer networking protocol (a variant of the eDonkey protocol, specifically), so it can't be killed by taking down a single server. It is also interesting because updates are periodically released for …
Even though the Cruxshadows are still on tour, they've been hatching plans while on the road to release another single from their latest album, Dreamcypher. Specifically, they'll be releasing a couple of remixes of the song Birthday along with some new (and some live-only) material on 4 September 2007 through Isotank Records - you can preorder it from here. Frankly, part of me isn't surprised that they announced it yesterday, which just happened to be the birthday of their frontman Rogue. In a weird, strange, "Am I doing enough in this lifetime?" kind of way, it works.
Well, my body turned 29 a couple of hours ago, and here I sit with a full stomach looking back on the year just gone by. Orthaevelve and Lyssa took me out for dinner at the China Star for my birthday tonight, and afterward we hit up Whole Paycheque for a tasty German chocolate cake that I've been sharing with everyone that came over tonight after we got home (that'd be Hasufin, who was kind enough to bring a shovel to help me free the TARDIS again) to hang out.
Since last year, life's taken a decidedly good turn for …
