Two things:

I turned on word verification for my comments because I managed to get two comment spams on the post about Rita. So since then I've decided that there's no way in hell anyone's going to work up a robust algorithm to automatically verify those letters. I can barely read them myself. Half the time I post a comment and write the letters for the verification and cross my fingers and hope I got them right. I've been wrong twice. Maybe I just need to learn to read...

My computer forensics class is going pretty well. Our latest group project is to solve a puzzle given to us by the professor. It consists of a CD with an encrypted RAR file in it. RAR files use AES encryption, which is generally considered to be practically invulnerable to anything but brute force attacks. So, we started a dictionary attack on it, and just shy of 3 million tries later we had gotten nowhere. In the mean time we started analyzing the text that came with it. Written on the cd envelope were five binary sequences, four of them containing eight bits and one only containing seven. Four of them were ASCII characters, so we figured the fifth was, too. Adding a bit to it gave us six possible combinations it could have been, so that gave us 6!/4 possible permutations to try. Turns out one of them did it. The only thing in the file was a very silly picture of a professor with four numbers written on it. Attached to the back of the CD envelope was a piece of paper with a sequence of characters on it. It looks like some sort of rotation or substitution cipher. I'm currently working on that. I'm having a blast!

I've realized that I use parentheses a lot. I think from now on (meaning from this moment forward) I'm (that's me) only going to use them (parentheses, that is) when they're absolutely (positively) necessary (not like this), 'cause they (parenthesized comments, that is, I mean it's not like just inserting a pair of empty parentheses like this: ()) make () the () text () harder () to () read ('cause it breaks up the flow of the thought by interjecting new thoughts)(but the empty parentheses didn't really make it any harder at all, now did they? It was just the parenthesized statements), don't you think (as if you really think. Haha, it is to laugh (chuckle (chortle (cackle))))?

(Parenthetically yours,
Dathan)

I had a professor write on one of my papers once, "Boy, when you grab ahold of a bad idea, you use both hands." I remember telling Christina how funny I thought that was (I still got an 80-something on the paper, so it didn't hurt too badly), and she just didn't think it was funny at all.

But on a different subject, I think I use both hands for a lot of ideas. I've been feeling bad because my only real means of contact with a lot of people in Houston has been blogs, and I just wasn't checking them anymore. So I finally realized that Blogger and Livejournal both have RSS and Atom feeds in place (well, blogger only has Atom, but it doesn't matter). So I fired up SharpReader and went crazy. I went to my one-stop-shop for links to all my friends' blogs (Jared's blog) and opened up every single blog he'd linked to in a new window. In fact, I opened up all the pages for people he's met online, too, not just for people I know. I don't know if it's because my laptop rocks, or because Firefox (which I use now) is a lot better than IE (which I used to use), but my performance didn't suffer at all with like thirty windows open. Anywho, I promptly subscribed to the Atom feeds for every single one of those blogs (except there were two or three that were broken. For sure, Jared, you need to remove that link to Katie S's blog, she deleted it. And some people *cough* Hartschuh *cough* haven't enabled RSS feeds in their blogs, and I curse them.) and I've been in catch-up heaven ever since. In fact, it's what I did instead of homework last night. So now I have to do my homework over my lunch break and in the hour between when I get off work and when I go to class, when it's due. Damn! But ah, blogs are good. I'll probably delete some of my subscriptions to Jared's online friends' blogs (Special K, for instance, doesn't look like it's being updated anymore) once I get tired of reading a LOT of blogs, but hey, that's life. Hell, I might even go find some interesting blogs on my own now instead of mooching off Jared's. Reading was never the hard part, it was going to the blog in my browser twenty days in a row only to discover that it hadn't been updated and then I stop visiting and start again after a month only to discover that the person started updating like mad the day I stopped reading which is such a pissoff and so frustrating it makes me want to write in runon sentences. Or maybe I'm the only one who doesn't update for twenty (or sixty, who's counting) days in a row. Meh.

Toodles!