Miscellaneous Ramblings....

I have finally procured my copy of Christopher Paolini's latest book Eldest, which is the second installment in the "Inheritance" fantasy series. The author wrote the first installment: Eragon, when he was just a teenager and I must say I was fairly impressed with the storyline. It falls somewhere between Harry Potter and LOTR and is definitely worth a read.

According to Slashdot, D&M Holdings is selling off it's RIO portable audio brand to SigmaTel, which effectively exits it from the MP3 market. For me, (despite the fact that I have an iPod ), that is some sad news, since I am of the opinion that more competition makes for a better overall product.

Just to keep life interesting, on my new custom built computer, the chipset fan started to go out -- grrrh !! Due to some expert consultation from my co-workers, I purchased a Zalman heatsink (ZM-NB47J) to replace the (whining) chipset fan with.
(note: it seems that this is a known problem with the ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard, so ASUS tech support readily RMA'd a new fan for me -- so I have a backup, just in case).
The only downside is that the entire motherboard needs to come out of the computer, since you have to clip the pins holding the fan on from underneath. Needless to say, it was a pain in the you-know-where, especially since I have two internal fans installed in the Antec Sonata case, which made getting the motherboard out (and back in) somewhat tricky. However, several hours later, all was done.
Let's hope the heatsink does the trick (at least there will be no more high pitched whining coming from the computer ).
Now I just have to finish reviving (or rebuilding) the other computer that went to computer heaven in June, courtesy of Mother Nature.

Today was the Championship game for the Burnsville SoccerBlast Recreational soccer league that our work team plays in and unfortunately, the soccer gods were not smiling on us . We ended up losing the game, but our team, IBSYS FC, did take second place in the league (which is a vast improvement over when our team first started playing together and we were consistently in the bottom league spot -- see - progress ).

This past Sunday I went to the Annual (Sioux) Mdewakanton Powwow (in Shakopee). The powwow had dancers from all over the country and the spectator bleachers were packed as well. Visually, it is quite a stunning experience. The costumes are breathtaking and the dance steps are very cool (I would imagine one has to be in very good anerobic shape to be a good powwow dancer).

Here are some of the pictures that I took, although the pictures do not begin to do the powwow justice -- it is really something to see in person.
(For those interested in different powwow dances as well as the significance of each of the dances, TPT has a nice web page on it).

I did my first ever 18 holes of golf yesterday at the "Two Adults & a Tiger" Golf Tournament, sponsered by PEPAA (Personal Enrichment Programs for African Americans). I was golfing with my niece and my two (younger) nephews. My nephews had a lot more fun driving the golf cart(s) than golfing (the nephew that I was riding with almost threw me out of the cart while trying to make as many sharp turns as possible ) -- however they did golf a couple of holes as well.
Needless to say, after golfing for over 5 hours, I was tired...
As for the final score, let's just say that me and my niece didn't have much competition for the most strokes

Update: My younger sister DID go and also took some shots. I am going to blame it on tiredness for the reason that I forgot to mention her earlier.

Found this (cool) website: Tech-Recipes.Com via Ebelog website (Thanks!). It contains step-by-step instructions for technical tasks, i.e. "how to determine speed and duplex settings for an ethernet card".

Want to quickly create a favicon.ico file from any image for your website. You can use the FavIcon from Pics website to do so (the only caveat is that it seems that the source image has to be local to your PC -- i.e. you can't (unfortunately) plug in a URL to the image). Very nice (especially since it is free)!!

The Register (UK) has a story regarding a plugin buffer overflow exploit for Adobe and Acrobat reader.
Adobe has posted a security advisory on the exploit. Users are advised to update to the latest level (which users should be able to do via selecting the "Update" menu option from the "Help" drop down menu from with in the Reader application).

After taking four days off from work (and being sick for three of them ! ), I did finally have the energy on Sunday to venture outside the house and take a short road trip to Interstate State Park located by Taylors Falls. The park is located on the St. Croix River, so it has some breaktaking river scenary views. Part of the park is located on the Wisconsin side and part of the park is located on the Minnesota side. There a quite a few self-guided trails and the ones that go by the Glacier potholes are very cool (both the Wisconsin side and the Minnesota side have trails that do this).
Here are some of the pictures that I took. (Also, here are some of the pictures that I took last Fall of 2004).

There has been some interesting murmurings around the internet regarding the former ISS employee, Mike Lynn, who went ahead and gave his presentation at the Black Hat Security Conference and then was fired from ISS (or resigned from ISS prior to giving his talk, depending on who you believe). Here is ISS' official statement on the events. At any rate, the latest seems to be that Cisco and Mike Lynn have reached a settlement out of court. This case does have interesting implications however. According to Mike Lynn, the security vulnerability could have affected thousands of Cisco routers. This is even more ominous when coupled with the news that the vast majority of the Internet routers are of the Cisco brand.
For those interested, you can pick find the original copy of his slides here.
(Additional links to copes are here).

Update (11/08/05): It turns out that Mike Lynn has procured a job at Cisco's main rivals: Juniper Networks.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press has an interesting article about a local photographer who takes Aerial 360 degree snapshots of various sites around the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. The photographer's web site, BigEye in the Sky, does have some outstanding pictures on it.

Here are some more Panorama Photography sites:

So my sister has a friend, who has a daughter, who is getting married and they need a wedding photographer ... I must say that doing the wedding photography for people you don't really know is in some ways a little bit less stressful then doing the wedding photography for good friends (although it can be stressful in other ways). Overall, I think things turned out OK, considering that it was confirmed Friday at 6:00 pm that I was to be the photographer for the wedding taking place Saturday at 2:00 pm.
In this day and age of digital photography, it was very handy having a laptop with a internal DVD burner as well as a built-in SD card reader. Just load up Adobe Photoshop as well Nero Ultra Edition, and you have an instant darkroom. I was able to turn around the pictures inside an hour and have a burned CD ready for the bride and groom.

Note: For those interested, there is a shop in St. Paul, Mn called White House Custom Color, that does a very nice job at printing (for reasonable prices) out digital prints.