Mindful Musings

:?::mad::???:Found out today at school that a bunch of Sun workstations have been hacked by an rpcbind vulerability which affects portmapper in Solaris 8 and 9. The hack is pretty simple and can be conducted through available scripts on IRC and on the internet. I have traced the hacked back to a machine in Cincinnati using Fuse Internet Service. They are behind a very stateful firewall and are difficult to track down. My IDS system logged interactions between that IP and a bunch of Sun OS machines on campus (through suspicious ports and the like), so we have concrete proof and we are in the process of following up with the ISP. I hate script kiddies! They got in through this vulnerability and installed a very old rootkit (of sexygurl fame), replaced a bunch of files in /usr/bin etc. OK I got sidetracked looking for information. Anyways, the actual fault, in my humble opinion, lies with Sun. They released a patch for the sadmin vulnerability in question, but it failed to show up on their critical ptach list till the 15th of september. Moral of the story? If you are on an always on connection and want a secure system, cron patch jobs every other day or setup an auto-update schedule through Windoze, you will suffer if you slack!

Most of your have heard of Blogrolls and Blogrolling. However, to get a blogroll the way you want it or to get it without the littel ad at the bottom costs money. I was thinking of the Toledobloggers.com link list and wanted to come up with something of my own which did some of the same things. The LinkTour idea was thus born. I have written some lean and ditry PHP code which lets one add links to a permanent blogroll hosted on my server. This code allows a user to submit links to a database which is then spat out when the include code is used on a php enabled page. For example, if any of my readers want to use the Toledo bloggers list on their website, simply add this code somewhere in your php page, preferably outside the php tags.

If you would like to add your site to this this, click on add link and have fun! I might get started on a formal LinkTour sometime next month when I have a little time. For now this code remains for use at ToledoBloggers.com If you would like a copy of the code, please email me.

tail -f /dev/mind > blog

Not my idea, gotta provide the link The Desktop Fishbowl
But it describes me fully!!

PS: w00t!! 100 posts and counting!!

I have had no time to post lately. Yaaayyyy…Its Friday!
I did find some really old pictures. The first one is from 1989, it is a picture of me from when I was a wee little student at St Xavier’s Collegiate School. Can you recognize me in this picture? Im sure Baba and Ma recognize me! :roll::P

The next picture is from Wooster. This is a picture of my dorm room door with all the decorations thereof. Im sure Beth, Craig and some other unmentionables recognize this picture! I dont even remember the relevance of some of the items on my own door. This was a corner single in Douglass Hall (of which I was co-president with Craig) A single was nice, but a corner single with two windows was just ….eeeeeaaaaxcceellent!

Micah and a couple of other people have started ToledoBloggers.com and I haave requested to be a part of it. It is a nice venture and will not only increase the propensity of our own blogs, but will also draw more attention to blogging in the NW ohio area. Heck, we could even host parties and such over time! I am going to try to change my hours at work a little bit to reflect the really long Mondays and Wednesdays that result from them. Hope Al does not mind.

This is how my dog Luckey sees the world!!:mrgreen:
New Album posted from the AirShow and old pictures from last christmas with my parents, Jeetu, Chrissy and Jennifer.

I have to start early today. I am meeting with the Director of Academic Computing and the Director of the Writing center at the University. They had wanted an application which could track tutor progress and also be able to schedule appointments online. I did some reasearch and came up with TutorTrac This seems to be a nice solution for their problems. If anyone has used this system or has some good or bad things to say about it, I would really like to know. Other alternative would be for me to develop something like this for them which would mean more than a full time job doing this (a team of coders built wrote this for about 10 years of arrested development) On another note, I have rewritten some of the code for a simple bulletin board which does not use a database, but simply looks at a flat text file. If anyone has a use for this, I will post it here. Check out the way it works at Software Engineering Homepage at UT

;)Needless to say Mondays are really hectic! I admire people that can squeeze in a whole day without complaining that there aren’t enough hours in the day to cover everything! But I digress.
I saw an ad on a website about a device which prevents snoring and even cures it over time. It was an interesting website and has a lot of convoluted information which I weeded through. They are selling the SnoreStopper for a tad under 60 bucks (which I cannot, nor wish to, afford) So I decided to look into the product and see what it actually does. It is simply a wide band of elastic with holes in it for your ears and this band of elastic goes over your head and chin and supports it much like suspenders. According to this site, most snoring (90%) is caused by minute sleep apnea and this device will put a stop to that over time. My bengali mind got to thinking and I came up with a temporary solution of my own. Here is a question to you, my reader. What item in your home comes with a wide band of elastic and has holes big enough to shove your head through? Yes! I thought so too! I told Jennifer that I will be blogging this, so I am. I grabbed my cleanest pair of underwear and put them around my head!! They worked like a charm! I did run into some problems getting to sleep though. I kept feeling like I could not breathe or was going to get stuck or something (which could be indications of my own sleep problems) but I decided to keep trying to use it for a few nights and see what happens. So if any of you are suffering from long sleepless nights because of a loved/hated one snoring or are in need of all the therapies that the ad website touts, save yourself the big bucks and shove your head through a large pair of knickers!!:lol:

I know who is reading my blog! PEOPLE!! please comment, leave a mark! Tell me you are visiting!! What do you think? Leave thoughts,comments, love postings…I dont care! but comment, be pro-active!!:-P

:roll:The fact that I could not provide a link to the wonderful ACID machine at school (which is a mised opportunity, trust me!) I added Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases (ACID) in short to my own server. I am sure that you will not see the kind of activity that you would from school, but it is still a nice interface. So here is the link to A.C.I.D on my server. I am also in the process of rewriting the installation tutorial for people that already have servers installed and would still like to install ACID. Cheers!:D

This is awesome! Rather than updating my codebase to B2++ or B2Evo, I am simply working in all the codebase properties of those programs into my own blog.8O:!::idea: (more…)

Here we go again. I found a nice piece of software which lets you build a Windows XP installation on a CD. This is a wonderful tool for SysAdmins and other geeks. Imagine the possibilities for a College Computing environment. You could use any public machine on a college campus with all the rights of an administrator! This project was stopped by Microsoft and was taken up by this person/company. Here is the link to Bart’s PE Builder

I dont eat bagels all that much nor do I drink all that much of cappucinos or any other kind of creamed coffee (I love mine black as tar!) but here is a very interesting link from MSN that talkes about the calorie excesses of foods such as bagels and cappucinos’ I dont indulge in either so I am a little better off. But according to this article from WebMD, fresh bagels (without accoutrements) can have as much as 700 calories Stuff for bagel lovers to think about. Donuts are better than bagels for calorie counters! More posts to come today and for the rest of the weekend as and when I think of stuff that I want to discuss with myself! LOL

My back still hurts a little from all the weird walking last night, but I am feeling better already. I did get some really nice pointers from Dr Ledgard about my knees and how I should try to stretch in the morning to get things loosened up. I shall try it and we will see how things pan out. I wanted to talk about relaxation. I relax with many different things; here is the list in no particular order

• Hang out and watch M*A*S*H with the person that cliche’ alert completes me (and makes me all flustered the most, at times), Jennifer


• Throw the ball, swim, run around and simply pet Luckey, my wonderful puppy


• Sit down with my parents and talk about simple nothings, maybe cook with them and Jennifer


• Work on web Design, graphics, paint on the computer, work on coding, anything computer


• Photography: I love taking pictures. The picture frame as I put it right where I can see the picture I am going to take in my mind’s eye, is extremely relaxing


• Motorcycles: I love bikes, always have, always will. Jennifer and my parents hate them, but as soon as I can afford one, I will cruise


• Music: I love music, everything but country fascinates and tittilates me


• I love the taste of fine wine and well aged whiskey. Currently (for the past few years) Kentucky whiskeys are my going drink


• I love to cook. I dont know where I get this from, but cooking is one of my most favourite things to do (along with a bottle of fine wine :-))


• I love remote control EVERYTHING. I have not been able to afford the upkeep of my existing toys, but I own a couple of airplanes, a couple of cars and a boat. This is a topic of discussion for another day

There are a few others that slip my mind right now, but as you can tell, I like being alone a lot and I like being with people a lot as well. I guess there are times when I like to be alone and to just follow my feelings, be one with myself and my dog. There are other times when I really crave the people I love the most. I work like a dog for most of the day and I play really hard for most of the night. Playing might be misinterprited in this context, but you know what I mean. Think about the things that relax you, choose one that sounds just right and treat yourself to a nice night tonight….you deserve it!
While on the subject of photography, I have been itching for a long time (almost a couple of years now, since the inception of digital cameras) to get a digital SLR camera, a real high end one. I have been looking around now and then and have come up with a few choices. There is of course the Canon EOS 10D which is a 6.3 megapixel monster! Lovely camera with a nice explosure and shutter range and interchangeable lenses. There is the Fuji FinePix S2 Pro which is a very highly recommended camera with nice lense options and a very high f rating. I like this one the most. My personal favourite is the Kodak DCS Pro 14n This is an extremely nice camera with a 13.8 MegaPixel (yes! 13.8 MP) resolution. I could take pictures of a plant and I would be able to magnify a vein on a leaf! This camera has a 1.7 frames per second shutter rate, can handle shutter speeds of 30 sec. – 1/4000 sec., and can handle exposure compensation of -3EV to +3EV in 1/2EV steps. A phenomenal digital camera in all. I only have to dream about these for now. These run between $1500 – $4500 between the three. A digital SLR camera would be very nice though!

Read about a very nice Beer Can Chicken recipe on Warped Illusions Sounds like this will taste very juicy and tender and I thought I would share it. I am going to go in a little late today. I was out of commission with my acute cyatica last night and I have some catching up to play with my thesis work. Lets hope it is not too time consuming.

The website I was referring to is called PhpOpenTracker which gives us a visual representation of the visit path of a user as he/she traverses through your webiste. I think this is pretty interesting. If you visit their website, they have a working version of the program. I was thinking of actually implimenting it on my website, but that would require a lot of code mods which I do not have time for. So for the time being I am going to have to refrain from that. I am going to write a CSS lab of sorts where a user could choose a certain CSS for my site and it would explore the possibilities. Sounds very much like templates, which is what it is, but I am not going to store cookies or anything to make it stick. It will simply be an example of what CSS is capable of doing with how little resources.

PS: on a happier note, I did get an honourable mention from our Computing director for “invalurable help” in the present virus and hacking crisis. I exposed another vulnerability in our CISCO router today (Proto 103 for all the COOs out there). Hopefully, they will resolve that soon as well. I have become like the vigilante (wannabe) hacker that helps keep things in perspective and expose problems with our existing network. As Jennifer puts it…”Kinda Scary!”

I have been wanting to get some of my thoughts down into my blog but just have not had the opportunity, nor the time to deal with them. I really felt the need to categorize some of the ideas a little better, in other words, add usability to my own thoughts. That is the reason I added the categories back to my page. Let me tell you, text editing a complex PHP script at 0.5 kbps is a pain to say the least. But I got it done.
I found a couple of very interesting sites on the internet about usability. I cant find it right now. I should have it at home. I will re-do this part of the post then.
Here is a little bit of information about changing your Ethernet MAC address in a Windows machine (for educational purposes only). It is interesting and so simple that it should be outlawed.
I found another interesting article on Slashdot about the College Freshman that built a Fusion Reactor. With my Physics background, this is extremely interesting and definitely worth a mention.
I finally broke down and decided to subscribe to Emusic.com They have a very good selection of music and are worth a look-see. They charge $15 for a month and minimum sign up time is three months. They have ALL of George Carlin’s works on MP3s. I have to mention here that the bitrates of all their MP3s are very high (384kbps mostly) and they produce very good CDs. You can burn unlimited CDs with their music and there are very little restrictions unlike other music services online. I really like their service. PS: They have a 14 day eval period. Check them out sometime!

With all the problems going on with the network at school, we decided to setup a Network Intrusion detection system at school. I dont think I should publish the address for security reasons, but here are some of the details. It is running RedHat Linux 9.0 with an updated and tweaked kernel. It is running Snort as the actualt IDS engine. It is running MySql with ACID (Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases) and a ADODB connector for ACID to interface with Mysql. Snort has been pre-compiled with MySql bindings. The linux box itself is protected using advanced ACLs and there are a bunch of modified and updated snort rules for the new worms that have come out. One of the major additions that I have made is the modification to the Ip Protocol 103 filter (which is a recently released Cisco IOS Hack). This is an amazing system. Incidentally, it is running on a 400 Mhz Celeron with 128 Megs of RAM and a 4 Gig Hard Drive. I call her Xena If you would like to setup a similar system at your location (office or school), you could use the tutorial from Snort.org or if you are even slightly familiar with Linux, you could download the items and just let ‘er rip. It is really not that big of a deal. If anyone needs help in setting this honeypot up or needs any other help in Linux System Administration, please let me know and I will try to be of help. PS: I LOVE LINUX!
You could also visit the HoneyNet Project Homepage to get the Sebek Kernel tool for your honeypot. I decided against it because my kernel was already tweaked for TCP/IP header analysis.

I just could not resist this. I read this article on Slashdot on how to make homemade sillyputty as big as your head. I just could not resist posting it on my blog. Here is the HomeMade SillyPutty link. Use it with caution!!

I spent most of this weekend coding and a little time on setting up the honeypot at school. I am setting up a Linux box, with RedHat 9 and some improvements to sniff packets, assail intruders and also keep track of various things going on network wise in school. It is like a pet project of mine. Most of the code for my OpenGL project is done. I just need to clean it up a little and make the code more readable. The first project for a class is always the hardest for me as I have to get a feel for the code and the nuances of the code. I spent over 8 hours working on drawing a bicycle and then displaying it in three different windows from three different perspectives. It was fun to figure out the insides of GLUT and OpenGL. I ended up compiling the program in all known platforms to make sure I knew the differences. I have tried it and modifed it for Win32, Mac OS Cocoa, Linux and Sparc UN*X. Things dont change much in terms of code because GLUT takes care of all the differences. I wrote most of it using MSVC++. I realize one thing though, OpenGL is cumbersome and very tedious to code with. EVERYTHING has to be defined and many, many features need to be enabled to get a certain result. I even played with a little bit of shading and perspective to get to know it better. If you would like to download the program, here is the link to bike.zip I dont know why anyone would want to see this stupid program, but if you do, unzip the contents of the zip file to a folder and simply double click on the executable. You can move the bike around on all three windows by using a, w, s, d keys.
I found some very nice OpenGL resources on the web while I was looking for code clarifications. There is of course NeHe Productions. Very nice site with some terrific tutorials. There is also Code Project They have some very talented people from the coding community providing examples and tutorials. Check them out when you get a chance. I received an email from Mac of theGoFish.com I guess my RSS feeds are not very visible and the b2 code which generates the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are missing some tags. So News Readers such as Feed Demon dont find the correct XML page. I am looking into that and should have it fixed soon. I think I know where the problem is. If any of my readers know of a problem with my RSS feed or know which tag is off, a short email with the fix would be greatly appreciated. For completeness’ sake, here are the RSS links again.
RSS 1.0
RSS 2.0

I read about some disturbing political/ideological trends in the tech industry. This Slashdot Article is a primary example of where this is headed. Workers in the tech industry in America are being replaced in large numbers by H1B visa holders. The resulting discontent is not without base either. I would not like to be replaced by someone who should technically have less preference in job placement. However, at the same time, I am not a citizen. I am a student who has held an H1 in the past. I dont want to take away other peoples’ jobs, but I want a job as well. It is a strange mess that could turn messier with the present administrations’ political aspirations and the peoples’ attitude towards foreigners in general. I dont know if there is a good solution to any of this. This also leads me to believe that one of my employment possibilities might be in India (and live here, travel back and forth, or something) Things I dont want to worry about right now. I write about this because my dad and I were having a discussion last night about how the tech industry is just about to lost its’ charm and that though people on the outside might think that there will always be jobs for people who are computer geeks, this might not always be the case. These prevailing winds are adding to the sadness of this tragic anniversary.

I was going to just add another comment to Gregs’ about the virus, but this is important enough that this requires a full post. The “virus” or hacker that I was talking about was a person getting in through an RPC vulnerability that was disclosed by various security sites on the 11th of August. Microsoft (finally, today) has released a patch to solve a part of the problem. Here is the Microsoft Technet Article. Considering tomorrow is September 11th (another Y2K sort of virus fiasco forthcoming according to IRC chatter) you should patch your Micro$oft Windoze computer as soon as possible. Go to Microsoft Windows Update and get your temporary fix.
Now back to the discussion. The vulnerability allows an attacker with malformed RPC packets (normally machine code hacked together from shellcode generated by a a similar script with the required stack overflow parameters) To cut a long story short, here is one of the writeups on an online security magazine. LOL tomorrow will be another day. I am trying to get EIT and ECC to chip in for a router/firewall controlled by Engineering which would have prevented messes like this in the first place. Then again maybe not. If the hacker simply comes into one of our labs and runs the code from there (which can be downloaded from the security site above) we are vulnerable again. Maybe the answer lies in personal firewalls in every machine. I know all of my machines are behind a firewall and my Windoze box is behind two especially with me toying with all this stuff and doing portscans of strange machines…:evil:

I spent most of yesterday coding and looking up a new exploit of the Engineering computers. Someone has managed to get access to the hard drive of Windows NT machines (and later Windows 2000 machines) which were partially updated. I tried to find out if this was a new virus or another version of the Deloder.A virus. I am still not sure. It looks like no-one else is seeing anything like this. In short detail, the infected machines end up with Famatech’s legitimate Radmin remote control software (which shows up as a little white square in the System tray) and a host of other servers installed on them, including ServUFtp, IRC Demon and a couple of others. What really irritates me is that I am not able to find a published vulnerability that works. I have tried all the recent hacking methods and our computers are relatively secure from them. If I dont know what is causing this problem, I dont know how to prevent it from happening in the future. Whoever hacked this, has also locked down the machines’ NETBIOS thereafter and all the admin and IPC$ shares are gone! I will write a script this morning at work to get rid of the registry entries. The machines will need to be rebooted afterwards and I will write another script which will trash the programs files after reboot. So a single VB script which deletes registry entries, reboots the system and then deletes the programs files is necessary.

I spent the rest of the day coding for my OpenGL class. Did I ever mention I REALLY like Dr Heuring as a Professor? He is nurturing, not too demanding and is simply a blast to hang out with. I am taking his Graphics class and am also the TA for his Intro to Programming Lab. While at the lab, I ran across a student who had Win_Main__ link errors when he compiled his program. We tried restarting the computer and also tried retyping the program. (I let the student do it) My conclusion was that this was a bad install of MSVC++. I was dead wrong. It was because the student had started a Windows project and not a console project. I apologized to Dr Heuring for the oversight and he simply says “It happens, at least now it wont happen again.” I thought that was a wonderful thing to say instead of snapping at me. It made me learn the problem and I will never make the same mistake again. I had just never made that mistake in my own programs I guess. Anyways, any EECS Toledo students reading this should know that Dr Heuring is a fun professor to have and a good man to work with!
I will write some more while at school, but I have to get there first! PS: I have also decided to get the el cheapo $35 MP3 player. It is cheap enough to not bite me back financially, and it should be more than functional with my nice set of Sony MDR headphones.

Remember me talking about my idea for an autonomous wireless network supported by users and propagated by the benevolence of the people using it? Here is a link to NoCat They are “are working to build a community supported 802.11b wireless network in Sonoma County, CA.” I would like to start something like this for Toledo, Ohio. Any users interested in this idea please email me or send me a message. I have been thinking about hooking up my 802.11b antenna to my (ex-)homemade yagi and setting it up on top of the television antenna in my condo complex. That should (and does!) give me a directional range of about 8-11 Miles. This yagi is very simple to build and you could yourself one at Cantenna for under 20 bucks. It would give your wireless connection a life of its own. Even without being setup on a tall structure, sitting in my den, while pointing it in the direction of Maumee, I could get a couple of hotspots show up on NetStumbler. I have even gone so far as to connect from school (7 miles away). Albeit, the connection was extremely bad and all I got were lost packets. I did end up de-constructing the antenna. I would like to get the project started again.

Luckey and I went to a community pond in Perrysburg today. She got to swim around and fetch the ball while I got to drive around my RC Boat. Here are some of the pictures I took while I was there.

PS: If anyone was looking for a nice place to getaway from life for a couple of days, here is a link to Getaway Cabins at the Hocking Hills area of Ohio (courtesy of Micah). It looks really really nice and they allow dogs!
And here is the link to the new picture album Luckey in Perrysburg Pond Album

I have found a new program called Skype. This is made by the developers of Kazaa and promise communication levels better than that of regular telephones. I am itching to actually try this with my parents who endure Netmeeting twice a week with me. Now netmeeting is a boon on its own because it saves us tons of money in Long distance bills. However, Netmeeting and other H.323 based applications have one major drawback. They are not very NAT friendly. As you can imagine, with a home network such as mine (with over 4 machines running all the time) Netmeeting falters quite a bit. I did download and modify the OpenH323 Protocol gateway and rewrote some of the modules so they would work through my firewall and my gateway, but it still needs a lot more work and effort that I am unwilling to give it. H323 is an aging protocol that needs a new sibling. In comes P2P. Though I am not sure of its prowess, I had this idea about a year ago and wanted to impliment a similar protocol for sharing wireless bandwidth over a completely autonomous and fee-living 802.11 network. My vision was to have an independant, co-existing wireless network supported by individuals, acting as a hidden layer to the existing 802.1 (wired) networks of today. I know that there is a company out there right now which impliments something of this sort.
I would really like to know if people have used this program and if they have, I would really like some input on how well this works.
Here is the link to Skype Networks
Coding Rulez!!

I dont know how many of my readers are Bengalis. I am originally from West Bengal, India and I am a Bengali. We are a small cultural group of people from India with our own language and our own flavor of Indian traditions and culture. I have been away from home for long enough that at certain times of the year (especially around Durga Puja, our biggest yearly festival) I get very nostalgic and Bengali centric. This year, with the success of my Blog, I have decided to start a Puja Parikrama (or a virtual visit to the various locations of the Puja) through my webpage. Once this process starts, I will try to post a link of a new place to visit from India as well as here in the US. This will be a nice healing process for me. Here is something to start with. I visit Bengali Dot Org often. I was listening to some of the music on there and it brought back some wonderfully fond memories of times past. But rather than lament the passage of time and feel sorry for what I am missing, I like to enjoy the memories and then do something in the present to somewhat compensate for it. Here is the link to the Bengali Music Website.
If any of my readers are from Bengal (East and West), please email me or leave a message. I would appreciate the contact. I have yet to meet any Bengalis living here in Toledo, but Jennifer and I go to the Durga Puja in Detroit every year. Baba, you and Ma will like the Bengali music on the above site.

I finally found the person that was making those cryptic comments. It was Aftab from La Martiniere for Boys. He called me from Florida and we had a very long chat about everything. It was awesome to hear from him after so long! We will be catching up some more over the course of this year. Life has been very hectic recently. Still have not gotten the TA assignments (final assignments) and I am still trying to get a good piece of software for tutor tracking. So if anyone knows of anything good (besides tutortrak) please email me or leave a comment. I refuse to write the whole application myself as a favor.

I was reading through some material I wanted to post to Dr Ledgard’s site and I came across a book that I would definitely like to read when I have the time. I might even get it this semester and read it on the side. It is very interesting from a computer scientist’s point of view. It is called A New Kind of Science. This is written by Stephen Wolfram from Wolfram Research. He is a prodigal scientist of Nobel calibre who got his doctorate at age 20. He has always been somewhat of an ideal for me and this book was extremely interesting in its content. While I am on the topic, I am also thinking of setting up an Amazon Wishlist. This might be very good for people looking to get me stuff for other stuff. Im not big on gift giving and I never know what to tell people when they ask me what I want for a certain event. The only four people who always seem to know what to give me are my parents, Craig and Jennifer. but that was a given. I will look into the wishlist and might get it up soon.

I was picking up LUckey’s poop (Im sure my baba or dad understands) when my Pooper Scooper broke. I needed a new one and for once in my life, it did not hurt to pay 20 bucks for a new one. I know this is a weird post, but I have to say that the pooper scooper is the MOST used appliance in my house. I use it everyday, multiple times and it stands right there in the rain, snow, sun and more snow. It has been a life saver when there is more poop than I can deal with. It has saved me from embarrasment, has left my porch clean and has been the source of many happy endings to a sojourn pooping expidition. I keep saying this is weird because people without dogs or people who dont pick up after their dogs will never understand. It is a great device!
On another note, I spoke with Joan Mullins (I know the name is strange) about my next webmaster assignment. I have a meeting with her next week. Classes are getting busier. I spoke with Dr Makki about the timeline and also spoke to Dr Stuart about the possibility of developing a USB smart card interface. I might have to get in touch with smart card manufacturers about that one.
Today was a mostly light day, excompassed with really bad weather. I got off to a nice start with Dr Kaur and we talked about MIPS and other fun processor terminilogy. Jennifer bought a “Miracle face mask”, (for $40!!) but I make similar stupid purchases on my own, so she is entitled to hers. I thought of Baba, Ma, Jennifer and Luckey while I was in class, day dreaming. Those are the most important people in my life and I dream about them when I want to get away from the crap around me and want to get to somewhere nice. Remember Happy Gilmore? I do the “dream about happy things” sometimes. I have been debating REALLY hard whether I want to buy an MP3 player that I want oh so bad. I still cannot justify it to myself and so it is not at home yet. But give me a few more weeks of justification and I will bring it home. At 60 bucks, it is a gem of a toy! I have a collection of about 5 thousand MP3s which beckon me! Micah, do you own an MP3 player? Should I get it? Jennifer wont believe that I am having a “blog conversation” with one of my regular readers! Love you baba, ma,(dad and mom) jennifer and luckey!

PS: here is the link for the MP3 player I am drooling somuch over Panasonic Portable CD Player with Digital AM/FM Tuner and MP3 Playback