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Late January and most of February for me was spent in the hospital. It was at this time that I realized that my phone was not quite up to par for being away from a computer for extended periods and it was then that I decided when I got out I would get a smartphone.

Unlike a lot of people these days my fetish isn't the latest and greatest phone. I've gotten by for a long time with a simple flip phone that just makes calls and texts with little else notable about it. I only know about the iPhone and the Google G1 because they got a fair bit of press. Enough press to know that I didn't want either; not because they're bad phones, but because of the cost of the base phone plus the required data plan.

When it came time to look for my "perfect" phone I asked a couple of people that were far more knowledgeable in the mobile arena than myself and finally figured out that I wanted an HTC Excalibur (more commonly known as the T-Mobile Dash). I didn't really have a lot of requirements in my search. I knew I wanted it to be in the $100 range and WiFi would totally be a bonus so as not to have to get a data plan if not absolutely necessary. Hotspots are everywhere now it seems and being able to tap an existing network for a quick email check or something seems a far better alternative to a ~$20/month data plan.

Just my notes from my assembly class way back in 2006, its usefulness may vary for you.

Notes

I have been a fan of Backtrack from the good folks over at Remote-exploit.org for a long time now but their new release of Backtrack 4 has gotten me all excited again. There are tons of new, incredibly awesome, features in BT4.

One of my favorite additions is Maltego Community Edition. For those of you who don't know Maltego is an insanely powerful data gathering/forensics tool that can show a seemingly endless set of relationships between entities including people (social networking site affiliation, phone numbers, email, etc), servers, IP blocks and more. It's nice to see something like that get added. I only had one small problem with this distro and that was setting up Fasttrack, i'm not entirely sure the SVN servers are up at the moment, so that could've been part of the problem but I'll get it working eventually. So, for any of you that are the least bit interested in information security or anything of the sort download BT4 (I recommend the VMWare image) and play with it on your network. Endless fun to be had.

Here is a presentation I gave at the Phi Kappa Phi student research conference presenting initial findings in our bioinformatics research:

Bioinformatics Presentation

Steven and I playing some improv we thought wasn't too bad:

About 6 years ago I decided to write a short tech article on the ins and outs of audio formats and APIs for GameDev.net. It was received fairly well after a rewrite (first time around I didn't really know what was to be expected) and people seemed to generally like it. Fast forward to June of 2008 and I get an email from one of the staff members at GameDev.net trying to use my article in an upcoming print book. Due to an unfortunate filtering accident I didn't get this email until August. Thankfully the process was still in the beginning stages and I didn't miss out.

The book is due out Feb. 27 of this year. Amazon seems to have already indexed the entire book and I read my article (Chapter 21) in full. I can't wait to get the free print copy from the publisher. I get no royalties from the sales, unfortunately, but you should totally buy it anyway :).