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Yesterday was a whirlwind, one-day trip to Six Flags Fiesta Texas (warning, Flash ahead) in San Antonio. We had a total blast and rode lots of great rides! Unfortunately, there was some weird height restrictions that were undocumented on the website, so we didn’t do Scream, Superman or Poltergeist. The kids had a blast on Rattler, which was pretty scary from a “holy crap this thing is rickety” standpoint. And Boomerang was a ton of fun. The kids seemed to like Der Fleidermaus (sp?) — they rode it like 5 times. Nothing like spinning around in a big circle for 3 minutes! Wheee! The best part of the night had to be when we went on Power Surge. The ride itself was your basic four-across-log-ride-with-splash-at-the-end, but the fun was afterward…. The kids stood on the over-ride crosswalk (at our suggestion) to watch the next boat come down the ride. Hah! They got completely soaked. Griffin was not amused that she was tricked into that, but she definitely found it funny.

Of course the Summer of Theme started out back in April with our trip to the land of Disney. And while the family was in Wisconsin, they went to Wisconsin Dells and the Mount Olympus (warning, Flash ahead) theme park where the kids rode Hades all by themselves (that was actually an accident, we didn’t realize it was one of the scariest rides in the country until after they went). A couple weeks ago, they went to Volente Beach and we’ll probably go back there again before summer’s over, since we bought discount “revisit” wristbands.

All-in-all, I think we’re pretty tired, and ready for school to start back up. The fun’s not over yet, though! This Friday night Grandma and Grand-dad and cousins Nik and Drew are coming to town for the 6th Annual Aggie Night at the Dell Diamond, which I’ve just learned has sold out! On Friday, with fireworks! Should be a lot of fun.

Why is seeing a finger up someone’s nose considered such bad form? I see someone picking their nose, I’m like “Now THERE’S a motherfucker I can TRUST.”

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The kids spent Monday morning at Barton Creek Mall, which is about a gajillion miles from our house, but also happens to be the location of the nearest Apple Store. They were at Music Camp and each made their own Garage Band mix. They both sound pretty good. Hays’ song is a somewhat one-dimensional, Hi-N-R-G rant. It comes on strong, lasts about a minute and dies quickly. Griffin’s has a considerable amount of funk to it and she really composes a good riff with a nifty back-beat bass.

Of course, they immediately came home and started working on other tunes on their own minis. The only problem is that 256 MB of RAM is hardly enough to do any sort of live playback during testing. I think I’ll need to go searching for a putty knife….

On Wednesday (tomorrow), they’re going to Movie Camp and they’ll be taking their own cameras. Of course, they both have a very unique eye when it comes to photography (Griffin’s “Steak Dinner” pic is one of my all-time favs), so I’m sure they’ll have fun. I’m hoping that it’s not a 4-hour tutorial on The Ken-Burns-Effect. No matter, it should be neat (and they’re both wanting to do some movie and game stuff. Maybe I’ll get Griffin to do the cinematics for the game Hays and I are working on (She’s also done some artwork for it).

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier…, and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.

Police Seize Camera With Pitt-Jolie Photos

So, this in and of itself isn’t all that interesting. But take a gander at this seemingly innocuous statement:

Local police [went] to recover a digital camera’s memory stick after [the photos] were tracked to Keys.

Heck, those photos could have been tracked down through any number of means:

1. The ISP that Keys used to “upload” the photos may have cooperated.
2. Keys may have been using an identifying account to whereever he posted them.
3. He could have even watermarked them with “Copyright 2006 William Keys”.

Now read this:
Digital Cameras Have Unique Fingerprints

But the JPEG format tends to be the most ubiquitous image format for cameras and for the Internet. A part of JPEG is that it’s a “lossy” image format, meaning that you can dial-in how good you want the picture to look via its compression settings. If you alter the image by resizing it or changing the compression, will that alter the fingerprint? Of course, since the fingerprint is an artifact of the camera, these techniques would have to be done in “post processing” — using a software tool to make the changes on your computer after the images are retrieved. There are lots of techniques that are available for encoding a digital signature into an image, but according to Scheier’s source article, this looks like it’s a more genericized formula for identifying the make and model a camera that took the pictures.

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Okay, here’s a picture of the new car I got a couple weeks ago. It’s been a joy to drive and I’m getting phenomenal (non-hybrid) gas mileage. Especially since I’m enjoying driving it!.

The car is a Scion tC 5-speed with a 160 hp, 4 cylinder, 2.4 liter engine.

This is 2529 of 2600 from the special “Release Series 2.0” that Scion produces for each of their lines. The blue paint, grill, stereo and other bits and pieces are part of the only way to configure a “package”, since all the configuration options are basically a-la cart.

Today, the fam took a trip to Half-Price and I loaded up on some new books. Yes, I’m a little behind the times, but I’m looking forward to reading them:

1. The Cluetrain Manifesto; Levine, Locke, Searls, Weinberger. Perseus Books.
2. Blink; Gladwell. Little, Brown.
3. The Creative Priority, Hirshberg. Harper Perennial

Of course, I haven’t finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon yet, but I should finish it up in the next few days.

Technorati Tags: malcom gladwell, rick levine, jerry hirshberg, cluetrain, blink, nissan, books

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