Teen Tech

Hello everybody.

I got a letter from Michigan Tech. I was declined acceptance. Crap. That was plan A. I’m still going to go to a University, it will just take longer.

One day about two weeks ago, my stepmom and dad spent the entire day watching “Beauty and the Geek”. Wow. Those geeks are worse than I am, and the beauties that they got were completely dumb. “Who won the Civil War”, “Well, we did. We won all the wars”. That’s the kind of stuff that they said. The show was about the teaching of the geeks to be social and the “beauties” to be smart.

For my birthday, my dad got me the official Eagle Scout scrapbook and Numb3rs, Season 3. I’m working on getting through numbers episode by episode.

That was my birthday weekend in a nutshell.

So, Here’s a little logic puzzle.  Let’s see who can figure it out.

1. There are five people - each living in a house with a different number of bedrooms, each with a different occupation, each enjoying a different entertainment, each drinking a different liquid, and each driving a different car.
2. The travel agent lives in a house with five bedrooms.
3. The manager drinks Gatorade,
4. The owner of a Porsche Lives in a one bedroom house.
5. The engineer drives a Ford.
6. The one-bedroom house is immediately to the right of the four bedroom house.
7. The person who likes opera also drinks Mountain Dew.
8. Watching ball games is the favorite past-time of the person who lives in the three-bedroom house
9. The person in the middle house drives a Cadillac.
10. The salesperson lives in the first house on the left.
11.  The person who likes to watch movies lives in the house next to the person who drinks water.
12. The person who likes ball games lives next to the person who drinks green tea.
13. The person who likes to go camping drives a DeLorean.
14. The teacher likes to travel.
15. The salesperson lives next to the house with two bedrooms.

Here are all of the options available:

# of Bedrooms:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Career:

Travel Agent, Teacher, Salesperson, Manager, Engineer

Entertainment:

Camping, Ball Games, Opera, Movies, Travel

Drinks:

Mountain Dew, Water, Lemonade, Green Tea, Gatorade

Cars:

Cadillac, Ford, DeLorean, Pontiac, Porsche

See if you can figure out the puzzle which includes matching each person with the house, car, career, drink, and past time, as well as figuring out which order their houses are in.

Have Fun

Aaron hasn’t had much of a chance to post recently. He’s been trying to finish up his Eagle Scout project, and has a couple web site projects in the works as well. He talks tech almost constantly, and I just need to sit him down at some point and say, “Ok, blog!”

He turns 18 today … something I can’t yet come to grips with. He was a big boy, 9 lb 10 oz and 23-1/2 inches long, born at the hospital at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. I don’t have a digitized photo from that time or I’d post it in here. But he was built like a football player from day one, and at over 6′ now, he’s really my “gentle giant”.

This is a proud dad writing. Aaron’s going to go far. He should know I consider him to be both a son and a good friend.

That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Happy Eighteenth Birthday, Aaron!

Hello Y’All,

Today I went on a field trip with about fifteen other people to Yes! Expo 2007 at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan. Yes! stands for Youth Engineering and Science, so it was really really cool. There was the First Robotics Competition (First stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). That part was played out on the field at Ford Field. All around on the concourse were other science and technology exhibitors, colleges and universities, and demonstrators, and about 4,000 highschool students in attendance.  I was very priviledged to be a part of it. It was the most fun I’ve ever had on a field trip. I will post pictures as soon as I receive them from my Vo-Tech instructor. The guest speaker at the expo was Dr. Steven Squyers with the martian land rover projects, and he gave a great speech on how his life and how math and science got him where he is today. All in all it was a great trip, and I had a great time. I can’t wait to get the pictures.  In the mean time, you can go to the photo gallery that the expo put up here, and see what this is all about.

This is the third time that I’ve been up at around 2:00 a.m. worrying about my Eagle project and how I’m going to get done before my deadline. I have until November 5th to get everything done and turned in. That’s only about twelve days away. Let me explain what I’m doing as my project, or first, let me explain what an Eagle Project is. The project is a leadership project where I lead a group of people, which can be fellow scouts, but also community members, to do some community service task that does not benefit scouting. For my project, I’m building flower planters for the City of Tecumseh. Here’s the plans that I’ve drafted using AutoCAD 2006:

(Clicking on the images brings up the full size drawings)

So, that’s what I’ve been working on getting everything in place. The city wants one built as a model before they actually go and get the stuff, and the model is not done yet meaning that I need that to be done by the end of the day tomorrow, so that the city can come out and inspect it, then so that they can get the materials and deliver them by Saturday when I plan to finally finish this.

Ok,

So, I’m working on my stuff to get the rank of Eagle Scout.  That alone is hard enough.  Try adding in school, a business, and life in general and it becomes chaos extremely quickly.  That’s what I’ve been up against this past month or so.  That is why my blogging has slowed down dramatically.  I just can’t keep up with everything, so I’ve begun to throttle back everything that is not as important as the other stuff in comparison.  Unfortunately the blogging is one of those things.  I’m still here and will give updates on my progress, but I will not be able to blog as much as usual.  I will probably continue at a good pace after this month, but I’ll drop in every now and then between here and then, so wish me luck.

Aaron

I used to have this old LiveJournal blog that I blogged in for a while.  Well, today I went back to those old posts, and they surprised me.  I forgot about some of the stuff that I wrote about,  so the next few posts will be about my more insightful posts in 2005.

Title: Discipline

“Its not that no one has it (seemingly), but its that no one uses it in cooperation with common sense and self control.  There was recently a kid in my English class who was posing as another kid, so the other kid would not be marked absent.  Does this kid have disciple? Probably.  Common Sense and Self control?  Absolutely.  Did he use them together as a guide?  Definently Not.   Why would someone have all of these tools in life and not use them?  Granted there are those who are uneducated and don’t know right from wrong, but this and a majority of the others are not this case.  This is a human who takes what God gives them and throws it away.  I, at all times am not perfect.  In fact, about a month ago, I just walked out of class with another student while the teacher was doing something and was oblivious to all but what she was grading at one of the back tables.  At this time was I doing what I should have?  No I wasn’t.  There are a few instances like this where I will go out of character and do something irrational, though that is not often.  Thus here is my question of the day.  How do you define “out of character”  the person develops their own character according to what they have been taught.  How do we know what our own characters are?  How can one be truly sure?”

This post surprised me tonight when reading it.  I completely forgot about what had happened 2 years ago, and my line of thinking, though it is starting to come back.  This is just food for thought.  I don’t have anything to add to this post.  It just fits with the events in my life right now.

I’ve begun work on my show, well the planning stages and this is what I’ve come up with so far:

STANDARD EPISODE LAYOUT:

• Intro Bumper
• Episode Overview
• Bumper
• Segment 1
• Segment 2 (Beginner Users)
• Bumper / Advertisement
• Sketch
• Segment 3
• Bumper
• Segment 4
• Closing

That’s about it.  I’ve already been looking for sponsors (advertisers), but I need sketch and segment Ideas.  The segments can be about anything and the sketches can be little funny geeky “things.”  I need ideas basically.  I don’t have any sketch ideas as of now, and I am very limited on my segment ideas.  These are what I have so far:

• Securing WiFi (Wireless) networks
• Chiropractic and Computers
• Green Screening with Avid

If you have any ideas or something that you would like to see done, please just post it.

Thanks Everyone

OK,

So, everyone should have a good idea of what phishing is, and if not, I’ll explain it. Phishing is where one person (or group of people) make you think that they are a legitimate enterprise, like a bank. They may ask for financial information and some will actually give it to them falling for thier trick, thus giving up their financial life. So, what is the alert about? This is an email that hit my Inbox 1:37 p.m. today. I didn’t get it until about 10:00 p.m., so it was a little dated, and the website in the email was already shut down and rendered a useless email, except as an example of what not to fall for. It has a few key features that I would like to point out.

Here’s the email, copy and pasted from my Inbox:

Dear Customer,

While running routine checks, we have detected some unusual activity IP:[82.207.70.231-NIGERIA] in your account. For your account security we require to urgent reset your password. Protecting the security of your account and of the network is our primary concern.

ATTENTION : You must reset your account and identify your information immediately within 24h.

To start the process click next link:
www.bankofamerica-office.com

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you and we would like to thank you for your cooperation as we review this matter.

Respectfully,Support Team , Inc.

First off, read this out loud to yourself. Notice the grammatical errors in it? “we require to urgent reset your password.” What kind of sentence is that? Secondly notice the “24h.” Any legitimate place would spell out “hours.” Next is the obvious link that doesn’t work. Next thing (in the first paragraph) is the IP address that they gave. At first glance it looks OK, but if you try to ping it (a computer’s way of seeing if another computer is online), it fails. That address is invalid. Then in the closing, the “Support Team, Inc.” Who are you? Exactly. It was sent from the address “support@office.com,” clearly a fake address. I’m sorry, but if you want my financial information, you’ve got to learn how to write a fake email (I apologize if one of my readers wrote this, but you’ve got to do better than this).

Another big dead giveaway is that I don’t even have a Bank of America account. I use a bank that I’m not going to disclose online anyway. That was my first hint.

In the event of you recieving an email like this one, you should send it to the authorities either at your bank directly or the police. Phishing is a crime especially linked with Identity Theft.

Please protect yourself.

A customer of mine wanted to be able to show her photography on her website, but she wanted “picture frames” on them.  I got to thinking, “how in the world can I do that without a ton of code and time”, well I finished my “Dynamic Picture Frame” code in about half an hour.  Here’s what it does.  Using pre-fashioned picture frame images (the frame itself is made of 8 different images), I simply resized them around the desired picture so that when they are put together, they look like a picture frame.  Cool Huh?.  Here’s the link: http://tech-works.info/picture_frame/ .  That’s a short, but cool post that I plan to use in the very very near future.