I had the opportunity to teach a bootcamp in Orlando last week for the SANS Institute.  The course was on .NET security and it was 6 straight days of fun!!  I was able to leave the hotel after the conference and hit a few attractions at Epcot Center, good times.

it was such a nice day yesterday that i thought i would fix my media center in the backyard.  i installed 2 mini fans to help cool the graphics card and the hard drives.  the media center case is very nice for presentationbut you have very little room so heat dissapation is a major issue.  i would lose my wireless card at times due to the heat from the graphics card, and the media center would freeze after long periods of use (the 2 sata and 1 ide hard drives get pretty warm).  after the mini fan installations the mce has yet to malfunction, and i can now keep the glass door closed when using all day.

i had the opportunity to attend a couple microsoft conferences yesterday on oahu.  the first one was a technet event that centered around wireless security and how to utilize ms products to secure yourself and your networks.  the afternoon session was geared up to help ms partners to sell small business server 2003 (there is now a transition pack for upgrades to the full version of 2003 server if you exceed 75 CALs) and the upcoming vista operating system.  the cool thing about vista (should it ever be released) is that it has naitive 64 bit programming and a built-in media center interface.  here is the link to download the beta version 2:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/downloads/products/getthebeta/

i found i nice little online stereogram generator online:

http://www.eyetricks.com/stereograms/onlinetools/stereocreator.htm

Can you tell what this says:

http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/

this is a perfect example of how the internet has changed our lives for the better.  i hope that this story reaches every single person on earth (is someone working on the different translations??) and people think twice before keeping someone's lost phone, wallet, whatever.  Way to go Evan

I like this for the mug shot:

abc.com is leading the way by making current episodes of it's popular tv shows available on the web:

http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/landing

of course there are still commercials so it's not quite as good as tivo but pretty darn close.  the quality is decent and it eats up a ton of bandwidth but it is about time they got this started.  now if we could just get HBO on board, i would gladly pay for just the programs that i want to watch.  as it stands you have to have digital cable first, then pay an additional $18 a month on top of that.  it would be great to just pay for the sopranos, entourage, the wire, curb your enthusiasm, etc.

the revolution WILL be televised (and downloadable from your home pc)

here is a snapshot of my lovely little cubby hole at work.  the good thing about this cube is that i have a window that looks outside and on a day when the surf is up i can count it as an ocean view (the surf needs to be WAY up).  so all things considered i am quite comfortable in my new home on the western edge of the united states.

i had the opportunity to help out as track meet officials last night at Vidinha stadium in Lihue. all 3 kauai high schools (Waimea, Kauai HS, Kapaa) were in attendance and many of the races came down to a photo finish. next meet we are going to try and figure out how to pre-load the events and display the results instantly. but considering the equipment was brand new i think we did a pretty good job getting the finish camera to work!

i learned the hard way not to leave your desktop computer on the lanai.  running a media center is a 24/7 operation and the sunshine in the afternoons fried 2 motherboards, 2 processors, and a graphics card.  my next generation MCE has extra fans and i'm designing it for maximum air flow.  the case is specially designed for a media center so i'm hoping to aviod another meltdown.  too bad because my last ASUS board kicked some serious ass! 

there is only one final speedbump on my way to completing my media center box.  i ordered 2 SATA drives so that i could run them in RAID 0 for increased performance due to the nature of the media center (constant writing/accessing to the drive).  the only problem is that i only had one SATA cable in my stash.  luckily i found a guy who has one and is willing to part with it (Steve Low).  so by this weekend i should have it in production.  BOOYA!!!!!