I sprained my right ring finger while playing basketball yesterday, and now I can only type at about 10% of normal typing speed. This sucks.

For those who don’t already know, Google Calendar is up and running. It’s fast-loading and useful, and I could certainly see people using it, especially for groups and collaborative efforts.� However, in an age where online privacy is becoming increasingly scarce and difficult to protect, I’m not sure how comfortable we should feel about dumping even more personal information into Google’s database.

Last weekend was very well spent; Eugene, Benji, Mark, Jung, John, Tim, Mike, Calvin and I met up in DC for Calvin’s bachelor party weekend. We were originally planning on hiking both days, but it was raining the first day, so we went paintballing instead.

This was my first time paintballing, so I didn’t know quite what to expect. The initial rush was very exciting– there were two teams, and when the game starts, you run out trying to locate the enemy while searching for good cover wherever you can get it. Dodging in and out of brush, running through thick woods, charging up hills– all with your heart pounding and your gun in your hands ready to shoot at anything that moves– that was fun and exciting. However, the fun stops when your goggles start fogging up (due to rain and perspiration), you can’t see past your gun, and suddenly you hear shots ringing out all around and you have no idea who’s shooting at you. In such cases, I’d just fall to the ground and start shooting blindly into whichever direction my ears told me the shots were coming from. This plan, surprisingly enough, proved ineffective, and I’d eventually get hit, most likely by someone equipped with personal anti-fog goggles and a semi-automatic, straight-shooting gun. The disadvantages in gear aside, it was a good experience.

The next day we went hiking on Old Rag Mountain in Viriginia, about 2 hours outside DC. The weather was perfect that day, and Old Rag Mountain provided a very nice and challenging 5 hour hike, which included a fun rock scramble near the top. The views were amazing, especially at the summit. At the end of the hike, although my legs felt drained and my body exhausted, my appreciation of nature and wonder at how beautiful God’s creations can be were frehsly renewed. There are some pictures in the photo gallery.

For those of us who’ve been on the edge of our seats to see an Intel Core Duo chip in an ATX box, here’s an article from ExtremeTech describing such a solution, with the Core Duo T2600 and the Asus N4L-VM, a purely microATX motherboard. After reading the review, it looks like this would be a great solution for a small, quiet, decently powerful box to put in your living room for casual gaming, video encoding, and multimedia playback.

While it’s good for contractors and vendors, defense spending as I’ve come to discover can be a total waste of taxpayer money. I’m going to be very vague here because I don’t want to get into any trouble. During my visit to a certain well-known Department of Defense client of ours in Washington, DC last week, one of their network engineers complained to me about how his department is throwing a significant amount of money (easily into eight figures) into a highly costly technology that not only doesn’t improve their network, but actually decreases their network’s fault tolerance and survivability. This wasn’t a case of opinion or personal preference; any network engineer would come to the same conclusion. (Read on …)