A cosplay photo:

[caption id=“attachment_7151” align=“aligncenter” width=“670”] Baltimore Comic-Con - Black Cat and Spider-Man[/caption]

See more photos from last year’s Baltimore Comic-Con here. Sadly I won’t be able to attend this year due to a family commitment.

Steganography is the process of hiding a message within another message. The difference between steganography and encryption is that encryption seems to make a message indistinguishable from noise. Encryption will turn “my cat is black” into “df cok eropz” while steganography could involve you sending a picture of a car and the receiver would run that image through some software to get the message “my cat is black”. Why use steganography over encryption? Because it’s less interesting to those who want to know what you’re saying. Imagine we’re in the world of Game of Thrones during Seaons 2 of the HBO show and Rob Stark needs to send a message about troop movements. He has to assume that the man carrying his message might be captured or bribed to give up the messages. If it looks encrypted, then King Joffrey will put his best minds on trying to figure out the encryption. If the message looks like a condolences to a lord for his son’s death, then they might let the message pass.

It’s too bad the whole plastic instruments genre died out so quickly. I would have loved to have played Salsa Band.

It’s been three years since the last time I posted about micro-blogging. Since then Google Buzz has been killed off, Google Plus has taken its place, Tumblr has arrived on the scene, and Identica doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did. I’m also using KDE now, so I went from using Gwibber to using Choqok:

[caption id=“attachment_7119” align=“aligncenter” width=“618”] Choqok[/caption]

I used Tumblr for about a year but I abandoned it because it’s just animated gifs and curation of the work of others. Out of all the Tumblrs I followed (about 20) only about 3 of them produced original content. All the rest were just reblogs. Also, there’s too much porn on there to use at work.

http://youtu.be/s4Rjy5yW1gQ

Saw this on Boing Boing a while ago. It saddens me that girls and women are treated as second class citizens within geekdom, but it heartens me that women like these don’t let it keep them from their geek pursuits. I hope to raise Scarlett to be just like them - self-confident enough to pursue whatever she wants, regardless of what others think.

You’ll never see me on TV - I love America

- Co-worker

[caption id=“attachment_7140” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V against Dave - 3700 BC[/caption]

As I continue exploring, I discover that I have a City-State to the South. That’s going to put a damper on my expansion south unless I destroy them. Also, if they end up best buds with someone else that’s an enemy on my doorstep. They may be the first casualty of living near the Great Chinese Empire! I’m now beating Dave by one point! Yes! Even when I play on my own, I tend to use the last turn to queue up all my production so I don’t have to remember what my plans were. That’s extra important when I’m playing 1-2 turns per day. So I finally got around to that in this game.

Well, if it gets immigration reform passed, does it matter what kind of lala land you have to live in? If anyone mentions that I’ve been confused for a Persian - good job at failing to realize that Persians aren’t Arabs.

The important thing is that you need to read to the end of the article or it’s just going to seem really weird.

During lunch I was looking back on my blog posts. Scarlett of 4 months ago still looks like current Scarlett (only smaller). But Scarlett of 1 year ago looks “nothing” like current Scarlett. I wonder where, exactly, is the inflection point.