Easter Pictures

Back on Easter Sunday, part of my family got together and had lunch at East Paris Baptist Church. We finally remembered to take the digital camera this time. I picked out ten of my favorite pictures and added them to the family gallery. Click the picture below to go to the gallery and see the rest.

Somehow Paige managed to elude the camera all afternoon, so she’s not in any of the pictures. I guess that means I’ll just have to try harder next time…

Where did all the pens go?

If you have a cat, you’ll understand this picture without an explanation.

Paige and I were looking for something in the living room the other day. I don’t even remember what it was now. Anyway, she lifted up the edge of the couch and told me to grab whatever was under there.

When I saw everything that was under the couch, I told her there’s no way I could get it all.

So, we ended up moving the couch, and this is what we found…

It looks like Sam has been busy lately knocking things around the living room floor. He just loves hiding Max’s chew toys where he can’t get to them.

Hello, Google

It looks like Google has finally started to really take note of our site. Google’s crawler has visited the site 113 times this month, and 23 people have found our site by searching on Google.

If you search for “lua tutorial”, we’re number 5 and 6 on the first page. This is pretty good considering those tutorials have only been up about a month. If you search for “Tony and Paige” we’re number 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and probably more.

The only thing that bothers me about this is if you search for “Tony and Paige Lewis”, we’re number three. There’s another Tony and Paige Lewis and their church page is ranked above our site.

I think part of the problem is I never use our last name on the site. No where on the home page does it say Tony Lewis or Paige Lewis. The really funny thing is I registered Anthony Lewis as a domain name and pointed it to this site, but I never use it anymore. I don’t even show up on the first page of hits at Google for Anthony Lewis.

Oh well, fame isn’t everything I guess.

E-mail spoofing

I’ve been trying to explain to people for a long time that the “from” address on an e-mail is just like the return address on an envelope – you can put anything there you want. This comes up all the time with spam and viruses.

Now it seems this is being used as a new form of harassment. CNN has an article about how some people are using spoofed e-mail to harass Arab-Americans by sending fake hate mail with their address as the sender.

The article mentions PGP signatures as a way to verify the sender of a message. This is probably the most secure solution assuming that everyone you correspond with has installed PGP. I think the best solution is two-fold. First, educate people about how e-mail works. Once people understand the simplicity of the protocol, it should be obvious how it can be easily faked. Second, teach people to stop and think. This applies to life in general, not just e-mail. My advice to anyone who gets an e-mail they don’t like is the same as it’s always been – just delete it and go on with life.

One more interesting thing, note how the article goes back and forth between spelling it “e-mail” and “email”.

Watch out for the DeLorean

This has got to be one of the most interesting stories I’ve read in a long time…

A man started trading stocks two weeks ago with $800. His portfolio is now worth $350 million. Of course, he was promptly arrested for insider trading. When the authorities questioned him, he gave a four-hour confession.

He claims that he is a time traveler from the year 2256 who came back to get rich off the stock market. All he wants is to return to his own time. He will not give the location of his time machine or discuss how it works, but he has offered to provide “historical facts” such as the location of Osama bin Laden and a cure for AIDS if they will let him go.

The really interesting part is there is no record of this guy anywhere before December 2002.

New (Old) Screenshots

I’ve updated my projects page with some screenshots from two of the first games I ever tried to write. I never got around to finding an old computer with DOS, so I used DOSemu on Linux to run these programs. Keep in mind these were written in 1993 while Tony Foster and I were still in high school.

 

I’m sure somebody will get a kick out of these…

April Fools

April Fools day is always interesting for someone like me. Since I get most of my news online, I spent a lot of yesterday wondering if what I was reading was true or not.

Some of the funniest things I saw all day were at ThinkGeek.com. I’ll bet they got lots of orders on the Shrinter (combination shredder / printer) and the Executive Atom Collection (one atom of each elemenent).

For more funny April Fools stuff, check out the Museum of Hoaxes Top 100 list.

This last story isn’t a hoax, but it is a little funny – . According to a study, three-fourths of the security experts at major companies do not believe Microsoft’s products are secure.