Ryan Morlok’s Blog

Thanks to this article I will never lose a technical argument again.

I haven’t posted a lot in the last month, so I thought I’d catch up by pointing to a few pictures from the last few weeks.

First, for those of you who don’t live in Champaign, we got hit by a pretty big blizzard a few weeks ago. About 15″ of snow, 35 mph winds and a lot of stuff was closed. Things probably shouldn’t have stayed closed as long as they did, but that’s another story. I was excited about the snowfall until Minnesota got 25″-30″ over the course of last week and I realized missed out. Still, it was nice to get a good snowstorm here in Illinois. Too bad it melted a week later.

Next, the Hilldores were finally able to get their hands on a Wii. Wii-ve had several partys over there the last few wii-ks to play. Wow, the puns just keep on coming…

A couple weeks ago, we hosted a dinner party for Brian & Amy, Michael & Katey. We played classic video games, DDR, guitar hero and karaoke. Good times.

And finally, Kim Labs had a happy hour after which people came back to our place to hang out.

*whew* I think that gets me pretty much caught up…

Better than their previously covered advertising/marketing campaign, this new ad is genuinely creative.

I remember 10 or 15 years ago when I used to naively think that when I saw a picture in a brochure that those people actually had something to do with the company.  I’m in another picture on the CS website.  This one is of Prof. Gunter teaching something on the marker board.  I remember when the shot was staged.  He was talking gibberish and we were supposed to watch attentively.  Oh, the lies…

In Korea, it is tradition to eat seaweed soup on your birthday. Nobody really likes the taste of seaweed soup, but the tradition because of a nutrition quirk that was discovered long before people really understood such things. Originally, women were fed seaweed soup as their primary food for one month following childbirth. Seaweed apparently is helpful in the healing process because of its high Iodine content (which was figured out later). The tradition of mothers eating primarily seaweed soup is still prevolent, even today.

Anyway, this tradition turned into a funny story today at work. One of the Korean Kim Labs employees had a birthday today, and to celebrate Katy decided she would make him Korean soup. Katy made two versions: one the traditional way, and one that was of her own concoction that involved additional tasty ingredients. When the Korean coworkers tried the soup, they burst out laughing. Apparently there are two types of seaweed, one that is used only in broths, and the other that is actually eaten. Katy chose the wrong one. You can’t really blame her, ’cause you don’t really get trained in cooking with seaweed in the central U.S. Plus the packing for the seaweed is completely in Korean, so you can’t even read what it says. The Koreans at work found this pretty funny, though, and they’re even talking about submitting it to a Korean newspaper as a cute story about an American trying to honor them with their traditions.

I’ve had the privilege (?) of activating a couple credit card and changing my account information over the last few days, and I must say, it’s freaking me out. You get the credit card with a sticker on the front that says to call a number to activate the credit card. All well and good. So I call the number, and after a short greeting (”Thank you for calling XYZ credit…”) it asks me to enter or say my 16-digit account number. Ok, now I’m not a hacking or social engineering genius here, but John Technophoeb could come up with the idea to purchase 1-800 numbers that are just common dialing mistakes away from the credit card phone number. Then all you’d have to do is sit by the phone all day, pick up, ask people for their account numbers, then head off to the Bahamas. And it gets better. When people think they are talking to their back or credit provider, they’ll pretty much hand over any information that’s requested without.

Phone: Social Security Number?

Me: 987-65-4323

Phone: Mother’s maiden name?

Me: Boitano

Phone: Childhood pet’s sexual orientation?

Me: straight…what!?!

During the course of my various phone calls, I was asked for all of the following information: account number, last 4 digits of SSN, home phone number, zipcode, mothers maiden name. With all that info, it would be VERY easy to impersonate me, and the individual on the other end never really did anything to authenticate themselves other than silently nod when I got the answers right.

What’s really needed is some mutual authentication. For example, many financial websites are going to setups where they prove who they are before you completely prove who you are. For example, when I log into my brokerage account, they first ask me for my username. After that has been submitted they show me an image that I have selected, and if it’s what I expect, I enter my password and finish authentication. If I don’t see the right image, I know I’m not at the right site. Users should be leery whenever they enter there username as password on the same page. It’s easy to make a mistake when typing a web address.

Anyway, like I said, I’m not a security expert and I know work is being done to prevent fishing in web browsing. I just feel like I’m without any protection when I use the phone, and a lot of times I give away more personal information there than on a website.

Someone is selling an exact replica of KITT on ebay. Well, by exact I mean it can’t break through walls, drive itself, jump over semis, scan buildings and instantly produce floor plans in cheesy 80’s style graphics, or carry on a conversation with you…but you get the picture. Knight Rider was one of the major reasons I got into computer science. I wanted to build a car that could talk to me. Sadly, 15 years later, I’m still here without a car that talks.

Since I’ve moved to IL, Dusty and I have periodically discussed the regional language idiosyncrasies as we’ve observed them both from our home locations (Minnesota/Tennessee) and what we see in central Illinois.  Perhaps the most famous debate is Pop versus Soda versus Coke.  I ran across an article on Digg this afternoon that has an interactive map that shows the regional usage of the terms.  Unfortunately, I haven’t actually seen the site because it is down to traffic load, but I was able to find another blog entry that has a map that shows similar information by county in the U.S.

When I lived in Minnesota, I almost always said ‘pop’, but since I’ve been in Illinois, I switch off between ‘pop’ and ’soda’ (though I still use pop more). That’s pretty consistent with the region, which seems to be right on the boarder between ‘pop’ and ’soda’.  Looks like ‘pop’ is used most often of the three in the U.S.

Kim Laboratories celebrated Myung’s 40th birthday this last Friday at Kennedy’s at Stone Creek.  It was a nice, fancy place but I wasn’t overly impressed with the food (especially for the price).  I know most people reading this don’t know who Myung is, but if you do, you might be interested in these pictures.  As a gag gift, we got him a cheap plaid jacket from Walmart.  To say Myung is normally a classy dresser is about as big of an understatement as saying the Pope is Catholic.  Anyway, we put a gift card to Back Rack (fancy men’s clothing store) in the pocket.  We still made him try it on so we could get a few pictures.

It actually snowed here in Champaign (gasp!) Sunday morning. Enough snow to do something. Obviously, we had three options for the day: go sledding, or build something out of snow, or have a snowball fight. Champaign is flat like a pre-pubescent boy (does that even make sense?!?), and the one man-made hill in town specifically designated for sledding is always packed with children whenever it snows. So that eliminated sledding. Dusty throws like a girl, so that eliminated the snowball fight. The only thing left to do was to build a snowman!

And build a snowman we did…

It took us several hours and half the snow available between the townhouse complexes, but we build a snowman so big frosty would have wet himself. The snowman came out to be about ~2 lauras tall (8–10 feet), and weight in somewhere in the ballpark of 8–10 lauras (I’m guessiong 1000lbs, but I’m just making that up).

The sections were so large (and more importantly, heavy) that we had to cut in half the middle and head snowballs so that the pieces could be lifted into place and then reassembled. That construction strategy came from our resident mechanical engineer Amanda Hilldore. Our chemist, Doug Davis, tried to take credit for the idea, but accidentally breaking a snowball in half while you’re trying to assemble the snowman doesn’t count as an idea. Full pictures of the ordeal are available here. Videos of the process are here and here.