If you know me in real life, keep an eye on your mailbox, as there’s a chance that you received (or will be receiving) one of these in the mail. Again, my apologies.

Happy holidays!

After some delicious homemade sushi on Saturday night, we baked two circular cakes and a crazy amount of rice krispy treats. We did our best to make sure that the rice krispy treats were all close to the same height… Roughly the height of 2 of the cakes stacked on top of one another.

In the image above, you can see the basic body of the guitar. Two circular cakes were stacked on top of one another, and then rice krispy treats were used to create both the neck and the details (the curves and parts that stick out around the bottom of the base, I don’t know the proper term for these) on the body.

We used frosting as a sort of “glue” to connect the parts – we applied it to the rice krispy treats before connecting them to one another and to the chocolate cake as well.

You can’t see the cake and the rice krispy treats that were used to shape this because we placed a layer of chocolate fondant over the whole thing. The fondant is like malleable, edible silly putty made of sugar. It’s awesome to work with for something like this, because it basically takes the shape of whatever you place it on top of. It’s like throwing a sheet over something, but it settles and kind of melts into it.

Again, we used the frosting as sort of a glue before putting the fondant over the top. This also helped to smooth out the surface of the rice krispy treats, so that the fondant didn’t take on the rough texture of the rice krispies.

We also used the fondant for some of the details on the body. We used vanilla fondant with food coloring to create the tuning keys, the buttons at the top of the neck (adjacent to the tuning keys), the cavities in the body (those light brown shapes on the sides of the body), and the silver duder at the bottom of the body. That’s what they call it – a duder, right? It’s either that or a string post, but we’ll go with duder. We used the frosting to attach the fondant shapes to the cake.

We used frosting to outline the borders and to create the frets on the fingerboard. We (I) also used frosting to cover and eat about 10,000 calories worth of leftover rice krispy treats during this whole process.

Walah! The cake is complete. It looks pretty damn good, if you ask me. I LIKE CAKE, HOW ‘BOUT IT?

We had so many ingredients leftover (frosting, rice krispy treats and chocolate cake) that they made up roughly 75% of my diet over the past few days. I never even touched the mandolin cake until today. I actually ended up bringing it with me to the Wpromote office, where it was promptly devoured.

This isn’t exactly a step-by-step guide, but if you’re interested in creating something similar, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me via email/blog comments with any questions you might have. I’ll most likely pass them along to my girlfriend – she did the majority of the work here anyway.

Shot on Canon PowerShot SD 870 IS (RIP!), F2.8 @ 1/1250th.

This is my favorite bouldering shot thus far.

I was visiting California for the first time in September 2009. Four of us drove down to San Diego on a Saturday night and had an amazing time. The following Sunday (Sep 6th, 2009), we took our time coming back up North, stopping at scenic vistas along the way.

Dan and I are both into rock climbing, and he had mentioned that there was bouldering on the beach somewhere in Corona del Mar. Southern California beaches and bouldering? It sounded too good to be true.

We made our way to “Pirate’s Cove” and sure enough, several climbers were already there, crash pads on the sand. The climbers were significantly outnumbered by picnicking families who were blocking off the majority of the climbs.

This particular climb starts on the inside of a cave, and comes up around the face. The holds were a little wet, but the weather was perfect for bouldering. Unfortunately we didn’t have climbing shoes or a crash pad with us, so our efforts were weak at best… But this photo was more than worth it.

All shot on Canon EOS Rebel XSi, F3.5 @ 1/1250th.

These photos were taking on a day hike in Santa Ynez, CA on August 28th, 2010. I came across a patch of Cape Ivy and impulsively grabbed a handful of the seeds. As I blew them into the air, I instantly realized the potential for some cool shots. We spent at least half an hour playing around with these things before continuing on with our hike, and I think some of the photos turned out pretty cool.

Shot on Canon EOS Rebel XSi, F6.3 @ 1/500th.

Shot on Canon EOS Rebel XSi, F3.2 @ 1/125th.

My friends and I spent an awesome weekend camping in Santa Ynez on the weekend of Sept 3rd, 2010. Lots of hiking and natural hot springs – what more could you ask for?

This photo was taken while we were frying up an obscene amount of bacon in a cast iron skillet over a roaring campfire. It turns out that dogs like bacon too, and Lexi’s eyes were on the prize. Don’t worry, she inhaled several pieces of bacon after this photo was taken.

Shot on Canon EOS Rebel XSi, F3.5 @ 20 seconds

This photo was taken on a climbing trip in Joshua Tree. I purchased a remote for my camera, but never spent much time playing with it prior to this. I had a mini tripod with me, and everyone had headlamps, so we decided to play around with light painting. It ended up being a lot of fun… I’m pretty sure we spent over 2 hours just running around with the headlamps and experimenting with exposure lengths. Several of these shots turned out pretty nicely, but this one was my favorite.

Shot on Canon EOS Rebel XSi, F9 @ 1/100th.

This has gotta be one of my favorite photos. It’s a decent shot, but I love what it reminds me of.

It was taken after a long and exhausting day of bouldering at Stoney Point (Stoney Point Outcroppings in Chatsworth, California) on January 24th, 2010. I remember feeling incredibly satisfied with the days events. We were hauling all of our gear back to the cars, and a beautiful sunset formed in front of us. We had a 10-15 minute walk ahead of us, and the fiery cotton candy colors in front us were growing more intense by the minute.

As drained as I was, I realized I needed to make some sort of effort to capture what was happening. My hands were cut up and burning from gripping rocks all day, but I sucked it up – I quickly pulled out the Rebel XSi and snapped a few pictures.

There are other shots where the colors in the sky are even more intense, but the silhouettes (of Pete, Nick, and Braydon) with crash pads on their backs make this one my favorite.

Shot on Nikon N60, F8 @ 1/350th. Taken for a college photography course in 2006.

This guy is well known in the small college town of Shippensburg, PA. He can be seen walking around in camouflage with a bucket and a cane, and if you stop to talk with him he’ll ramble about absolutely nothing for hours on end. His house is painted orange and black, and the glass is all covered with black paint. I happened to be driving by at the right time and I got a snapshot of him emerging from his lair. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all, but I couldn’t help myself.

Take a close look at the high-res version of the photo. He’s not looking through the goggles; he’s looking right at you.

The reality of the situation is that there are thousands of people responsible for these attacks… Responsible for not only the execution, but the selection of targets.

Imagine that a web server is a library of data. When you want information, you go to the front door. You knock on the door (enter the website address), and when the door is open (the server responds) you are handed the information that you’ve requested (download the site data from the server).

Now imagine that 50,000 people all show up to the library and simultaneously and knock on the door. They can’t all be accommodated at once, and this prevents people who are legitimately trying to access the site from being able to do so. This, more or less, is how a denial-of-service (DoS) attack works.

A distributed denial of service attack (DDos) is when multiple computers are responsible for the attack. A computer can be compromised (often via malware) and used as a “zombie”. Someone can remotely control a network of these zombie computers to launch an attack on a site.

This is not the case with “Operation Payback”, though. Supporters of Wikileaks are volunteering their computers (and bandwidth) to take part in these attacks.

LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) is basically a DoS tool for dummies. It allows people with little “hacker” knowledge to launch denial-of-service attacks by sending TCP, UDP, or HTTP requests to the target. To dumb it down a bit, it basically “spams” the server with requests from your computer.

Don’t want to install LOIC? Here’s a javascript version, it runs right in your browser.

LOIC attacks were being coordinated via Operation Payback’s Twitter account (@Anon_Operation). This account was removed by Twitter yesterday, but you can view Google’s cached version here. Once that expires, you can see a screenshot of some of the tweets here.

“Hivemind” LOIC allows volunteers to be even less involved in the process. Once installed, you simply point the application at an IRC server, and someone else controls the attacks. It’s like volunteering your computer as a soldier in a virtual army. When thousands of people do this, the person controlling the attacks has a pretty serious “army” at their disposal.

The risks involved in using Hivemind LOIC seem pretty slim. A “virus” could have caused your computer to launch similar attacks – this sort of thing happens more often than you’d think. Your computer illiterate aunt’s Gateway PC that is still running Windows 98 may very well be involved in hundreds of these attacks. Also, once a succesful DDoS attack knocks a server offline, the log files that’d normally be used to determine where connections were coming from most likely won’t be accurate.

Please note that I don’t condone committing a federal crime, nor am I participating in the attacks myself. But it’s pretty exciting to watch this all unfold, isn’t it?

The websites of Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, and the Swedish government were apparently also attacked, but I didn’t personally witness these sites as being offline.

Operation Payback is back on Twitter with a new account (Op_Payback), and as expected, they are coordinating attacks against Paypal and Amazon (who used to host Wikileaks, but pulled the plug on them last week). As of writing this, api.paypal.com is down.

Facebook and Twitter also dealt blows to Wikileaks by removing the Operation Payback accounts from these sites – are the two major social media sites the next targets?