What a blow to my pride, my ego. *laugh* I did a Google search, searching for "gifford" as the only search term, just to see what I could see. How awful it was, to see that my web site only finally shows up near the bottom of page six. *smirk*

I shouldn't be surprised. I don't regularly churn out new and interesting material on my site. I don't exchange links with friends. I'm quite a web recluse after a fashion.

The search did reveal another Gifford (no relation that I'm aware of, though if we both traced our genealogy back to the 1600s, perhaps we'd find we were cousins), another blogger, Matthew Gifford who appears to be a tad geekish and interested in technology. Cool! I browsed his blog for a bit, and even visited his Amazon.com wish list. There was some interesting stuff there that could have easily been on my wish list, like C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity or perhaps (if I didn't own the books already), C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia (boxed set).

Mr. Gifford also managed to attend the Gnomedex, which I only heard about today while listening to the latest episode (episode 11) of TWiT (This Week in Tech).

If I'm ever to rise in the ranks of Google's search, I'm going to have to change, and become interesting so that people will link to my web site. *sigh* It's not going to happen, however. I'm too lazy for such an endeavor. I shall have to continue where I'm at, way down the list. Fame is not everything, and in fact isn't that desirable. It's often destructive from my own observations, so why should I bother?

Well I need to stop ruminating and go hold Family Home Evening with my friend Jason. See you later!

Peter Schickele's opening narration to the track Kangaroos from the Carnival of the Animals composed by Camille Saint-Saëns from the CD Sneaky Pete and the Wolf/Carnival of the Animals open with this awful poem:Then the music begins.

What does it mean that I love that? I mean, I really go for the puns and the corny humor like that. My family members will gladly warn anyone that I'm a regular purveyor of puns and one had better have a strong constitution for tolerating such if they hang around me too long.

I also must admit, if I'm being completely honest here, that I like Peter Schicklele's musical humor, and his P.D.Q. Bach compositional humor. I've got a few of his CDs and I thoroughly enjoy them, though I'm quite sure some of the parody is way over my head due to my musical ignorance.

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson I finished reading Elantris by Brandon Sanderson.

After reading Orson Scott Card's review of Elantris back in November before the book came out, and after discovering that the author had put sample chapters online, I hopped over to his web site and devoured the first three chapters. I was hooked. I had to have the book.

It was mighty annoying to have to be patient, to wait over five months until May, 2005 to buy the book. By the time May rolled around, Elantris was lurking in the dusty back corners of my mind, so I didn't get around to ordering a copy from Amazon.com until the last part of May.

It's a good book. No, a really, really good book. While there wasn't a lot of physical action at first, by the ending scenes, things were hopping all over the place. And the unique, fantastic system of magic in the world Brandon Sanderson invented was intriguing from the start. And I enjoyed the characters, their development, and liked watching the choices made by both protagonists and their enemies and the consequences of those choices.

It's a keeper, and a re-reader.

My friend and co-worker (no, not cow-orker) Cassidy was expecting delivery of a new wide-screen high-definition television to his new house this week. He bought the Samsung TV online and knew it would be delivered mid-week. I had to ask him when he was going to invite me over to watch a movie on it, once it arrived. My curiosity was double, because I hadn't yet seen the inside of his recent home purchase.

Wednesday was the day the television arrived...

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Early this afternoon, while doing some work, I discovered that my server (the computer that runs this web site as well as performing other jobs for me at my house) had spontaneously rebooted last night. That should never happen. The server computer has run continuously for five months with no glitches or errors until recently.

Since the files I was working on are temporarily stored on this server, I had to stop what I was doing, shut the thing down, open it up, install a CD-ROM drive, then...

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Gorgeous music! I've raved about Eric Whitacre's music before. Here's an excerpt of Sleep which is currently my favorite Whitacre composition, available directly from Eric Whitacre's web site. I think it's probably the BYU Singers rendition.

http://www.ericwhitacre.com/flash/music/Sleep.mp3

Or an excerpt from the wind instrumental rendition (I'm not sure who the performers are):

http://www.ericwhitacre.com/flash/music/sleep_winds.mp3

While perusing some other blogs tonight, my iPod Shuffle decided to shuffle on over to Sleep, and the expressive, beautiful music instantly grabbed my attention so powerfully that I had to say something about it.

Way to go, Mr. Whitacre!

I suppose I must also mention another track I listened to, composed by another of my favorite composers, John Rutter. It's the first movement of Magnificat, from track 19 on my The Cambridge Singers Collection CD. Celestial music!

Eeek, I guess I rant about good music often enough that I ought to create a separate category for it. *laugh*

After Church services today, I drove over to Hurricane to visit my folks. What's more, my brother's wife and the two eldest of their children have been visiting from Georgia, so I anticipated...

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This evening I played around a little bit with my iPod Shuffle. I noticed that one of the files on it, iPod_Control/iTunes/iEKInfo looked a bit interesting. It appeared to contain the key information that my iPod needed to play back encrypted AAC files. But the keys in the file appear to be encrypted with some sort of session key.

I have no idea what encryption methods are used, or what is used as keying material. My interest is too casual to undertake reverse engineering this thing. I was mostly just curious.

Now I'm wondering if various open source FairPlay DRM projects like they HYMN project have code that knows how to decrypt the keys in this file. They probably do. Maybe I'll have to download it sometime and take a look. Not tonight, though.

This is the structure of the iEKInfo file so far as I could see...

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This article is a quickie about three things I really like, a grill, a local restaurant, and a portable music player...

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My new iPod ShuffleI recently bought two iPod Shuffle music players, one for myself, and another as a gift for my little sister. I've really enjoyed my iPod Shuffle the past few days. When I commented about music here, I was listening to my new iPod Shuffle.

I'm also a fan of the iTunes Music Store and have been since October 2003, and have spent over $100 buying music from Apple since then (and will likely spend more now that I've got an iPod Shuffle).

Yesterday night I was...

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