We had a credit card stolen a while back and I was just on the phone with the bank clearing up one last transaction. The vendor, Steam, was claiming that the charge was valid. It took me about 2 minutes to convince the card issuer that the charge was not valid by simple reverse DNS of the IP addresses captured by Steam. Account signup happened at a location served by Adelphia (I have never been an Adelphia customer), and subsequent accesses all took place via two different Russian ISPs.

What surprises me is that neither Steam nor the card issuer (a huge national card issuer) was able to figure this out. It seems very automatable. And seems like card issuers could easily cut down on online fraud by looking at IP addresses – for myself, 99.99% of my transactions come from my work or home machines with fairly stable IP address histories, at least at the subdomain level. Not foolproof of course, and I do occasionally do transactions from other locations, but it seems like another good piece of info to consider when assessing the validity of a particular transaction.

As I previously mentioned I’ve been taking a graduate course in MEMS design – A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: The ass-kicking began this weekend in my re-education process – and the analytics have been the toughest thing to recover after 20+ years out of school.

Midterm yesterday. Analytical problems on comb drives (involves mechanical and capacitive behaviour analysis), on MUMPS structures, etc. I can take some solace in the fact that I had an idea how to approach every problem, I got an answer down, and the youngsters didn’t get done dramatically before me – only 1-2 people out of 50 got done early. I know I blew 1 question at least tho on further thinking.

Fortunately no final in the class, just a team project which I am pretty excited about – good team with a set of experienced people, with expertises spanning mechanical and electrical domains.

Also looking at winter courses – Nanophotonics (EE 539c) or Electronic and Optical Structures of Engineering Materiials (MSE 565). The MSE course is a little more fundamental and probably my first choice.

Halloween Masks? Better! Foam Latex Prosthetics, Make-up, Costumes: The Scream Team – some of this is a little too gruesome for my taste but some good stuff in here.

The Gadgets Weblog: Lightsnake, the Soundcard in a Cable – is this cool or what? awesome. the idea is brilliant.

Google Press Center: Press Release – pretty nice little app on the bberry. motivates me to make more use of gmail.

* Rich rounds up PHP editors – Tong Family Blog: PHP Editors * Phil keeps jamming features into Berry411 – now flickr access. * Rich on Canon rebates * Andy is increasingly sharing about his business on the web…good progress on stats. * Phil recos windows desktop search. Doesn’t do network drives, sadness.

Finally resolved my Alienware issues. Full refund. Took too much of my time complaining but at the end of the day, I will give Alienware credit for making it right.

* 2006 Illinois Fighting Illini Game Preview - BuckeyePlanet Ohio State Forums * The O-zone preview

I expect to see OSU work on holding onto the ball – 3 fumbles last week, that won’t fly against Michigan.

The Curie, the pascal, the newton, the coulomb, the farad – all great stuff. If you ever need to know just what a yoctofarad is, or how to express in terms of zettacoulombs and attojoules, this is the place.

Total successes – our talking tree, the FCG, the Creature Crate. Also our surround sound systems generated a lot of volume, and the sounds i got from Sounddogs were really clean.

Failures – my pneuma-powered popping ghost. My “waterproof” container for the control electronics somehow got an inch of water in it. Ffffft.

Almost failure – the Creature Crate controller also struggled with dampness, continually shorting out. I had to apply a blower and some heatlamps to get it going.

Lesson for next year…all the control electronics that I placed in the garage or in the house worked perfectly. All the electronics outside struggled with dampness one way or another. I either need to

* house all the electronics indoors and just run power or pneuma cables outdoors. works fine for power, that is how i did my thunder & lightning. not going to work great with pneuma… * make the electronics easily pluggable so i can bring them in at night and take them out in the afternoon. might be the best strategy, but kind of a pain * invest a lot in weather proofing the outside containers.

Crowds started out slow last night but at about 7pm traffic exploded. Last visitor at 945 and then we shut down.

Massive cleanup ahead…

On paper this looks like a game OSU will dominate – head to head stats – but of course both teams will play out of their minds.

Good summary at Mpire – Results for ohio state michigan tickets – also stubhub has a good listing – looks like $700 or so a ticket is what it takes right now.

Basic Microfluidic Concepts – a good basic explanation of the fluid dynamics in microfluidic channels.

Fluids Flow Hydraulic and Pneumatic Knowledge Menu - Engineers Edge – I learned a lot of this at one time but it has been a looooong time. This site seems to have a lot of good basic definitions.