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Video games I'm looking forward to

Tue, 2007-07-24 12:19 — Laurie

I was given a EB Games gift card for my birthday back in May (Thanks Aimee and Judy!!) and I've been holding out to buy something I really want. Here are the games I'm looking forward to:
PC

Playstation 3

Decided Against

Just Married

Tue, 2006-08-22 16:11 — Laurie

Tammy and I just got married on Saturday. The whole thing went well. I'll be posting pictures soon once I get them sorted.

Thank you everyone for coming for all the great gifts. Special thanks to all of you who helped out. We couldn't have done it without you.

New 3-series coupe

Fri, 2006-06-09 17:33 — Laurie

I just found pictures of the new BMW 3-series coupe on deiselstation.com. While I like it better than the newer-style sedan, I still haven't decided if its better than the old style coupe. Any opinions?

It's interesting that their still flogging the old-style 3-series at www.bmw.com (as of June 9, 2006).

I noticed that this badging states it's a '335i'. This would be larger than any other 3 series before (the '35' part implies a 3.5 litre v6). It's worth noting the current M3 is a 3.2 litre. It also seems they have dropped the 'c' for coupe. Although this may be a pre-production example.

There was some speculation in a Road & Track I read at my dentist's office that the next generation M3 would be a 4 litre V8. With the usually cleaner lines of the M3 than the regular 3-series that should be quite the car.

Vampire Name

Wed, 2006-04-26 09:25 — Laurie

For those of you who wanted to know, my Vampire name is, "Barnabas Choiseul" and known in some parts of the world as, "Kronos of The Howling Wolves". I got this information from the The Vampire Name Generator.

I'm a Mercedes SLK!

Tue, 2006-03-07 16:43 — Laurie

I did the sports car quiz I found on Matt's Anthology of Interest. Here's what the web site said:

You appreciate the finer things in life. You have a split personality - wild or conservative, depending on your mood. Wherever you go, you like to travel first class. Luxury, style, and fun - who could ask for more?

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Easy Money

Fri, 2006-01-20 11:04 — Laurie

Just the other day I came across an article about prime numbers. It's called Fun with prime numbers. I though it was quite neat. Of course when your talking about prime numbers, the obvious next topic is Cryptography. Since the "Fun with prime numbers" page is about generating prime numbers, why not use this knowledge to crack some encryption code. What did Wikipedia have to say about this?. A fair bit.

RSA is the most common type of encryption around. People are constantly trying to break RSA keys for both fun and profit. The RSA people have a bounty to try and factor very large numbers. It's called The RSA Factoring Challenge. The next available bounty is $30,000. The challenge is to find the only two factors of this number:

74037563479561712828046796097429573142593188889231289084936232638972765034028266276 \
89199641962511784399589433050212758537011896809828673317327310893090055250511687706 \
3299072396380786710086096962537934650563796359

Ryan and I figured since we have so many library computers out there that sit there and do nothing all night, we could put them to good use. Ryan is a big fan of "brute force". How long would it take to find a factor? Well, I did a little test. After 15 hours, I tested 43 billion possibilities. It sounds like a lot. How long would it take to find the number at that rate?

More to come...

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