A flurry of updates in this post as there has been a lot going on:

1. I returned from an awesome six-day hiking trip in Lofer, Austria.  First time using a travel agency and Wanderweg Holidays really delivered.  The entire package was well organized as our luggage was delivered flawlessly to each different hotel throughout the trek.  It was a self-guided hiking tour over 105 km total.  I’m hoping to submit an article to Greattreks.com with the details, when I do, I’ll link to all of the details.  For now, a teaser photo.
   

   The author looking at some Austrian Trees

2. I completed my Computer Networks course and I’m now taking a database theory  class.  The professor is one of the people behind Greattreks.com (which I found out when I was desperately looking for the class schedule… turns out the class meets on Tuesdays).  Invoking xkcd reference… now…
   

   xkcd 773

3. I read the following books, some of which spawned more insight than others: Life of Pi, In the Plex, Restaurant at the End of the Universe (re-read) and Homo Faber.
4. I guess that was all the updates, but it seemed like a lot to me

Lastly, as part of my final project for my networks class, we had to design and implement a network protocol.  Our group designed a protocol to play hangman online and we decided to implement this over Twitter.  For a four person, distributed, graduate class team, we knocked out a pretty cool hangman game for the class, (high-five group 8).  I wrote the Twitter Adaptation Layer, which essentially provides sockets over Twitter.  Which, is a little weird since Twitter is broadcast like medium and besides direct messages (DMs), unicast communication is not really Twitter’s thing.  Anyway, applications of this idea are limited due to Twitter’s rate limits on status updates, but I put a lot of work into this so maybe somebody out there might find this useful.  That, I and I’m starting to use this blog as a repository of things I don’t want to forget…  The code is on a private bitbucket repo, which I can make public after some cleanup.