One of Sarah's co-workers at VMware invited us to a "no so very thanksgiving" Thanksgiving dinner/shindig at her house this weekend.

One of the other co-workers had a relative with a liquor store that had some surplus kegs of beer, so there was a keg there as well.

Turns out from conversation that one of the things that happens in College (or maybe it's a Frat-house thing) is the keg stand. This involves one doing a handstand on top of the beer keg, whilst two other people hold you up there, and third person shoves the hose in your mouth and you drink until beer comes out of your ears or something. Mmm, hygienic.

Anyway, somehow it was decided that that had to be done, and the key who brought the keg was only going to do it if someone else would do it, so I volunteered, to see what all the fuss was about.

It wasn't terribly eventful. No beer came out of my nose. I don't think I got exceptionally pissed from it, either. I think it's got mythical status for rapid intoxication like drinking through a straw supposedly has.

So now I know what a keg stand is, first hand.

Everyone was very polite at the party. We couldn't stand around for very long without other people introducing themselves to us. It was nice. Turns out it's a small world, and we met Carol, who knew Kate, the receptionist in my building at work.

I'm currently debating whether to go to linux.conf.au or not.

I'd really like to go, because I didn't make it to Dunedin last year, and it really is the most rocking conference in the world.

The catch is, I've already scored two work-funded trips this year, and I will have only barely returned from the second one by the time I'd be wanting to head off to Sydney again, so I don't feel right about asking for work to fork out for this, even though it's reasonably justifiable. I also want to go to Debconf in 2007, and I'd rather that one be covered.

So I'll feel more comfortable forking out for it myself. So I now have to decide whether it's worth the airfare, the negative vacation balance, the two 20 hour flights in a week joy that is flying from San Francisco to Sydney and back again.

And all I have to base this on is the title of the presentation and the presenter's name.

Oh, the huge manatee!

That said, on the face of it, there's enough tracks with at least one presentation that look like they whet my appetite that I would be prepared to go based on the face value of the program.

I'll mull it over some more.

I'd like to get a Bluetooth keyboard for my MythTV machine. It'd be more convenient to drive it from the couch instead of crouching down in front of the TV on the existing USB keyboard.

Thing is, I'm paranoid about typing passwords over the air. Most of the wireless keyboards at Fry's are either IR (I'd be happy with this apart from the line-of-sight requirement) or running on some 27Mhz frequency I've never heard of, and so am rather wary of.

I'm assuming Bluetooth will be a little more secure given that it supposedly encrypts the communication, but I'm trying to determine how flawed or not that encryption is. This article was an interesting read, but didn't really address any of the cryptography involved.

It suggests that if I don't leave everything discoverable (which I wouldn't) and attackers aren't able to narrow their search space by knowing what sort of keyboard I have (which I'm guessing they could sniff anyway) that just sequentially searching the Bluetooth MAC address space would take over 1000 days.

So I'm assuming that if the keyboard is in use, then its MAC address is going to be known, so the question comes back around to the strength of the encryption...

Apple's website says it's 128-bit.

I guess I could get the gear and do some investigating myself, but I'm hardly a l33t h4x0r, so my self-penetration test would hardly be as comprehensive as being under attack from someone who was.