7. February 2010 by admin.

With only a week away, I thought that I’d throw up a post asking for suggestions on roadside attractions, traveling tips for the road, and/or any suggestions or questions anyone might have about #ert.

As you can see on the map of the previous post, we’ll be traveling across the southern states and then heading north toward Seattle. The only minor change being made is that we’re going to make a trip up to Oklahoma City, OK, to visit Jayson Street and then from there go to Roswell, NM. After Roswell, we’re planning on heading north toward Denver, CO. So, if anyone resides (or have seen/been somewhere interesting) in any of the areas mentioned or marked on the map, let us know in the comment section.

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4. February 2010 by admin.

Next Sunday is the big day. I’ll be leaving at 9:55PM on Valentine’s Day (boo) and arriving in Jacksonville, FL, at 10:30 the following morning. There, Nikita will be picking me up and then we’ll be driving to visit my family in St. Pete and from there begin our Epic Road Trip (with the hash tag: #ert) back to Seattle. Here’s a rough drawing (lol MSPaint):

We’ll have Internet through most of the trip and we’ll be keeping you up to date via Twitter (@tottenkoph and @niki7a), posting blogs up here (I’ll try to have pictures up in a timely manner on my flickr), and we’re talking about maybe doing QIK videos from our phones if/when we get extremely bored (will post link here and/or on twitter when that happens).

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28. January 2010 by admin.

I love it when I’m given things that are homemade. I don’t care what they are. Baked goods (especially cupcakes) or random craft bits or cards. Anything, really. It makes me feel super special and important to know that someone spent a lot of time to make something just for me.

As a belated birthday gift, Nikita made me a cupcake mini-scrapbook.

She put together each page with paper, stickers, and other embellishments she had bought.

and the outcome was this precious scrapbook!

I love how the heart on this one has little “Tottenkophs” on them
See? Told you. Mini-avatars!

I had to laugh at this. We don’t know why we find Kristin Wigg in the Gilly skit (SNL) so funny. But we do. <3

and the back cover was just  too way cute! Yes, I know thinking two girls in front of a pile of skulls as cute may be a teensy bit disturbing…
But it’s us! She *has* to be the one on the right and I’m on the left (you can tell by the skull bow)

Anyways. I just had to share this with you all because I was so happy to get it and thought it was hella cute.

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25. January 2010 by admin.

Hello everyone. My name is Totten and I’m addicted to cupcakes.

Like. I’m not even joking.  I’m addicted.  So, in order for me not to feel so ashamed of my addiction, I decided to gather a bunch of girls this past Saturday for a Frostitution Party. As an early birthday gift, Nikita (from here on in referred to as “my dealer”) got me a cupcake maker. You scoop the batter into five little holes in the machine, close the lid, and voila! In five minutes, you have small, cute cupcakes. Anyways, back to the party! We had eight girls come over that day. Poor Alex had to run for the hills to Fry’s in order to escape the estrogen.  Smart boy.

   Here’s a shot of the mini cupcakes with neon colored frosting surrounding it.

  At one point, Octal started talking about Ireland and the IRA, so I made a little Ireland flag cupcake to show my support of motherland.

My dealer. She wasn’t fond of the idea of evidence of her being at the scene. I was surprised she let me get away with the picture.

I was also surprised that there weren’t any fights during the party. Usually when you get 8 girls together, there’s snipping. But everyone waited their turn to talk (more or less). Eventually, 6 o’clock rolled around and the boys (Alex, Tom, and Jon) got back to the house and the party dissolved.

Kind of. What actually happened is that the guys got back to the house and then started eating the leftover cupcakes and icing. Overall, it was definite win.

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20. January 2010 by admin.

So. I promised a craft post last week and I had it all planned out. I really did! I took pictures of them, enhanced different parts, and even started on the write up. But then I realized something:

The crafts I’ve been working on are birthday presents. The crafts I’ve been working on are birthday presents for people who haven’t gotten them yet because it’s not their birthdays.

…D’oh.

As soon as I mail out these gifts and get confirmation that they got their gifts, I’ll write a post about them. That’s three new posts that are pending.

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6. January 2010 by admin.

I am trying hard to make sure to post at least once a week this year. I thought that the best way to kick off the first post of the new year would be to talk about what got me interested in neurohacking as well as information about what I am currently working on.

The first time that I heard about neurohacking was during DEFCON 15. It was there that a nervous, pink-haired pixie talked about using your heart rate to play video games. I didn’t hear or think about neurohacking again until April of the following year at NOTACON where the pixie and a mad scientist were having a heated conversation about neurohacking. She wanted to use it to fix herself and he wanted to use it so that he can (in one form or another) live forever. At DEFCON 16, the mad scientist sat next to me at the bar and asked why I was interested in neurohacking. I replied with the stereotypical hacker answer: I’m curious.

Something that a lot of people don’t know about me is that I took four years of medical classes in hopes of becoming a forensic pathologist. I gave that idea up for my passion for technology. I (just like the majority of the medical world) thought that medicine and technology were more or less mutually exclusive.

We as hackers make sure that we know all of the ins and outs of a machine and then finagle it so that we can get it to do what we want it to, even if it wasn’t created to do so. Our bodies are nothing more than electrochemical machines and after we learn the ins and outs of it, we can get it to do things that we didn’t think were possible. The days of invention and creation in the medical field are few and far between.  I’m not saying that they’re all sitting on their thumbs, some progress is in fact being made. But it is up to us to try the new and adventurous since the good ol’ boys now seem to be scared to do so.

As part of my new habits for this year, I’m going to start quantifiying my life. I’ll post more about this later, but why this is important (to me) is that I don’t have health insurance and even if I did, I wouldn’t go to the doctors regularly. I don’t trust most of them nowadays. My experience has been that they have you come in, run a few tests, and then prescribe a lovely little pill for one ailment or another. With the quantified self, I hope to be able to establish a baseline for how I usually feel and operate so that I can easily track any deviations from said baseline. I’m also starting work on a new project that won’t be ready until at least 2011 and works with genetics.

Are there any questions from the blogosphere regarding neurohacking? Feel free to post them in the comments section.

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16. December 2009 by admin.

Greetings!

As some of you may have noticed (SecBarbie pointed it out today, for example), all past entries are missing! I deleted them a couple of days ago so that I can start over with this blog (pictures are still floating around, if there was one you’re looking for, contact me and I’ll send the link to you). At first, the blog wasn’t being updated because I didn’t really have an idea what to do with it. Tottie + No guidelines/ideas = bad idea. Then neon came with the idea to update her blog daily. Now, this idea sounds good in theory (to me). I had a general idea what I was going to post about everyday and I’d just do it. In practice, however, this didn’t work because I was expecting myself to generate that much content every day of every week. The reason why I’m telling you this is because I needed a segue to (and excuse for) a new schedule for blog posts next year (which is only technically a few weeks away).

Instead of updating everyday like I promised (and failed) to do, I’ll be making updates at least once a week. That is to say, I promise you at least one post a week but may or may not post more. The schedule for the posts I’ll be making for January 2010 (the absolute minimum ones, anyways) are as follows:

1/3: Neurohacking-Why I’m interested and Why You *Should* Be
1/10: Food-Recipes (step-by-step w/pics) of random goodness from December
1/17: Security-Digital Billboards
1/24: Craft-Random made bits from December

A few more changes will also be made to the main site (tottenkoph.com). As you can tell by clicking the pics link, I’m working on a photo album for Hacker Cons Past. Also starting next year, I’ll be posting a picture of the day. I’ll probably be posting those updates on the main RSS feed for those interested.

Anyways, have a (Happy Hanukkah/Merry Christmas/Merry Solstice/Happy Kwanzaa) and I’ll see you here in the New Year!

<3,

Tottie

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