Got this message from Google Voice today:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

and received this handy transcription:

It’s not a matter and I want to make a single. But I think the rest of the not. If you’re not. You’re gonna.

Unfortunately, Google Voice didn’t recognize that the message had been left in Spanish, and so the message makes no sense. What’s really funny is that while it bears no relation to the sense of the message in Spanish as the Spanish speakers among you will recognize, Google Voice did a great job of making sense of the sounds assuming the speaker was speaking English!

For many reasons Pennsic 39 was a wash out for me this year. There was still a possibility that I’d be able to go out alone for the middle weekend, but that shriveled like my manhood under the gaze of a woman who would not be scorned. So, instead of simply sitting around drinking beer and sulking, we decided to sit around drinking in our tent and sing instead! Good Times were had by those who attended our mini Pennsic, I think. The “event” started for me on Thursday night, myself having taken off Friday to prepare the yard. By Friday afternoon the tent was set up and skulls and candles were in place for night time festivities. That night was nice, with only one friend and his kids making it out for a little pre-Pennsic party. Most of the fun happened Saturday afternoon into Saturday night as several of my similarly Pennsic-pitying friends showed up to share story and song supplemented by fine food and strong ale. We found many analouges to Pennsic in my back yard, though the town runs were much shorter and we didn’t have to wait for the honey wagon to clean Mr John. We all commented on how what we really missed about Pennsic the most were all the people who are really almost extended family who we miss very much. We also enjoyed star gazing and the Perseid meteor shower as the night grew older. I spent almost all Sunday out in the tent listening to Ceol na nGael with Eileen Ivers as guest host which made for an absolutely fantastic show and a perfect cap to my personal Pennsic. Finally got the tent down and stowed tonight after work

Now that smartphones are everywhere and seemingly everyone is hooked into the social web, there are a number of different ways to keep tabs on whats going on at Pennsic in real time even from afar. I’ll keep poking around for new links and updating this post as I come across them.

• Pennsic twitter feed
• Most recent Pennsic photos posted to Flickr
• Pennsic Independent RSS feed
• Pennsic parties page on Facebook
• Pennsic War on Tribe
• NOAA weather page for Slippery Rock, PA
• Live Weather Channel Radar for Slippery Rock, PA
• Pennsic Party Calendar
• Latest Pennsic Hits on Google

Just a short note to my military friends. Doubtless you’ll be hearing about this soon enough anyway, but just in case you do not: Tom Ryan is due to present a talk at the upcoming Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas about the dangers of revealing too much information on social networking sites. According to reports on computerworld, FOXNews, and Armed with Science [dod.mil], Ryan ran an experiment to see how much sensitive information he could glean through social networking. He created the ficticious persona of “Robin Sage”, a good-looking twenty-something, hacker grad from MIT who claimed to be an intern at Naval Network Command. In the month Ryan ran the experiment he was able to build a considerable number of social networking connections on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with active duty military personnel and officials and through these connections was able to glean military intelligence. The simplest and most obviously dangerous example of leaked information should be of immediate concern to military folks:

For example, one of Robin’s soldier friends posted a photo of his unit on surveillance duties at a mountain outpost in Afghanistan. That inadvertently exposed their location, because the photo contained GeoIP data from the camera.