Category : Rants
Posted in Rants on 28. Feb, 2011
I’ve always been a fairly sparse user of Facebook. I mainly like to keep my account running to keep in touch with a few specific people, even though I’ve “befriended” many.
When I first signed up for and started using Facebook, I was about 10 years removed from high school, so naturally the first friend flux was a bunch of people that I hadn’t heard from for about 10 years, since high school.
Then the coworkers also became friends. Then many family members started using it.
I got used to watching the daily life streams of people that I didn’t really think I’d ever be in contact with again in my lifetime. It’s weird stuff. There’s nothing more interesting or disturbing than following the daily drama of somebody you have not talked to or seen for several years since high school.
Now, these days, the daily dramatics from people of past times has given way to a much more commercialized stream of information. I’ve started to “like” many business for many reasons, and now whenever I log into Facebook I’m basically seeing a feed that consists of the following:
- Some people that I haven’t known for a long time posting pictures of their babies that I’ll never see.
- Some people that I haven’t known for a long time bitching about daily life.
- Lot’s of new blog posts and new article announcements from many online publications.
- Lot’s of commercial and promotional stuff from local businesses.
Logging into Facebook is kinda like going to a high school reunion sponsored by all the businesses that have enticed me to “like” them on Facebook.
These days when I log in, it’s becoming more and more overrun by businesses and people with commercial intent, it doesn’t seem so much to be the friendly gathering ground that it used to be.
The more that I think about this, I should start focusing on the people or organizations that I really do want to hear from. If I did this, I would:
- Only be be friends on Facebook with people I currently know or socialize with, and family members.
- Only follow the Minnesota Twins and bands that I like to keep up on.
Yeah, I might do that.
I recently have been using 1Password to keep all my passwords organized. For the most part, it’s helping me to be a lot more efficient during my work, due to the fact that it makes keeping track of multiple passwords a lot more easy. I use this app with Firefox and Dropbox to make my life easy.
There is one thing that I really like about 1Password, and there is one thing that I really do not like, and the rest of my opinions seem to sit somewhere in the middle.
What are these two things I’m referring to?
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Posted in Rants on 27. Jul, 2010
So I downloaded a full backup of one of my hosting accounts at Hostmonster a few weeks ago, I’m talking the full site files backup, in a zip file.
This backup file apparently contained a bunch of email accounts and their contents, in addition to my site files and such.
I tucked the file away in my hard drive where I keep my other backups.
Just last night I noticed that my anti-virus app (Kaspersky) was going off the hook, to put it lightly. It was alerting me of all sorts of trojans and viruses, all kinds of different types, it basically looked like my computer was infected with just about every type of trojan on the market.
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Posted in Rants on 03. May, 2010
Have you ever been listening to some of your favorite tunes, or Pandora radio, or something similar, and arrived upon a web site only to have some cheesy music blaring over top of your own playlist?
In an attempt to stop the madness, you try to find some sort of “mute” or “stop the music” button on the offending web site, only to realize that you are going to have to listen to the background music, even though you have no desire to.
Your impression of this offending web site is now negative, just because of the music.
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Posted in Rants on 29. Apr, 2010
I recently purchased a Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000. It’s a nice little thing. It has the side buttons that I can use to move sideways in applications. It has no cord.
When I first hooked it up, I was just happy to have a mouse that didn’t have sticking button issues, like the previous. Quickly I noticed that I had a bad lag issue with the new wireless mouse. Dang. It persisted and didn’t go away. Attempting to systematically shut down applications and test other junk didn’t help either. The lag persisted and was pretty annoying.
The Solution
Eventually, I tried moving the USB portion of the mouse to a USB port on the front of the PC. That fixed my issue. The annoying lag was gone. Apparently the mouse had trouble talking to the USB connector when it was plugged into the back of the computer, behind the desk.
This is kinda lousy though, because now I don’t have any available USB ports on the front of the PC – if I want to plug something else in, like a camera or a hard drive. I’ll have to go mouse-less to use USB peripherals. I better get used to keyboard commands.
Posted in Rants on 28. Apr, 2010
I just received an email from some guy who owns a product that is marketed by his affiliates. I’m on his list, as I’ve taken a look at his product and have subscribed to hear what he has to say on a frequent basis. I like his techniques and feel he can be learned from just by watching him do his thing.
He is offering to give people SEO tips in return for keyword based links to his site. Pretty crafty. Part of the schooling in that whole situation is him lining up to get all those links.
This could be a good example of using your product promoters or other contacts to help build some keyword based links quickly. Trading knowledge for links.
Posted in Rants on 07. Apr, 2010
Ah yes, Gary. And his many counterparts. They all have the same name.
Web sites under development need testing. Testing often requires creating user accounts and users. I like to use Gary and his clones as testers on my projects.
Who is this Gary that I keep mentioning over and over again?
This guy:
It’s a long story, but basically there is a vault full of clones in Fallout 3, all named Gary. It’s a silly place. There’s 14 of them if I remember correctly.
I can log into my applications in development as any one of the Gary’s, most of the time. I have a hard time keeping track of who’s who though, there’s so many of them and they all are only known by their number.
That helps me keep track of those guys.
Posted in Rants on 01. Apr, 2010
It’s a simple word, “password”.
This word will be around forever, it’s ingrained in people’s minds everywhere, as the term that describes a secret phrase that is needed to gain access to a hidden fortress (or in most people’s cases, an email account).
Here’s why I don’t like it – “password” seems to indicate that you’re using a “word”, such as something that is readable and understandable within the set of a spoken language. Like “dog”, or “awesome”. Those are words. Unfortunately they are probably used as passwords by somebody, somebody waiting to get an account hacked.
Times have changed
You don’t want to use basic words as passwords anymore. It’s a bad idea.
Not only does it give somebody the ability to guess the password (even though that would usually be kinda hard), it also gives hackers the ability to use dictionary tools to hack your account without much effort.
A lot of inexperienced Internet users use very poor passwords, in terms of complexity and ability to be guessed or hacked. Most of these people can’t be blamed though, mainly because they just need to be educated on the topic so they understand why they should use tricky passwords.
The problem…
When an inexperienced Internet user is prompted to create a “password”, they immediately hear the term “word” – and they probably think of a “word” to use as their password. It’s just natural.
Not a good idea.
The word “password” suggests to people to pick something that is indeed a word, which is a bad idea.
Those aren’t words
These days, a secure password is something like “a$W.e+S)0!m@E”.
Countless web applications are requiring users to create passwords with a combination of letters, numbers and special characters. Rarely will a web hosting provider let you set a password that contains any less than those three items, for example.
Those types of passwords aren’t words. Those are complex phrases of characters, unable to be spoken or pronounced as words.
That’s a good thing though. But, as you can see, the term “word” doesn’t really apply to these cryptic strings of characters, letters and numbers.
The whole problem is that I don’t know of anything better to call them. Maybe something like passkey? Naw, that just doesn’t sound right.
