So, it seems like this week I got asked to provide a little help and I am more than happy.
First a friend of a friend is am pursuing a doctorate degree in Adult Education at the University of Georgia and needs professionals to answer a survey. Simple rules are, you have to wor for the man, but not be the man. It is about mentoring and promotions so lend Mr. Chase Westray some minutes of your day and instead of herding sheep online or whatever it is you do in farmville, answer this simple survey.
My research area of interest is mentoring. I am writing to request your voluntary participation in an online survey; the data obtained from this survey will be used to complete my dissertation research. The research will identify the role of Human Resource Development activities, like mentoring, in career development. This survey also requests basic demographic information such as age, gender, racial/ethnic group membership about you and your mentor. Please be assured that none of this information will be used to identify you as an individual; rather it will be used to group you with other participants like you, in order to understand unique group experiences. These data will be used to complete my dissertation research. Completing this survey should take no more than 10 minutes. You may skip any questions that you do not feel comfortable responding to.
Next and just as important its about giving a little piece of yourself. About a month ago when I donated blood I also did the whole DNA swab thing and joined the National Marrow Registry. This week they sent me an e-mail letting me know that they are starting a campain including Mr Shazam. Watch the Video, put it on your Facebook and maybe even sign up. t does not hurt, and if you are a match hey don’t need to use the big needle…only some extreme cases, most of the time just blood works… so learn more, be informed and look and link the video.
Today everything wants to remember your password for you, from your internet browser to your mobile device. Is your password remembering supposed to be left to devices and software? What is the point of a password at that point? are we really achieving securiy anymore?
Keyloggers are rampant and visiting an untrusted website can leave you with your information floatig in cyberspace for those that know how to use it. From someone simply reading your e-mail to your identity being stolen. Strong passwords are a must have and remembering the a necessary evil, but a current trend is making this quite annoying.
Before we go on, I beg you to back up your pictures and important infomation in a regular basis. You never know when you computer is going to kick the bucket and leave you without that song that took you days to download back in the napster days. CDs and DVDs are so cheap that laziness is the only thing stopping you from having backed up data. Ok, but enough of this tangent and back to passwords.
Recently I had my main computer malfunction. Thankfully almost everything was backed up prior to an external hard drive, and I was able to keep the computer on life support for long enough to get anything I needed prior to my last backup. One thing I did not back up was my password setting. As you know I love strong passwords, even before many applications started to grade your passwords I was alread using them. My web browser has been remembering those passwords for me and making very convenient for the every day use.
For work I have to remember about 10 passwords that I use in a daily basis. For personal stuff the number is around 25 for various destinations and e-mail addresses. I don’t believe in one password to rule them all, simply because one cracked then not only are people going to be able to read your e-mail, the will also leave your bank account with 20 bucks. So leavin the web browser behind meant that now I had to remember all of those passwords, which was not a big deal, but it did make me think, should I really let this new browser start remembering all my passwords? and further yet, should I trust that my phone will never be stolen and let it remember several passwords for me as well?
The middle of the road for at least the computer is to have a thumb drive with some password management software so you can have access to your passwords from every single computer you get to and you only have to remember one maser password at that point. Realistically though, I don’t even do that even know I have the knowlege and the thumb drives.
I think the best solution is to pick strong passwords that are easy to remember so when you have to either change computers or type that password somewhere public you can remember it and not have yourself locked out. I don’t think that passwords is one thing that you should rely solely on machines to keep fr you.
Bea had not posted in a while and when she did it seems the little web spiders wanted to crawl all over that site and woke up some kind of hidden robot… bots they tell me are causing the issue.
The back end database for wordpress does not like to get too many hits too quickly so when that happens there is an auto suspend on the account so that the whole web server does not go down. We have some new pluggins that should take care of that issue and I need to do some clean up on the old web server and get rid of some old blogs we don’t use. Maybe this is a sign that spring is coming!
If you have numerous hits on your site and you run wordpress, do yourself a favor and install the WP-Cache pluggin. It will save you some headache.
Well, since the mythical bird cannot really die, it actually turned into ashes and I don’t have to rebuild it any time soon. Phoenix was my main computer for a little over 6 years in its various iterations. I think a couple of different processors, various memory chips, at least 3 different video cards and a hard drives have passed through that case with the pretty blue lights. Thanks to my wife’s assertive nature, we went ahead and purchased a laptop that is pretty powerful and will handle my gaming at home and on the road. Now the question is… do I rebuild phoenix or simply turn it into a pretty server with some storage drives.
I am sicks of Windows. Especially now that I have been using Windows 7. I have found the new OS to be a lot more of the same, just with pretty graphics and less annoying messages than Vista but I am not really sold on the new software. I am sorry but I am not one of those “I’m a PC” commercials with the “pretty” egos that invented the new features seem to be.
I am more Ubuntu which is my favorite Linux distro and one that I want to play with some more. I want to store all of my MP3 and video on a machine that I can easily remote desktop to, and once in a while maybe play some music out of it to some outside speakers on the deck looking at the river. So I think Ubuntu will do just that and tons more. So in the near future I will spending some quality time with my old computer and taking it apart and building it as a little Ubuntu machine. Not a dual boot mind you, but an actual official Ubuntu machine at home serving us for storage.
I also have not decided completely if I will do a complete salvage or start with all new components. The video card and power supply are only about a year old and could be reused. I am leaning towards a solid state drive and use it as an additional gaming machine in the future. For now I will enjoy the laptop and rest knowing that I was able to get all the data I needed our of phoenix in time. I guess this is as good as time as any to remind everyone to back up your files, specially documents and pictures. Burn them to a CD or DVD. Five bucks will save you a lot of regret later on!
First I want to start with a disclaimer. Why? Well, it has been a while since I wrote about someone’s death and I want to make sure that while this post will be satirical in nature, I don’t mean it to offend anyone, their memory, or bring more pain to their family. So, with that said, if you are related to the poor chick that was attacked by the whale I beg you not to keep reading because what I am about to write will be completely insensitive to your loss and I seem to be on a roll pissing people off.
Orcinus orca is a marine mammal from the dolphin family; I am no expert but thankfully my wife is. I wanted to be an expert growing up, since Marine Biologist was what I wrote on all of those “what do you want to be when you grow up,” right next to veterinarian. But that did not happen and I chose to go the computer geek route. So in language that is at my level of understanding, an Orca is a huge animal that somehow got the reputation killer… even a movie made about it which I saw as a kid. It probably somewhat steered me away from a life near the sea altogether.
When Steve Irwin died getting to close to marine life, I wanted to also rant about it… but I thought better of it back then and left it at one line. Today I cannot let it go any longer, especially after a report this morning informed me that previous situations in the park had lead to warn the people that run the place that the attack to a human was only a matter of time.
People love their pets a little too much at times. I am one of those people. I have become attached to the cats that share a household with me quite a bit, and when they do go it’s going to hurt like hell. They are domesticated animals, and to me that means that they won’t eat me unless I die first and they simply have no food. I do have to be dead though, and they have to be starving; however it is very unlikely they will take my life. I like being around those animals.
Then there is the second tier of animals that I see people keeping, but start questioning their sanity. That is animals that can actually kill you or your loved ones. They will be all the animals that to me are not domesticated, like things with fangs and venom and primates. Yeap, primates too, they get violent and can kill you but especially your kids.
Then we cross the “have your head examined” line. The people that actually seek these animals in the wild to swim with sharks. I somewhat understand the adrenaline junkie mentality because I would not mind running with the bulls some day… even though I don’t think I can outrun a calf. If I was to get trampled or someone gets chomped on by a shark, they totally deserve it… that is natural selection working its magic.
I am not a fan of zoos or aquariums because wild animals should not be kept in captivity, in my opinion. I have gone to them and I will accompany people to them, but I feel sad when I see amazing animals for humans to just gawk at. Now, if it is for conservation purposes that is another story. Humans should not be around predators, period; especially in captivity. I might be way wrong but I cannot believe a wild animal is happy to be in a cage. Yeah, those pretty “habitats” are just for your pleasure that most of them don’t enjoy past visiting hours. Even trained people get hurt by them all the time, and I think they are insane for loving animals that much that they want to be that close every single day.
Like Steve Irwin I think Dawn Brancheau died doing what she loved, but her employer should have discontinued the proximity between humans and the whales after they were warned of the danger. Seaworld, and even her family and friends during the funeral, wanted the show to go on. I am not as extreme as PETA, but I do agree with the flipper trainer on wanting to conserve marine mammals. It will never make sense to me that people have to be that close to animals that can kill you.
the site is back up now.
