Why, you ask is today “Fun Day!”? Try here for size.
It seems so unfair that I have to go through this torture despite the fact that I’ve been taking care of things (is this vague enough yet?). This deviltry is purely preventative. Bugger…
Category: Personal
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Electrical Issues
I’ve been an electrical person the last few days. On Sunday, I was eating lunch with Courtney and Kapow KABOOM KABOOOOOMMMMM!!!! a thunderstorm came rolling over us. We were sitting outside at Apres Diem in Virginia Highland and at least 5 of the strikes were within 100 yards. It was impressive, to say the least.Then, yesterday, I witnessed a power cut-out go kablooie outside my office window. Also impressive.
And last night we had a thunderstorm roll over the house with several strikes within a very short distance; close enough to make the TV go BzzzT! BzzzzzzZZZZZT! Also, consequently, fried Comcast cable service. Hopefully that’s temporary. I cannot live without my internet, obviously.
Perhaps I should stay away from electrical circuits for a few days, just in case?
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Poison Ivy
I mentioned last week that I had a large outgrowth of poison ivy in my yard. My dad was in town and he went out back to RoundUp the heck out of them, so I was unaware, until now, just how much I had! Approximately 110% of the mass of my backyard plants is poison ivy. Thankfully, only about 25% of my front yard is the pernicious weed. I hit everything I could find with the RoundUp and we’ll see how that works in about a week.I must have gotten into a bit of it last week because I’m fighting off a nice little case. Yippee.
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Google Calenar Sync
“Thank the maker!”, as C-3PO would say. Google has released a program designed to synchronize Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook, either 2003 or 2007 (and only on XP or Vista).
This may not be news, but it’s news to me because I was using Funambol and it was giving me hell.
Now I need a phone that I can synchronize with Outlook and all will be right with the world. Or, at least, I won’t have to call back my dentist to reschedule an appointment because I didn’t know there was an overlap.
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Poison Ivy
Today’s Xkcd hits a bit close to home for me.
One of my fun surprises when I moved to Atlanta was just how big poison ivy can grow around here. A tip: if you’re hiking in Georgia, don’t lean against the four-inch-thick hairy vine that’s growing up the side of a tree. For that matter, don’t lean against the hairy vine no matter how thick. Where I lived in New Hampshire, poison ivy was always a ground plant, growing in small clumps or bushes, so I got me an edumacation the first time I had to go to the doctor for a steroid shot.
Now I hear that increased CO2 concentrations can lead to explosive growth of our hairy-stemmed poisonous friend. Anecdotally, I can attest that I have a ton of poison ivy growing in my yard this year. It wasn’t there previously; this is new growth going to town with a vengeance. We’ve been forced to bring out the nuclear weapons (Roundup™).
So, watch out hiking in Georgia; if you’re working with the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club, always always always wear long pants.
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Jenn's Coming Home!
Yay! Jenn will be “home” in an hour. By “home” I mean Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. I guess I should think about departing to pick her up.
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Further Schooling
Open Question:
If you had sufficient time to devote to full-time graduate school, or just full-time study in the Gentleman Scholar type of framework, what would you study? We are assuming here that you haven’t burned yourself out already on, or sworn a blood oath about avoiding, advanced academic degrees.
I think I’d have to go for history. Probably something technology-centric. I really don’t have any desire to go back to school to specialize my technical skills any more than they already are.
You?
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My Ruhsam-ness Falling off Google
The Eyebrow used to be in the top 3 of google hits when you searched on my last name, “Ruhsam”. It was often the first hit. Now it’s on the seventh page.
[sigh] I’m forlorn.
Apparently a lot more Ruhsam’s are appearing on the web and doing google-worthy things. That’s good! It used to be that I occupied 7 or 8 of the first 10 google hits and there would only be 6 or 7 pages worth of hits. Now there’s a gazillion hits on all sorts of people. I need to do some work to move The Evil Eyebrow back up the rankings! Any social networker worth their salt would tell me to get out there and participate on message boards and blog comment streams. We’ll see.
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Foo Bolton -or- Michael Fighters
I plugged the Foo Fighters CD “One by One” into my CD Drive, iTunes pops up and look what I find!
Apparently Michael Bolton is hacking the internet in order to increase his sales.
Thankfully, after changing up the artist name in iTunes I have determined that I am the owner of ZERO Michael Bolton music.
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Encryption, Security, Passwords
If you are a hip, with-it, web 2.0 person, you probably have more online IDs and passwords than you can shake a stick at1. I do. Sitting here in front of my computer, I can think of 15 without breaking a mental sweat. To simplify my life, I’d been basically keeping the same user ID and password for everything, to avoid having a long list of passwords sitting around for someone to find. Unfortunately, there are numerous websites that don’t allow my standard password (which has special characters2). Some modifications were called for. To date, I’d really only needed to remember 3 or 4 different variations on my password theme.
Then I read Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow (great book, by the way), and I kicked off a huge security revamp on my online life. I generally now have different passwords for everything, although I’m keeping the same user ID.
This raises the question of how I’m going to remember all of these (strong) new passwords. An example of one I use would be “yelling@OutLoud294&+”, which is hard to figure out but easy to forget. Thankfully, TrueCrypt, a free, open-source encryption software lets you encrypt bits and pieces of your hard drive where you can place those passwords.
But wait! What happens if you’re travelling and you want to log in to your bank account? Therein lies my woefully unused thumb drive, pictured here.
After ridding the drive of the terribly annoying U3 software3 I turned half of the 1gb thumb drive into an encrypted volume that lets me use it like a regular drive space once I’ve “mounted” it with the encryption password. So, I essentially have a 1/2 gb thumbdrive worth of free space for regular document transport and a 1/2 gb thumbdrive to which I need a password for access. Remembering one crazy password is easier than 15.
One of the nice things about TrueCrypt is that you can load the executables onto your portable drive; whatever computer you plug into won’t need to have TrueCrypt installed as long as you have those files.
So, now you know where to go to find all of my passwords. You still need to torture me for the encryption key, though.
1What does that phrase really mean, anyway?
2This list includes some finanicial websites that really should know better: Bank of America, American Express, Fidelity, US Department of Education, for a few. Not permitting me to use strong passwords does not give me a warm fuzzy about my security.
3This software crashed my home computer every single time I plugged in.