In the for “Shits & Giggles” column
Yesterday I installed BBM on my iPhone.
It works nicely, unfortunately I couldn’t recover my old original BBM account and had to create a new one. I had a blackberry for a while and it was a very nice phone. The problem was that it was on AT&T and where I worked, the phone had zero AT&T coverage.
Creating a new account wasn’t a big deal.
WHY? Did I do this, you ask?
Well, I noticed a tech news story that said BBM now could search for other people who were using it.
After installation I told BBM to scan for people in my contacts list.
You know what? Zip, NADA, Not one of my friends is still using BBM.
I’ll leave it installed, who knows, perhaps some of my buds will turn up.
The app is pretty nice although I can’t comment on the chat function.
You have to have someone to chat with after all.
I still think that iMessage is awesome on the iPhone and since I have unlimited texting with my phone plan, BBM may be an application that just takes up some room but never gets used.
Reset your Yahoo password
Here we are again folks. Yet another data breach.
Yahoo has been hit again.
I have a yahoo account. I use it as a junk mail account. This is the email address I give if I think I’m going to end up on a mailing list or junk mail list. I’ll go for months without checking in at Yahoo. When I do finally get around to seeing what’s accumulated, It’s almost all SPAM!
I just changed the password, that was a thrill!
I’m debating if I should just delete the yahoo account entirely. This account does protect my privacy a bit.
Every time I hear about a breach like this, I’m reminded of all the companies that demand you have an account to interact with them.
It seems that no matter how zealously you protect your personal information. Somehow or another you find yourself looking at gaining access to a needed service, or doing without it.
Most of the time we just create the new account and write account name and password down on a postit that we promptly lose.
We do what we need to do, and as soon as we log off, we forget that new name and password then spend 30 minutes to an hour recovering both six months later.
I personally have a spreadsheet of 143 account names and passwords. (By the way, that 143 line spreadsheet, is trimmed! Over the past few years I’ve been killing accounts. I’m down to 143 from about 250.)
I was inordinately excited when Apple announced that their new operating system would create passwords, remember them, and make said passwords available across all their devices.
I could hardly wait for the new era of simplicity to begin.
Sadly, the reality is that many web sites are telling the Apple browser not to store or supply passwords automatically. Which leaves me referring to my spreadsheet often.
I was thinking about the bad old days
Back in the stoneage you could have a password that looked like “blat”, then the era of 8 character passwords dawned, so your password became “blatblat”. Not too long after, you had to have a capital letter so “Blatblat” became the norm. Then you had to have a number so “Blatblat8” got used.
Finally we were forced to change our passwords on a regular basis. Our passwords now look like “FranKen$$tein989”, if we’re lucky. More often than not a password looks like “hual38&&n3gg__7yyhaakj”
I’m far more in favor of passphrases. “I like to have my dick sucked. 69 rules!” Unfortunately many websites and even some computer programs don’t have password fields long enough to deal with a phrase. Which leaves us with a password that looks like the keyboard malfunctioned and is just as forgettable.
Who hasn’t seen
“Your new password must be 8 characters long or greater. Your password cannot be reused, your new password cannot contain any part of your old password or user name.”
So you spend 5 minutes coming up with something clever that you’ll remember only to have the web site or computer system say;
“You password is unacceptable and must contain upper and lower case characters, at least one symbol and two numerals.”
Now you’re thinking for another 10 minutes to access your bank account because you want to check a balance.
If you are finally successful in getting the password changed, you’re likely to have written down the wrong sequence of characters because the system has forced you to try again so many times you’re not sure what the hell you entered.
I personally give up after two or three tries at changing a password. It’s easier for me to just call the vendor and ask for a human. Often, I’ll shut down electronic access when I speak to a human. Invariably I’m asked why I’m terminating web access and I say flat out, “I don’t want to deal with of your insane password requirements.”
I’ve found that I spend just as much time waiting on the phone for a human, as I do fooling around with quarterly password changes. By cutting out the frustration of password changes I’m in a far calmer frame of mind.
Recently I realized that I’m less likely to do business with someone who cannot provide paper forms instead directing me to their corporate website where I can fill out this or that online.
The odds of my doing business with such a company are further reduced if I have to create an account before I can get to the forms.
The truly ironic part of all this, is that I’m a technology kind of guy. I’ve been in the business for decades. I know and understand the need for good strong passwords.
I can’t imagine how annoying all this stuff is to folks my Moms age.
Why does no one listen?
You know, when it comes to computers I’m pretty good with ‘em.
So when I notice that someone who shall remain nameless, has a cracked aluminum bezel, (on their laptop, after repeatedly dropping the poor machine) and suggest that it would be an excellent idea to have the screen replaced ASAP.
I’m not making the suggestion just to hear myself talk.
I know of course in the end that I’m going to be called upon to fix it when the system fails. So one could say that my suggesting the repair is an act of pure selfishness. They’d be right and I make no apologies!
However, when a certain someone decides to ask everyone else they know what they think about spending the $800 to get the machine repaired. Then take these other peoples advice, but still do nothing! I can’t help but be a little annoyed.
Especially when these other people;
1 Don’t know the value of the machine
2 Are suggesting that for $800 you can buy a new machine
3 Are forgetting the little extras like larger hard drive, expanded memory, top of the line processor etc.
Yes, for only a little more than $800 you can buy a new machine. A bottom of the line stripped unit that will in fact run but which isn’t a worthy replacement for the unit being replaced.
This is one of those times when I wonder why I even bother.
The cracked bezel led to flexing of the display near the hinge every time the laptop was opened or closed. This led to plastic supports breaking and falling out of the display, further weakening the assembly.
I said “That needs to be repaired now.”
I was ignored.
Then came the day last week when the display was finally so weak that something inside was shorting out.
This caused the computer to randomly hang or reboot.
Then it was “What’s wrong with my computer?”
I’m thinking, “Well DUH!!!”
Turns out that the short in the display damaged the video processor on the mother board. Which in the case of a laptop typically means total replacement of the mother board.
NOW the cost to repair the machine exceeds the cost to repair it!
Humm,
You don’t have to be psychic to see what happens next.
“Oh My GOD! I can’t finish my whatsit for work! What am I going to do?”
Hey, I’m keeping my mouth shut and watching TV. I do turn the volume up on Lethal Weapon 3. The explosions helped drown out the meltdown.
I’ll wait for the panic attack to subside, to be followed by the self loathing, followed by depression, followed by could I borrow YOUR machine?
That’s when I point out that while it might be possible to restore their data to my machine I doubt that I have enough room to accommodate a 750GB drive.
I also point out that my machine has my book, and my client data on it and that I’ve got appointments next week that will no doubt require me to have my machine.
I suggest that the person get in their car and go to the Apple store. When they get to the Apple store, I suggest that they purchase a new machine and that they don’t forget to purchase Apple Care. Then I say buh bye!
That of course is not what happened. OHHHHH NO! Nothing in my life is ever that simple or straight forward.
After searching for a day or so, for any alternative to purchasing a new machine.
The used market provided a nice solution. That can also be read as CHEAP!
Saturday evening a new laptop appeared in the house. Well gently used, it’s in great condition and it’s the next generation up from the laptop that suffered such an undeserved demise.
It sat on the counter, nothing on it’s mind, all night.
This morning I woke the little guy up and started trying to figure out how to restore the backup data without restoring the entire operating system.
I figured it out in no time, then found a nasty little bugaboo.
The other person had 377GB of data stored on the DESKTOP of the old machine. The problem is that the maximum capacity of the hard Drive on the new machine is 299 GB
OOOPS!
Talk about 25 pounds of shit and a 5 pound bag!
First, WHO keeps that amount of data on their desktop?
Then I started poking around and could tell it was mostly video.
Uh oh… it’s probably not the family Christmas.
The restore utility is a utility that restores only a selected set of folders at the user level.
Yes I could restore the desktop folder if I had enough room but I can’t select the important folders in the desktop folder.
At this level with this backup routine, it’s kind of an everything in a folder or nothing affair.
Ok time to get clever!
First I’ll restore everything but the desktop.
Then I’ll see if I can navigate the backups themselves, digging into the data and bringing back only the really important stuff.
NO! not the movies your mother shouldn’t see, I’m going for the work stuff.
Thank goodness for UNIX, Terminal, and FTP.
Since I’m the administrator of the network and of all the backups I can, in an emergency do this kind of thing. To be honest I’d rather not!
When you go digging around on someone else’s computer or in their backups you almost always find something you wish you’d not found.
But here I am…
Cleaning up another mess.
I really need to upgrade the switches on the network to gigabit. Or I could justify a new WiFi router with 600Mb capability.
But none of that is going to help me today. Today it’s slug it out with the infrastructure I’ve got and learn from what’s not working well, what I need to do.
I laugh when I think about it. I’ve got a network here in my house with storage and speeds that most small or even medium sized businesses don’t have.
Maybe I should come up with a way to capitalize on that. Humm another thought for another day.
SIgh, an hour to transfer one of the work folders. It looks like there’s about a DVDs worth of data in that one.
I go back to editing my book, then I realize I could blog a bit and that brings us to here.
I can’t help but notice that we’d never have gotten to “Here” if someone had simply done what I said to do in the first place!
Live but don’t learn seems to be the motto lately!
Finally got tired of the Russian sites attacking my websites
I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to block an entire country from my sites. But I really felt like a had no choice.
My web site(s) were being attacked almost constantly. I decided that I no longer wanted to maintain an endless list of individually denied ip addresses.
After 1500 it’s just too much to manage especially when you have to keep adding addresses.
I hated to lock out those folks who might actually enjoy my content, there simply wasn’t any other way to deal with the situation.
How do you tell the good from the bad? The attackers, or bandwidth stealers from the guy in Moscow who reads and gets a laugh from stuff I say?
China is another country that is almost always hammering on my sites.
They’re about to suffer the same fate as The Russian Federation.
Now I’m off to write some other stuff, perhaps a short story.
It’s one of those days for me, Squirrel!