Stop Telling Me How to Create My Password!!!
I am fed up to here with Web sites that presume the right to tell me -- sometimes with annoying precision, equally often with annoying vagueness -- what constitutes a "valid" password.
It's my information.
It's my account.
It's my freaking password.
"Must contain at least eight and no more than 16 characters and include at least one letter one number and one special symbol." Bullpuckey. Says who?
Sometimes the rules make it impossible for me to create a passsword I can remember. So what do I have to do? Write it down. How's THAT for secure, you lame-os?
If I want to be stupid enough to use 1234 as my password or my name or whatever else, what the heck business is that of yours?
Keep your grimy mitts off my passwords!
There. Now I feel better.
:-)
Experience -> Knowledge -> Wisdom
Experience leads to
Knowledge, which when reflected upon creates
Wisdom, which can then be applied to improve
Experience and
Knowledge
Or:
Don't Waste Your Time on This Slide Show
I usually find much of what the SocialMediadd folks offer to be of some reasonable value, sometimes even really useful.
That's not the case for this slide show that purports to explain 13 things to factor into your website redesign. It's actually a bunch of thin statistics that end up offering very little actionable advice. Don't bother wasting the significant amount of time it takes just to read this extended Hubspot commercial.
That's not the case for this slide show that purports to explain 13 things to factor into your website redesign. It's actually a bunch of thin statistics that end up offering very little actionable advice. Don't bother wasting the significant amount of time it takes just to read this extended Hubspot commercial.
Google Has Funny Error Messages
I was trying to link an event I'd signed up for to my Google calendar from gMail today and encountered the error message in this image. Too funny. I like this kind of creativity. Brightens my day even when something has gone wrong.
There's an art to this and Google gets it.
There's an art to this and Google gets it.
My Twitter Account Was Hijacked; Support Appears Horrid
Well, it finally happened. My Twitter account was hacked and hijacked by a good-for-nothing spammer. Suddenly I began receiving messages from followers asking if I'd sent them Tweets about diet programs or people gossiping negatively about them on Twitter. Of course, I hadn't.
So I changed the password, disabled a bunch of app connections and researched what other steps I might take.
Finally, I tried to send Tweets to the folks who had reported their concerns. No can do. Twitter tells me I've sent too many Tweets now and advises that I try again in a few hours!
On top of that, I went to get help with the problem and Twitter informs me, after I submit my report, that, "We are usually able to respond within a few days, but some issues may take longer." A few days? In an era of instant communication that they are capitalizing on? Really? Ridiculous.
If this doesn't clear up today it will be the final reason to kill my Twitter account and never use the service again. Frankly, its value has been pretty limited anyway but as long as it remained low-maintenance, I was OK using it. But this hassle has already cost me over an hour and there's no telling how much longer it will keep up.
And don't get me started on the filthy, corrupt, greedy idiots who engage in this vandalism and cyberviolence. They all but destroyed email and they clearly have their sights set on social media next. Their behavior is despicable and cowardly.
The President's Gospel vs. Ralph Reed's Bigotry
President Obama's clear understanding of the message of Jesus being, in part, the necessity of caring for the poor among us came up against Ralph Reed's narrower perspective on the meaning of Christianity yesterday. I thought the contrast was stark and important to bring to greater attention.
The President, quoting from Luke 12:48, said his view of social policy coincides with the statement, "for unto whom much is given, much shall be required." That was an accurate paraphrase of the actual quotation from the King James Version but I prefer the NIV on this: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded;" The passage goes on to say, "and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."
That the largest portion of Jesus' teachings -- insofar as we have them recorded reliably -- is about neighborly love and caring for the downtrodden. So, too, were the teachings of virtually every Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) prophet,'
But Reed, of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said that for the president to tie his tax policy to Jesus’s teachings “is theologically threadbare and straining credulity.”
It's a classic clash between the Social Gospel and Socially Conservative Fundamentalist Christians. This clash, in turn, is a product of late 20th Century America. Jesus talks not once about abortion or gay rights or any of the other social issues on which the Christian Right is focused like a laser beam while ignoring most or all of his teachings about love, relationship, charity, compassion and forgiveness.
It's sad, really. This time, at least, the President got it right and the guy with a Ph.D. in history who leads a large faith-based movement got it, if not wrong, at least sideways.
MS Word on Mac Fundamentally Broken
One of my main clients has insisted that we use Microsoft Word for project document collaboration rather than my strongly preferred Google Docs. But of course the client is always right, so I'm adapting.
But tonight I spent an hour longer than I needed to spend editing a document that required substantial modifications. Word on Mac OS X just seems to lose its mind from time to time. I lost substantial work three different times when all of the menus in Word -- dropdowns and ribbon-based -- just started showing blank contents. All other apps running at the time were fine. I'd try Command-S to save a document and get an absolutely blank dialog box in the middle of the screen. It was just plain weird.
On other occasions, text entry slowed to an absolute crawl. I'd be typing 5-10 words ahead of what was displaying on the screen while the disk thrashed.
I've been avoiding using MS Office products as much as possible for the past several years and now I understand why. They just don't work reliably.
Tim Thomas is a Jerk
Yeesh. My headline expresses my thoughts but so does this parenthetical remark by the writer:
(Is it any wonder that the country is so politically fractured when a bunch of guys can't agree to just get together and talk sports?)
Life is Easy and Light
Check out this delightful video of a TEDx presentation from a guy who speaks from the heart about the equation between simplicity and freedom, and between freedom and the easy, light life.
Blazing Fast Worldwide Internet on Near Horizon
The UN body responsible for setting standards for the international use of the radio spectrum has signed off on specs that promise to create a whole new Internet experience. The new standard, dubbed IMT_Advanced, is commonly discussed as "true 4G". It provides the bandwidth and protocols to support data transfer at 100 times the speed of today's fastest 3G systems.
Speculation is that it will take two more years for this new standard to reach deployment to the consumer. It's likely to happen much faster because one of the cell phone providers will jump on this with both feet and start implementing and deploying it, forcing its competitors to accelerate their plans as well.
Supporters say that this speed is so high that there will be literally no visible delay from the time of requesting a Web page and having it show up on the 4G-enabled device.
