Sent from my iPhone

So there is a big houpla going on over Google Plus user names. Google seems to be suspending accounts of people that don’t use their real name. Well, I don’t use my real name. I’m a nobody, so I doubt I will be suspended. I feel more comfortable online using a pseudonym, and have been using it for years. I want to be able to say whatever I want online, and not have to worry about employees, friends, or family finding it online. I want to be able to say I am going on vacation without worrying about somebody finding where I live and robbing me. I just feel better using a pseudonym online.

What is Google going to do if celebrities start joining Google Plus? Are they going to expect Lady Gaga fans to look for Stefani Germanotta? Charlie Sheen fans will have to look for Carlos Estévez? And the countless others that go by different names. How does anybody at Google even know a person didn’t use their real name if their aren’t popular? And what about Kevin Rose? He is forwarding his blog to his Google Plus account, but his real name is Robert Rose.

All this nonsense of making people use their real names is just stupid, and unenforceable. It’s still the early days of Google Plus though. Google is full of smart people, so I’m sure there will get this figured out soon.

I always have to have the latest and greatest in software. Some people hate change, but I love it. So of course I upgraded to OS X Lion yesterday. It was a pretty simple and easy upgrade. It took about 45 minutes, and Lion was up and running with all my settings intact. For the most part it works great. Nothing too revolutionary though. I’m not even sure how much I am going to be using any of the new features.

The Launchpad it interesting. It’s like an iPad look of your apps. I think it would be great on a touch screen, but don’t see the point of it on a desktop. It’s much quicker to use Spotlight, or my favorite Google Search Box to launch an app.

Mission Control is pretty looking and makes it easier to set up your multiple desktops. I like it, but I’m not a fan of the new layout of the multiple desktops. I preferred them in a grid rather than a in a line, but I can get use to it.

I don’t really understand the Full Screen Mode that most apps have now. I guess I see if you want to work distraction free, but it just blanks out my second monitor when I go to full screen. It kind of defeats the point in having two monitors.

Then there is the backward scrolling. I don’t know anybody that didn’t turn that off. Again that makes sense on a tablet or touchscreen, but not a desktop. It should have been off by default.

I also wasn’t a big fan of the new layout in Mail, but that can be quickly changed in the preferences. No big deal.

As for the new mouse gestures? I hate the Magic Mouse, so I won’t be using any of them. My Logitech mouse just feels so much nicer in my hand. Apple makes some great hardware, but for some reason they can’t make a mouse that fits comfortably in your hand.

I did have one problem with Lion. It would not connect to my NAS. A quick Google search and I found a workaround, and got it working. A few terminal commanded, a couple reboots, and I connected to my NAS.

Overall I like the look. It’s not drastically different from Snow Leopard, and they have added some cheesy animations, but overall, probably worth the $30 upgrade despite all my complaints.

I feel like I’m getting a little social networked out. I love the new Google Plus. I have been on it since day one, and it seems to be getting better day by day. I just don’t know exactly what to use it for. I use Facebook for my family, and people I know in person. It’s mostly non-technical people and I only check it once or twice a day. Twitter is more my throw away comments. My Twitter stream goes by pretty fast. I dip in every so often and catch what I can catch, but I probably miss 80% of the tweets that go by. Google plus on the other hand, people seem to be posting longer posts, and it’s easier for more conversation to occur there. It may threaten Twitter, and Facebook, but I think it could kill blogging. Kevin Rose has already forwarded his kevinrose.com blog over to his G+ account. I think that’s crazy, but I totally get it. People are hanging out on G+ and not kevinrose.com. Nobody really comments on blogs much anymore, but there on tons of comments on G+. People aren’t using RSS as much anymore either, so you they aren’t seeing blog updates, whereas they are seeing G+ updates.

I was thinking about putting this post on G+, but I still want control of my content. I still want my thoughts, and however lame my writing is, to be on my site. I want to be able to look back at it 20 years from now and know it’s still here. In the past I wasn’t good at preserving my archives, but now I want to more.

So what should I use G+ for? I’m not a fan of cross-posting, so I’m not interested in sending my tweets to G+. That’s one great thing about G+ now is nobody is cross posting things yet. I think it would wreck G+ if Twitter streams started showing up. If anything, I might start cross posting my blog posts to G+. Nobody really reads my blog, so it wouldn’t be that spammy.

So Facebook=real friends and family, Twitter=short throw away comments, Blog=longer thoughts I want to get off my chest, G+=somewhere between Twitter and my blog? Will I be able to keep up with three social networks and my blog? Only time will tell.

BTW this was written in the cool new “Full-Screen” feature in WordPress. Great job WordPress dudes, I love it.

My link blog that’s usually over there —> is currently down, and has been for a few days. I use Pinboard.in to run the link blog, and some of their servers are down because they just happen to be on some racks that were pulled by a FBI raid. They say it should be back up this weekend. The only reason I am mentioning this is that when it comes back online I’m expecting all my links from the past few days to spam Twitter, and I’m just apologizing a head of time.

I’m big on password security. It drives me crazy when people can’t remember their passwords. Before recently I couldn’t tell you any of my passwords if you held a gun to my head. Not because I am forgetful, but because I had crazy passwords, all over 10 digits with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. They were all stored in LastPass, so they were always filled out for me, and if I needed to know them I could just look them up. Everything was great until I listened to a recent Security Now podcast.

Steve Gibson realized that the entropy of a password really isn’t as important the length, and the use of upper case, lower case, numbers, and symbols. The use of all four of those increases the character set to 96, 26 upper case, 26 lower case, 10 numbers, and 33 symbols. That combined with a long password makes it virtually impossible to brute force it unless you use dictionary words, or make it too easy.

Which password below is stronger?

D0g…………………

PrXyc.N(n4k77#L!eVdAfp9

Yep, the first one because it is longer. It would take the first one 95 times longer to crack, yet it’s simple to remember. The key is to just have a short password you can remember, and then some kind of padding system you can remember. The first one probably isn’t the best because the padding is simple, but it is simple to come up with your own algorithm for passwords.

Everybody should sit down for 5 minutes and come up with their password algorithm. You could just have four characters that you can remember like tR4$ or something followed by some simple padding like q]q]q]q]q], and you will have a 14 character password that is easy to remember and super hard to crack. My algorithm takes some characters out of the URL, so now all my passwords are long and hard to crack, but yet easy to remember.

The only problem are sites that don’t allow symbols in their passwords. I’m talking to you Verizon and Capital One. So I have a handful of passwords that can’t use my algorithm and have passwords that I can’t remember, but thanks to LastPass, I will never not be able to know what it is.

Steve Gibson has a site explaining his whole theory on why length is more secure than entropy. According to his calculations the fastest my passwords could be cracked in is 1.65 hundred centuries, and I’m fine with that.