• Giving money to family sucks

    June 16, 2011 / No Comments

    So my father-in-law lost his job back in April. I kind of lost a little respect for him because he found out in February that he was going to be losing his job, but wasn’t going to bother to start looking until it happens. He wanted to just collect unemployment like everybody else that has lost their job recently. That’s not really cool in my book. Jobs are pretty scarce in central Minnesota where he lives, especially for someone with no education, and not many skills.

    Over the last couple months we have given him $1700 and another $600 for some home repairs. I have no problem helping someone out when they come upon hard times, but it’s hard for me to give money to someone that should have been looking for a job in February, and waited until May to start looking. I can’t stand laziness.
    It feels like we are getting taken advantage of because we were smart and went to school to get good jobs. Both of my wife’s brothers are losers too, and don’t have a pot to piss in, so when anyone ask for money they come to use. Thankfully she refuses to give money to her brothers.

    We always seem to get stuck with the bill on all the combined gifts also. When her cousin graduated high school we bought her a Roku since she liked ours so much. It was from my wife’s parents, two brothers, and us, but we paid for it. For Christmas we bought her Grandpa a new TV and split it among the families. Of course we got stuck with paying her parents, and two brothers share along with ours. I hate to complain about money, but it drives me crazy when people are too irresponsible to take care of their own finances. Seriously, just get that one consultation from accountants Bundaberg and you’re ok.

    Tonight my wife is sending her Dad another $500 and she wrote a resume out for him. Hopefully he gets a job soon. I’m getting sick of sending him money.

    Read More

  • Secure passwords

    June 15, 2011 / No Comments

    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.

    Read More

  • Great listen about cellphone science

    June 14, 2011 / No Comments

    I just listened to a great episode of the Skeptically Speaking podcast about all the latest cellphone hoopla. It’s a great listen if you scared, or just interested in the possibility of getting cancer from cellphones. There is no evidence that cellphones cause cancer, but you can never be 100% sure because it’s really hard to prove something doesn’t exists. You can’t prove their isn’t a god, Big Foot, or unicorns, but they are all highly unlikely just like getting cancer from a cellphone.

    Read More

  • Flashback Friday: Smashing Pumpkins – “Rhinoceros”

    June 10, 2011 / No Comments

    Life got a little crazy with houseguests moving out, Grandma’s Funeral, and a little vacation at a lake, so I had a little unplanned blogging vacation. Today I am back with another edition of my “Flashback Friday”.

    I remember the day when I first saw the video for “Rhinoceros”. It was 1992, my senior year of high school. I was a fan and hooked right away. The next year they released Siamese Dream, and the rest is history. Siamese Dream was basically the soundtrack to my freshman year of college. The music was so great back then, or at least that is my excuse of why I sucked at college that year. there was just too much good music to listen to.

    Read More