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Showing posts from June, 2012

Hole To China

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If you've been a regular reader of my site, you'll know that I am an avid listener to audio-books during my commute to and from work. My latest story, " A Hole to China " by Catherine M Valente is available on Lightspeed magazine's website. This story is about an "exceptional" girl, who wants to be more like the popular crowd. She believes that she can do this by mimicing what they do. If a child carries a shovel, for example, adults will laugh among themselves and say that the little one is digging a hole to China. This is what exceptional children do. So, she picks up her dad's shovel one night and starts digging in the middle of the family garden. It's once she digs down deep enough that the story takes an interesting turn of events and the lore tie-ins start to get interesting. I recognize some of the lore bits from other stories I've listened to but cannot place the origins. This is one of the side quests that I think Bli...

Importance of Changing Your Passwords..

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In the past month, I've received notices from 2 different agencies that my password may have been compromised. Since I have been lazy, I may have used that same password on a few different web sites. Now is the time, for me, to start seriously fixing this. Develop a new password. A password needs to be both memorable (aka don't need to write it down) and complex. This means that you need to combine a (at least 8) variety of elements into your password, including upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. Too hard?? No, not really. Start with a sentence that relates to the use, then use a sort of letter to symbol 'license plate' logic. So, let's use: I LOVE PANDA MONKS By replacing characters and mixing in symbols, I'd probably change that to: !LvP@ndaM1ks or !LuVP&aM1ks I find a nice rhythm in my passwords, when I start with a upper-case or a symbol character, then alternate back and forth between upper and lower. SHIFT+1,L v  S...