We’ve all experienced it – that infuriating moment just a day or two after a password change when you realize that you’ve forgotten what you chose (although you’re certain that it was witty and brilliant).  In truth, there isn’t much that I can do for your lost passwords… but I can probably help you create *better* passwords that might be easier to remember.

The recommendations in the articles referenced above will help you understand what makes a password strong.  If you don’t like those, there a millions of other sites – try searching for “how to make a strong password”.  To summarize the common themes, anything that relates to you is bad (names, addresses, etc).  Things that are random and not English are good (extra points for numbers and symbols).

You might be wondering “but then how do I remember it?”.  I’ve given this some thought in past so I figured that I would share my secret.  Here is what I do:

1. Choose a completely random, absolutely impossible to guess phrase like “i ate a watermelon once while naked at the zoo”.  Make yourself laugh, be witty or stupid, but for gosh sakes pick something that you’ll remember!

2. Create an algorithm.  Be creative but not crazy – you’ll need to remember how you did this later to recover the password.  Here are some examples:

- take the first letter of each word in your phrase (iaawownatz)

- take all the vowels only (iaeaaeeooeieaeaeoo – with the current example phrase this would be bonkers)

- before each 3 letter word, count the letters, then add the 3 letter word, then count the letters until the next 3 letter word, etc (1ate27zoo – so much work for a rather lame password, but it shows how far you can take this)

Ok so that’s a fun guideline for creating crazy but not impossible passwords, but we are advised not to use the same password for each site, so how many phrases do you need?  Very few!  You could include the name of the site in your password phrase.  For example, if my phrase was “I’m a lover not a hater”, I could include nytimes.com in there to make “I’m a nytimes.com lover not a hater”.  My first letter password would be “ianlnah” for nytimes, but “iacinah” for CNN and “iaginah” for Gmail.  Not bad eh?

If you’ve followed along so far, at this point you have a unique, strange, password for every site in your life.  I recommend that you do yourself one last favor – create another pass phrase for the really sensitive sites, like banks.  The burden of protecting your data increases as the sensitivity increases – so a bank is obligated to do cartwheels to protect you, but yahoo.com isn’t (as much).  It makes sense to have at least two levels of security in your system.

Finally, for those who think the above solution is a waste of time, you could ignore all that and use a password management tool.  This is a place that saves all your passwords behind a master password.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which you believe is more secure – personally, I trust my way of remembering passwords far more than I trust any one company to hold my data – but that’s just my paranoia speaking…  If you want to try some out, take a look at LastPass or 1Password.

Enjoy creating your new passwords!

~ab

“More than 30 years ago, RiceSelect™ introduced Texmati®, the first basmati Rice to be successfully grown in America, and still the most popular because of its unsurpassed flavor and aroma. Today, RiceSelect™ offers a wide variety of delicious rice and other dishes all grown and packaged in America, all inspired by cuisines from across the world. Requested by name in countless recipes and cookbooks, RiceSelect™ tastes like no other rice.”(Source)

What they didn’t add, but certainly should have, is the following: “RiceSelect products, like our amazing Sushi Rice, can be used to rebuild shattered hopes and dreams!” By now you’re probably checking the URL to make sure that you didn’t mistype the link, but I promise you that this is a technology story.  It’s just a roundabout way telling it…

Virginia Beach is a great getaway spot for a good time in the summer. The beach is packed but there’s sand enough for everyone.  The collection of bars, restaurants and hotels make it easy to find entertainment.  If, like me, you have an iPhone 4 and decide to visit, I hope you’ll heed to the following advice: keep the darn thing off the table and away from your margaritas.

I had just Googled “dog fighting experience” for my brother-in-law.  He had told me of a childhood love for fighter planes and I figured, why not actually get in one?  That’s the beauty of having a great smartphone, you can look this stuff up!  I had the data and we were chatting about whether the rather hefty price tag was worth it, when I gestured a bit too energetically and tipped over all 16 ounces of sickly sweet lime margarita right on my phone.

Panic.

“GIVE ME A TOWEL!” I screeched, while almost overturning the chair of the small boy sitting behind me, and whipped a damp pool towel into action.  I wiped every surface clean of the mess and powered the phone down. I sat stunned back down in the chair and stared blankly into space while my family members discussed the best next steps.  My only thought was “this is why I can’t have nice things”, over and over again,  while I slipped into a self-hating catatonic state. My brother-in-law gets full marks for taking over the situation. Someone at a nearby table mentioned that rice might help dry out the phone and so he sprinted off to the nearest store to buy some.

I’m not sure how many stores he had to visit in Virginia Beach before he found one that would sell him rice (it’s not that kind of place), but 20 minutes later, he returned with RiceSelect Sushi Rice in a very convenient plastic container with a screw-top lid. We dumped out a small portion and shoved in my phone.  It felt a bit like someone was putting one of my chopped-off appendages on ice, to be reconnected later “if there are no complications”.  I ordered another margarita and tried not to pray out loud.  I rallied through the rest of the evening, but my mind constantly strayed to my severed limb, crammed into sushi mix back at the hotel.

The next morning, the second I woke up, I sprinted to the hotel desk and tried to resist the urge to fling the rice everywhere, as I dug out my iPhone.  It looked a bit gritty, but there was no visible damage.  As slowly as I could, I removed the rice grains from the charging port and the headphone jack.  It was time for the real test – I turned it on, half expecting it to catch fire or sizzle in my hands… The beautiful silvery Apple logo appeared and the phone’s main menu appeared. Ok, I thought, now for test two.  My wife, who somehow still loves me despite my complete obsession with technology, called me from her phone.  She could hear me and I could hear her.  Test two passed.

At this point, I wanted to test the headphones, so I was about to plug in when I noticed a lone grain of rice stuck in the bottom of the headphone jack.  Test three was on pause, as I searched my travel gear for a pin. We had to leave the hotel, so I juggled my iPhone, the pin and the steering wheel as we meandered over to pick up the rest of the family.  Again, my wife is unbelievably supportive, so she only yelled at me a few times to pay attention to the road.  After careful prodding, the grain of rice fell out but the iPhone shut off.  I thought I was going to have a heart attack as I tried in vain to get it to start again.  After a few painfully long seconds it started and … worked perfectly.  Our vacation was over, everyone else was disappointed and dreading the coming work week, but I was smiling ear to ear.

Summary:  My unscientific, one data point study brought me to the conclusion that sushi rice saved my phone.  The technique worked for me and I haven’t seen any side effects from the event.  Could I have tried to reboot right after the spill?  Probably.  Would it have fried my little phone?  I have no idea.  All I know is that leaving it overnight in sushi rice worked. If you find yourself in a similar situation, I hope you get as lucky as I did.

On the other hand, you would probably have more sense than I did and avoid the spill in the first place…

~ab

The truth is this:  when your picture goes out into the lovely webs of cyberspace, it’s never gone.  It might be just sitting on a shelf without a label – that is, until the technology to link you to the evidence comes along.  As an example, try Googling yourself on Google’s image search:

When I tried this, I found my photo on page 17 of the results from a site that I had never seen before.  That alone was pretty strange.  However, don’t stop there – add a piece of information about yourself that others might know (like the company you worked for last) and you might be surprised how much the field narrows.  I went from page 17 with millions of hits down to page 1 with my picture as number 2, just by adding a former job to my search.

Companies liked LinkedIn and Facebook are the source of many of these images, but there are also companies that archive older pictures from the Facebook or LinkedIn database.  For example, Radaris (which does background checks) has a copy of my LinkedIn image (how is that ok?).  Long story short, even if you remove a picture from the site you’ve signed up with, you might be too late.

There really isn’t a fix for this. The best answer is probably not to post things unless you’re sure you want the world to see it.  I know that we’ve heard this before, but the supporting evidence is rarely so easy to find.

Best of luck staying safe out there!

~ab

Hi all,

After a few weeks with my new MacBook Pro, I’ve probably installed (and then deleted) 100+ apps as I try to rebuild my digital life on a new platform. Finding apps that did what I needed was a bit of a chore (not to mention a bit pricey sometimes), so it was great to find lists like this one from Mac.Appstorm.Net (check it out).  Some of my favorites?

1. Firefox – My alternative to Mac’s Safari browser.  Firefox is better supported, and so I use Safari until I hit a problem.

2. Fluid – creates applications out of websites.  It sounds a bit strange, but it’s way better than just a bookmark for sites like Gmail, Remember the Milk, etc.

3. Cinch – Snaps windows around like Windows 7.  I grew to love the feature and feel less-productive without it (this is not evidence-based…).

Are there any apps that I should try out?  Anything that a mac user out there is dying to know?  Leave a note or suggestion in the comments and we’ll take a look.

If you’re in the same boat as me – enjoy the transition!

~ab

Why?  Well I’m learning!  Apple is not my strong suit and everything is new.  That said, every feature pleasantly surprises me.  Each time I think “there must be a way to…”, I stumble upon what I’m looking for, amazed that it’s there, without code or effort.  What had worried me about the transition was this: I’m a pretty geeky dude.  Won’t it be hard to transition the hard stuff from Windows to Mac?  The answer?  Not even a little bit.

Google Calendar and Gmail were both quick to setup (a Google search put me on the right path).  Microsoft Office was a simple install.  My programming environment in Windows (Komodo Edit) is available for Mac, so no transition there.   Skype and Dropbox were the same story.  To be honest, if we discount the time for my downloads, I’ve probably set the entire machine up, super-user environment and all in less than 3 hours.  That even includes the time I’ve spent playing with it… Pretty amazing.

Given the fun I’m having, I’ve decided that just an asterisk is going to follow me on my new adventure into Mac land, writing about the land of the apple from the big apple.  That said, my day job still requires a PC and I’m sitting on a ton of windows hardware, so JAA will have to be about more than just the domain of Steve Jobs.  We’ll see where the balance lies after a few months…

I guess this is really a post about posts that I’ll write in the future.  Keep an eye out for a Mac post soon and feel free to send questions to ab@justanasterisk.com.  I’d love to have ideas of what to try next.  We’ll explore this lovely transition together.

Best,

~ab

However, if you say “Google told me”, I’m pretty sure that you will not get the same response.  Thus, in full admission of my own blog’s failings and guided by a passion for giving you the best possible info, I present: Google on Google (well I guess Google is actually presenting it… )

How Google Works

If you’re dubious about this link (because you think google is an evil empire or out of some absolutely insane loyalty to me) then here is a sample of what you’ll see:

Enjoy it!

~ab

What the program does

This program is for emailing new events to your Google Calendar.  It checks your Gmail account for new events that were sent to a special label every ten seconds.  It can only process one calendar entry every ten seconds (but if you’r emailing in more than that, it’s pretty impressive and you are far too busy to be playing with my software).

I couldn’t find any 3rd party services that do this, so I had to improvise using AutoHotKey and a script I wrote previously for quick adding events to Google calendar.  The result is a bit rickety, but it does the job.  Improvements may or may not occur over time and currently it does not work with google apps (although it couldn’t be that hard to fix this).

Setup

It requires three pieces of setup (these are the defaults which can be modified if you know how to script):

1. Create a Gmail filter that puts take email sent to youraddress+jaacal@gmail.com into a new folder/label called jaacal.  You can also say “skip the inbox” so these emails don’t clutter things up.

2. Download the zip file from this link – Email to Google Calendar (112) – and unpack it to a directory of your choosing.

3.  Change the logon.txt file to include your email, your user name (email without @gmail.com) and your password.  Make sure you keep this file in the same folder as the EXE file.

Workin’ it

Once you’ve done these three steps, run the EXE file and walk away.  Send an email with your quick add text in the subject line to the address above and it will appear on your calendar within about 20 seconds.  An example of a quick add subject line could be something like “dinner with Dave to thank him for such a good idea tommorrow 10pm”.  It doesn’t matter what you put in the body, the program will just ignore it.

Download Email to Google Calendar (112)

And that’s about it! Let me know your thoughts at ab@justanasterisk.com or in the comments.

~ab

Dear reader,

A year has passed since my first JAA post.  All said, I’ve written 104 posts (with a few guests).  My hope is that these articles have helped strengthen your confidence to solve your own computer issues.  I will continue to write in 2010 and I hope that you’ll continue to read!

I leave you and 2009 with one of my favorite IT crowd clips.  If IT were less like this – I wouldn’t have a blog…

Happy, healthy, peaceful and safe new year to all!

~ab

In 2010, may you be happy, healthy, peaceful and safe!

Sorry for the poor video quality, but this one is a classic (with John Denver).

~ab