Categories
Ranting Tech

Uh oh… again

So facebook is a cool useful place to gather friends and share info, but what happens when that company that has all your info starts whoring you and your friends out to the highest bidder? Well you have to login and change your privacy settings again b/c they automatically set it up for you to make them money. Seeing how all of you will want to do this, here’s step by step instructions.

See this thing… now think evil… now click learn more


That takes you to this list (your privacy settings, also accessible via your account drop down list)
Click edit settings across from “What your friends can share about you”


Uncheck all the ones you want (I unchecked all of them b/c I don’t want any unsavvy friends sharing any of my info with urbank.com)
Hit save, and go back to the list, now click on edit settings across from “Instant Personalization”


This is the awesome one, it is automatically checked and it says Can we make partners and let them automatically access your public info, even if you’re not logged in? Pretty please, they are our “partners” oh and they pay us money… So uncheck that, and then click the STUPID confirm button, they want to make you understand you are screwing them by withholding this cool feature.

There that’s it! Now you’re again safe from stupid automatic privacy settings changing in Facebook.

Here’s a video running through all that, go fullscreen.

Categories
Personal

Changes

I am feeling a little bit bewildered about the changes that will occur this summer. With 2 sisters getting married, you can imagine there’s a lot of drama, chaos, sadness, happiness, uneasiness, and excitement in the air. Things are going to change…

We won’t have sister bonding time nearly as often.

                       DSC04743

Or Sunday evenings filled with food, chatter, and ninja star throwing.

                       DSC04848

                       DSC04851

                       DSC04853

But one thing that I know will stay the same is the length our giraffe-like necks! Some things never change.

                       DSC04872

Categories
Chase

Chase is 4!

April is a crazy birthday month with our family and friends (topped only by December, I think)! It makes for a lot of excitement, and Chase’s birthday was no exception.

On his actual birthday, we were reminded that he is adored by a lot of adults in the family, being the only grandson and all. He was spoiled! A few days later, he had a birthday party (his “real birthday” he called it) with his closest friends in the ward.

DSC04788 DSC04794

DSC04817 DSC04797

Though his birthday friend list was comprised of about 30 kids that he knows, we narrowed it down to 10 for sanity’s sake. GG, Rachel, and Jessica also came to join in the fun (oh yeah, and to help out)! Thanks, ladies, for all the help and love!

                         DSC04831

Pace had set up an amazing superhero obstacle course in the backyard, which did not disappoint. Among other things, the kids got to throw real ninja stars at an evil cardboard robot (isn’t Pace awesome?). The kids made it through the course to earn their goody bags which would soon be filled with pinata candy.

We tried out a pull-string pinata this year! It was certainly safer than a traditional pinata, but not quite as much fun, in my opinion. But the kids were content with all the candy and stickers they gathered!

DSC04825 DSC04827                          DSC04821

Why so serious???

DSC04803 DSC04804

Categories
Tech

Monday

Well it’s monday again, funny how that keeps happening. Here’s a little video to perk you up.

Categories
Family Fun

Fab-egg-ulous (hmmm…)

Easter was pretty enjoyable this year. How could it not be with 3 Easter egg hunts?!? Also, we’re proud of Chase for understanding the resurrection of Christ (partly because that was what his recent primary talk was on). I’m not very into the Easter bunny thing, so unfortunately there was no suspense or waiting for the Easter bunny to come… sad, I know. Chase still believes in Santa, though, despite Pace’s attempts to tell him otherwise.

We had one egg hunt at the park, with some little friends from the ward. I called a few people who have preschool-aged kids, and told everyone to bring a dozen (filled) plastic eggs. It was a better turnout than I had anticipated!

DSC04682 DSC04687 DSC04696 DSC04694DSC04700 DSC04704

At Grandaddy and GG’s church Easter party, we were proud of GG who won the “best taste overall” award for her apple pie. There were at least 30 desserts there, so it was no small feat!

DSC04679 DSC04676                          DSC04673

The kids decorated their own Easter bags, and Charlotte actually enjoyed it! She also drew on Chase’s shirt, which did not please him. But he’s such a nice big brother that he forgave her!

DSC04668 DSC04666                        DSC04665

These days we’ve been getting sick and getting better, then getting sick again. I thought we’d be pretty safe from sickness now that it’s April! Oh, well. 🙂

Categories
Personal

Happy Birthday, Pace!

                        DSC04606

Happy 29th Birthday, Pace!

I truly am sorry that Charlotte (& Chase) didn’t get the memo that it was your birthday and didn’t let anyone sleep ‘til 3am. I wish you could have gotten sleep for your birthday… But you got some awesome patience practice and strengthening instead! We’re gonna miss this….

We are glad you’re in our family! We really appreciate your sense of humor and all of your manly skills that you share with us. We’re all so excited when you come home from work, because we love you and know that you love us. Thanks for all your hard work. Happy birthday!

Categories
Personal

The Outlook Was Bleak.

Early this morning, I realized that it was my last day of school. Unfortunately, I had no idea when or where my last final was going to be held. I had emailed and called the teacher and frantically searched the internet for information, to no avail. But I couldn’t waste any more time figuring out when the test was going to be, because I really needed to study– I hadn’t even started studying for the final yet! Also, our apartment was about to have a cleaning check. I tried to convey the urgency of the situation to my roommates (including Jessica’s friend Adella), who were sprawled out watching TV, chomping on candy & carelessly tossing the wrappers on the ground. No empathy from them. Adding to my great stress was the fact that I really needed to tie up all these loose ends quickly, before catching a flight back home to California in just a few hours!

And when I woke up there was nothing but relief…. Ah, it was just all a dream. Although I wasn’t completely pain-free at that point, because upon waking, I found that the inside of my cheeks were extremely sore, because they had been gnawed on through all the anxiety of the nightmare.

SO here’s a SHOUT-OUT to Rachel, Jessica, Nathan, Tyler, Laura, and all the other current students that we know and love, who are living this nightmare in real life!!! Props to you.

Also, a shout-out to my dad who still has academic nightmares (much like this one) on a regular basis!

Categories
Tech

Tech Talk: Passwords

"Let’s see… here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I’ll probably get into all of them.

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…

Assuming the hacker has a reasonably fast connection and PC here is an estimate of the amount of time it would take to generate every possible combination of passwords for a given number of characters. After generating the list it’s just a matter of time before the computer runs through all the possibilities – or gets shut down trying.

Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters – like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.

Remember, these are just for an average computer, and these assume you aren’t using any word in the dictionary. If Google put their computer to work on it they’d finish about 1,000 times faster.

Here are some password tips:

1. Randomly substitute numbers for letters that look similar. The letter ‘o’ becomes the number ‘0′, or even better an ‘@’ or ‘*’. (i.e. – m0d3ltf0rd… like modelTford)

2. Randomly throw in capital letters (i.e. – Mod3lTF0rd)

3. Think of something you were attached to when you were younger, but DON’T CHOOSE A PERSON’S NAME! Every name plus every word in the dictionary will fail under a simple brute force attack.

4. Maybe a place you loved, or a specific car, an attraction from a vacation, or a favorite restaurant?

5. You really need to have different username / password combinations for everything. Remember, the technique is to break into anything you access just to figure out your standard password, then compromise everything else. This doesn’t work if you don’t use the same password everywhere.

6. Since it can be difficult to remember a ton of passwords, I recommend using Roboform for Windows users. It will store all of your passwords in an encrypted format and allow you to use just one master password to access all of them. It will also automatically fill in forms on Web pages, and you can even get versions that allow you to take your password list with you on your PDA, phone or a USB key. If you’d like to download it without having to navigate their web site here is the direct download link. (Ed. note: Lifehacker readers love the free, open-source KeePass for this duty, while others swear by the cross-platform, browser-based LastPass.)

7. Mac users can use 1Password. It is essentially the same thing as Roboform, except for Mac, and they even have an iPhone application so you can take them with you too.

8. Once you’ve thought of a password, try Microsoft’s password strength tester to find out how secure it is."

Taken from How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords

Just wanted to pass along these good words of advice to our readers. I can’t personally recommend the software he mentions in this article, b/c I don’t use it. I really liked the chart showing how useful using an uppercase or numeric value is. Comments? Questions?

UPDATE: I wanted to put this back on the main page after I got two extra special SPAM emails last week. One from my brother linking to www.hgr5.tabletxpills.com (don’t go there). He sent it to my old email address via his old hotmail account. The email included a CC of everyone else in his address book (hint hint). Somehow someone got the password to his hotmail and ran a script to email eveyone this link. The second one was a desperate cry of help from my old roommate, Kylin Kovac. He was stranded in Europe and needed me to click a link and send him money. Funny, I haven’t talked to Kylin since he got married and swamped with kids and medical school. KYLIN, UPDATE YOUR GMAIL PASSWORD!

Categories
Family Fun

Benadryl and Pee

This wild experience happened a few weeks ago, and it’s one that I want to remember and laugh about…

It was late afternoon. I had just gotten Charlotte out of the bath, wrapped her in a towel, and had taken her to her bedroom. I rummaged around in her closet to find something to help her endure the dreaded diaper/clothing time that she generally loathes. I selected a big plastic bottle of Benadryl (that we had recently bought) and handed it to Charlotte. She immediately shook it, and it fell and landed on the floor, breaking somehow (it’s very sturdy plastic so I don’t know how that happened)! Benadryl seeped out of the bottle all over her closet floor, into the cracks and everything!

Despite my surprise, I put Charlotte down, snatched the rapidly draining bottle up in my hands and rushed it to the bathroom. I stuck it in a cup so I could later salvage the last few ounces that remained. I soon found that Benadryl had dripped and leaked everywhere. I took a deep breath and even kinda laughed at what was going on!

I scurried back to the bedroom to wipe up some of the mess so the fresh, clean Charlotte wouldn’t play in the puddle and track it all over the house! As I was madly mopping up the mess, Chase woke up from a little snooze (which he doesn’t do anymore–sad!) and when he asked me what was going on, I impatiently told him that Charlotte had made a mess so I needed to hurry and clean it up.

Meanwhile, Charlotte was still running around naked. I then heard a thump and a scream over in my bedroom, so I ran in there to find that Charlotte had apparently peed on our laminate floor and subsequently slipped in her puddle of pee and hit her head in the doorway! So she soon had a nice goose egg on her head. Meanwhile, Chase was just quietly standing there, wondering why everyone in the house had gone crazy. I comforted Charlotte, figured that she had just peed so she wouldn’t pee again soon, so she could stay naked while I continued addressing the messes at hand. I went back to cleaning up the Benadryl and pee puddles.

Aaahhhh, finally, everything was taken care of. I went down to the kitchen to retrieve little Charlotte who had been thoroughly enjoying running around the kitchen naked. I probably did some of these things in the wrong order, but it all happened in about 2 minutes so I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I’m glad things aren’t that chaotic around here all the time!

                         DSC04594

Categories
Chase

Chase’s Birthday

Little man’s birthday is coming up, and I was so excited to buy him some video games, guns, and back hair. Instead I nabbed Cars on Xbox360 and Star Wars Clone Wars the movie. I’m sure he’ll be excited, even if Mom wasn’t. When I bought them I was so excited, I had to tell someone. When I told Joy, she said, “wow” all lowercased on purpose. Well, Joy, why don’t we tell the story of My Little Pony and Charlotte? Hmmm hmmm?

If you’re in a gift giving mode (or mood) and wonder what Chase is into, he’s into anything that he can play with outside, anything that helps him use up energy, or anything on this list. Sorry I had to keep this post to all words, Chase can see images, but he can’t read.