Heftel Family
Boy + Girl = Happiness!

Today’s blog post brought to you by XKCD, the hilarious webcomic:

For your Sunday edification, I wanted to post a quote that is often mis-attributed to Mother Teresa. This was mentioned in our church meetings last Sunday and it really struck a chord with me:

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;

Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;

Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have,

and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis,

it is between you and God;

It was never between you and them anyway.

Thoughts?

Well, here we are in the 21st century – the second decade of the 21st century, even, and Internet security, specifically the problem of weak passwords, still plagues our society.  A new study, based on analysis of 32 million passwords, shows that the most popular password is – can you guess? – “123456″.  One in five users leaves a key under the virtual doormat with obvious passwords like “qwerty”, “password”, “iloveyou”, or “princess”!  (original story here).

Why is it that we can’t pick secure passwords?  It seems it’s just human nature.  A password that is secure is, by definition, hard to remember for a human.  Here are five tips that will help your passwords remain secure.

1. Here’s a simple hint – if your password can be found in the dictionary (any language!), it’s not secure enough!  It’s easy to crack a password that’s listed in the dictionary – it’s routinely done in college computer science classes.
2. Put letters and numbers in your password.  Try replacing some letters with numbers (i.e. 3 for “e”, 1 for “L”, etc) or symbols (@ for “a”).
3. Mix up uppercase and lowercase letters in your password.
4. Use more than one word in your password.  You could use a whole phrase, for example, or make it an acronym by using the first letter of each word in a phrase.
5. Use symbols such as punctuation in your password.  Note: some websites won’t allow you to use anything but letters and numbers.  It’s dumb, but they do it.

Hopefully these tips will help you keep your password secure!

Oh, man, I laughed when I saw this:

How true that is!

Just got this in my email the other day:

CASTING – MUSICIANS

Auditions are being held from 1.20.10 – 2.5.10

It’s a great opportunity for musicians, share it with your friends! You have to have an Endoora account to apply. If you don’t know what Endoora is, click here to find out!

My wife is so creative!  She made her sister into a mermaid for a school activity using just makeup.  She created the pattern on the face by using a mesh bag that originally held mandarin oranges to create the pattern as she applied makeup to her sister’s face through it.

Yup, she’s pretty cool!

So the other day I was shocked to find my normally-well-behaved dog Miko up on a chair in the living room…

Silly dog!  She had just been groomed and when she saw the clippers coming out again, she panicked!

‘Nuff said. (link to original image)

Recently I started using Google Chrome. I downloaded it, tested a few things, and before you know it I was using it every time I wanted to go online, leaving my old standby FireFox unused and un-clicked.  I will attempt to organize the reasons for my switch into a bulleted list below:

• It’s fast. You open the program, it displays.  The quicker I can get to my webpages, the quicker I can get to work.
• It maximizes screen real estate.  I hate having my usable browser area cluttered by a bunch of toolbars I don’t want that came bundled with other stuff I did want. (Internet Explorer, I’m talking to you).  Chrome even goes so far as to use the top window bar (which is normally not used for anything except the program’s name and window controls) to put my tabs in when maximized.  I love that!  Every little bit of usable screen real estate helps when developing websites on my small laptop screen and I appreciate having those 20 or so vertical pixels back.
• It comes with great developer tools.  FireFox has an add-on called Web Developer that I truly love for debugging websites, especially CSS.  But the built-in developer tools that come with Chrome blow it out of the water!  You can change CSS properties on any element and watch how the rendering changes, without re-uploading the CSS file.  And you don’t have to download an add-on to do it.  While I was writing this post, I used the real-time CSS modification abilities of Chrome’s developer tools to fix a problem with my WordPress theme that was chopping off the title of my posts if they got too long.
• Did I mention it’s fast?
• It’s simple.  It shows me what I need, and hides what I don’t.  It doesn’t bury clearing the cache in some tab in some dialog box, under the heading Temporary Internet Files (again, IE, I’m talking to you).
• It has all the keyboard shortcuts I loved in FireFox and had gotten used to as a Web Developer.  Things like CTRL+SHIFT+DELETE to clear cache and cookies (essential for web development), CTRL+T for a new tab, CTRL+SHIFT+T to re-open the most recently closed tab (handy when you just closed something and realized you weren’t done with it yet).
• Did I mention it’s fast?

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now.  The list is in no particular order, and is not terribly thorough, but there you have it – my unofficial list of why Google Chrome beats the pants off of any other browser out there.  I still keep the other browsers installed on my machine to make sure the CSS I’m crafting works across browsers and doesn’t break my nice site layouts, but as far as day-to-day heavy lifting goes, Chrome is my new best friend.

Attention, Kodak EasyShare Wireless Digital Picture Frame users! Kodak has made it extremely easy to share what’s on your picture frame with everyone on the internet! Each picture frame has a unique RSS feed that includes its MAC address, and the frames have wi-fi capability built-in, so anyone on the Internet that has your feed URL can see ALL the pictures on your picture frame. There is even a chance that someone could modify the RSS URL of your picture frame and load pictures of their choosing on it – even before it gets out of the box. Read the original post here. Kodak, you need to think the security implications of a wifi-enabled digital picture frame before releasing it to the public!