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?

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!

How true that is!

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!

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

‘Nuff said. (link to original image)

• 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.

Cool, huh? Click on this link to spell your message with random pictures from flickr!

Like when you’ve been in an 18-foot trailer with four people and three dogs for three days, and you find out that it will take a week longer for your hardwood floor in your house to be usable.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Like when you come home to said trailer to find an entire bottle of Ibuprofen broken into, chewed up, and scattered all across the bed by said three dogs.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Like when you get stung by a bee at Wendy’s and three days later the swelling has not gone down, but rather is spreading over your elbow and down your arm.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Like when you’re afraid that the three dogs will die from an Ibuprofen overdose cause you don’t have money to take them to the vet, and you’re relieved that by the end of the day, none of them has died, but then when you go to bed, you find out that the dogs have thrown up all over all the clean blankets on your bed.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Here’s a link to the comic on the original page.

This picture comes from Terry Bozzio’s website (click here for drum specs, click the image to go to Terry’s site).  This is officially the biggest drumkit I have ever seen!  How does one even play such a beast?  I also stumbled upon the following video today.  This is a timelapse video of what it takes to set up the kit.  I definitely admire the guy for being able to play so many drums, but there is no way I would be able to have the patience to setup that kind of a kit (to say nothing of the skill required to actually play it).

followers > following!

I now have more people following me than I am following! I somehow feel like I’ve come of age in the Twitter world. I’m pretty new to the Twitter world, my account is less than a year old.  I didn’t quite understand it at first, when a friend explained it to me – it took a lot of experimenting on my own to figure it out.  But now that I’m on it I love it.  I especially love using the TwitterFox extension for FireFox – it turns Twitter into a truly real-time stream of updates from people I care about, and allows me to almost use Twitter as an instant messaging protocol.  I also love that Twitter has so many apps that interface with it, it’s available through WordPress here at my blog, and from my iPod touch, etc.  Twitter is truly a modern-day phenomenon.  It allows me to quickly communicate my thoughts on pressing issues to an audience of people that is different from Facebook and other accounts I may have.  I use it to comment on science and technology articles, shamelessly promote my content, and occasionally tell people what I’m doing at work or at my recording studio (shameless plug).  Here’s to Twitter and more growth to come! Follow me on Twitter @kheftel

I just read a blog post by a friend of mine and a former coworker, where he explained that he used to pray as a kid, but God never answered, and now as an adult, he feels it is silly to worry about God and where we come from or where we are going.  I posted the following as a comment on his post, and thought I’d share it with all of you.  Consider it my testimony that God lives and loves us despite all that is wrong with the world:

I believe that there IS a point to life, and that there is a God up there who loves us. Yes, I know that seems contradictory with all of the suffering that happens on this planet on a day-to-day basis. But that doesn’t change my belief that God knows each and every one of us by name, and that he will one day make right all that has been wrong here on earth. We are here to learn to be kind to others even when no one is being kind to us. We are here to learn to do good when there is no immediate reward, or even when we take flak for it. I don’t claim to know why infants die from malnutrition in poorer parts of the world, but I know for sure it’s not because they “deserved” it, and I believe God will make up for their innocent suffering on the other side. God ultimately wants us to be happy, and if we soften our hearts and turn to him in times of distress he will hear us, and if we know how to listen we will hear his response. When it seems like he doesn’t answer our prayers and save us from hard things, it is because there is something for us to learn from it. There is no shortcut or easy way to learn and grow, we must put in the work necessary for such growth to happen. And through it all, the triumphs and the sadness, the thrills and the heartaches, God is there, watching us and rooting for us to succeed, but also allowing us to go through hard times so we may grow.

While on the topic of the iPod, I wonder why the included safari browser doesn’t allow you to download files from the web. I mean, I have an iPod that can surf the web, and I can’t download music to it from a server I own, nor can I download pictures to it unless I email them to myself. That is quite annoying!! I haven’t checked to see if I can email myself mp3s and download them to the iPod – I’ll have to try that and get back to you.

All in all, though, the iPod touch is an incredible piece of hardware and software. I mean, it beats the computer I first learned to program on at the tender age of 11 in every aspect, from memory to processor to storage. Plus it connects to wi-fi, plays mp3s and video, has a touchscreen, and a better display than what I used to use in my games back then (I started programming games I’m mode X – 320 by 240 graphics, 256 colors). And did I mention it fits in the palm of my hand? We do indeed live in a marvelous world.

This rabbit was hopping around in the front yard until my father-in-law shot it with a bow and arrow, skinned and cleaned it, and roasted it on the grill:

Yes, that is the same rabbit!!  I wish I could compare to my father-in-law in manliness and sheer testosterone, but I’m afraid that will never happen.  I’ll have to stick to hunting PHP/MySQL bugs in the thickets of server code.  Here is how the rabbit looked on the table:

Rabbit kinda tastes like a cross between chicken and pork, with the texture of tough steak (most of the pieces were tough, and some of the pieces that came from the back cut of the rabbit were actually pretty tender).  So there you have it – I have officially eaten rabbit.

Another new thing is I got to ride a riding lawnmower for the first time!  It felt like I was driving a zamboni!!  I’ve always wanted to drive a zamboni!!  I felt like this guy:

Shanae thought it was pretty funny how excited I was to drive a riding lawnmower – her family has always owned them.  I guess in Florida, push lawnmowers don’t count as “real” lawnmowers.

As Catholics, Jews and Muslims have known for centuries, such attention is inevitable once an institution or faith group reaches a size or prominence sufficient to attract notice. Yet Latter-day Saints – sometimes known as Mormons – still wonder whether and how they should respond when news or entertainment media insensitively trivialize or misrepresent sacred beliefs or practices.

This is the problem – what do you do when your beliefs are criticized, put down, or otherwise blown out of proportion, without your consent and without context?

You do what you do when a small child throws a temper tantrum to get negative attention – you ignore it.

From the article:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an institution does not call for boycotts. Such a step would simply generate the kind of controversy that the media loves and in the end would increase audiences for the series. As Elder M. Russell Ballard and Elder Robert D. Hales of the Council of the Twelve Apostles have both said recently, when expressing themselves in the public arena, Latter-day Saints should conduct themselves with dignity and thoughtfulness . . . There is no need to feel defensive when the Church is moving forward so rapidly. The Church’s strength is in its faithful members in 170-plus countries, and there is no evidence that extreme misrepresentations in the media that appeal only to a narrow audience have any long-term negative effect on the Church.

There have been many criticisms of the Church in the past, and there will continue to be criticisms in the future, but the best course of action for those who truly believe is to let the truth speak for itself. We can defend ourselves and our beliefs without stooping to the level of our attackers.

Elder Uchtdorf:
It’s not merely enough to surround ourselves with symbols of our faith.  Ours is not a second-hand religion.  We cannot receive the benefit of the Gospel by merely observing what others do.  We must get off the couch and practice what we preach.

Be of one heart and one mind in your marriage and family.

Elder Anderson:
God shapes the back to fit the burdens placed upon it.

Any questions?  Planting begins in May!  Woohoo!

This is a book I made myself in a bookbinding class with my lovely wife.  It’s a flatback book – a book with a hard spine similar to many books you may buy commercially.  I can’t believe I made something so cool!  Bookbinding is neat, but takes many hours of hard work.  The finished product is amazing, though!  Below are pictures of Shanae’s flatback book:

Shanae is so artistic.  She can take ordinary things and imbue them with artistry and beauty.  I am truly blessed to be at her side.  She took the already-cool book above and made a matching box for it, to keep it safe and protect it.  Here are the pictures:

But coolest of all is her final project for this class.  She made a leather-covered book to use for quotes.  The edges of the pages are burned so they have a cool, blackened, irregular look.  She used her awesome calligraphy skills to put famous quotes on many of the interior pages.  Basically this book rocks:

My little brother Kai just turned 2! This picture is from his birthday party, he was simply adorable. So cute!

“Oh, is that so? Tell me…” replies God.

“Well”, says the scientist, “we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man.”

“Well, that’s interesting. Show me.”

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil.

“Oh no, no, no.” interrupts God.

(I love this…)

“Get your own dirt.”

8:00  am – Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am – A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am – A walk in the park! My favorite  thing!
10:30 am – Got rubbed and petted! My favorite  thing!
12:00 pm – Lunch! My favorite thing!
1:00  pm – Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 pm – Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 pm – Milk Bones! My favorite thing!
7:00 pm – Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 pm – Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 pm – Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

Excerpts from a Cat’s Diary…

Day  983 of my captivity …

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects.  They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates  and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets.

Although I make my contempt for the rations  perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength.

The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of  escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the  carpet.  Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless  body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since  it clearly demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a ‘good little hunter’ I am.  S—!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices  tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of ‘allergies’. I must learn what this means  and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost  successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around  his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow — but at the top of  the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are  flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released – and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously short of  his mental capacities.

The bird has got to be an informant. I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe.

For now…

The case was brought before a judge. After listening to the passionate presentation by the lawyer, the judge banged his gavel declaring,”Case dismissed!”

The lawyer immediately stood objecting to the ruling saying, “Your honor, how can you possibly dismiss this case? The Christians have Christmas, Easter and others. The Jews have Passover, Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, yet my Client and all other atheists have no such holidays.”

The judge leaned forward in his chair saying, “But you do. Your client, counsel, is woefully ignorant.”

The lawyer said, “Your Honor, we are unaware of any special observance or holiday for atheists.”

The judge said, “The calendar says April 1st is April Fools Day. Psalm 14:1 states, ‘The fool says in his heart, there is no God.’ Thus, it is the opinion of this court, that if your client says there is no God, then he is a fool. Therefore, April 1st is his day. Court is adjourned.