Daily David

Monday February 8, 2010

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Friday Five: Favorite Magazines

Friday February 5, 2010

  1. Sports Illustrated
  2. Men’s Health
  3. Popular Mechanics
  4. Esquire
  5. Vanity Fair

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Daily David

Wednesday February 3, 2010

  • Check out Slaughterhouse 90210, where erudite literary quotes meet TV screencaps!
  • “Read carefully you kayaking school teacher from Deland, because what I’m going to tell you in this post will serve you for the rest of your life. The only reason he dated you at all was because his male friends prefer him to date overweight women …”
  • “There are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe.” — from a fascinating article by Garry Kasparov on the topic of playing chess with computers
  • If you’re addicted to Twitter, there are a bunch of tools you can use to monitor trends and (your own) statistics.
  • Terri Carlson is 45 and was born with a genetic immune disorder C-4 complement deficiency. She’s currently on Cobra health insurance but it runs out in a year, so she says she will marry you for your health insurance.
  • Probably Bad News is just like the Jay Leno “Headlines” bit. I saw a good one today: Homicide victims rarely talk to police.
  • Psssst! You can buy ten ampersands for $9.99 if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Password Schmassword

Tuesday February 2, 2010

Are you using the same password for everything? You probably are, aren’t you? “That’s okay,” you’re thinking, “It’s a really, really hard password. Nobody will ever get it.”

Not so fast, fish-breath.

A recent post on the Twitter Status blog details a new way that some crafty crackers are stealing passwords. It basically works like this: You join a perfectly legitimate online community, a website that lets you share your favorite YouTube piano-playing-cat videos, for example, or a forum to discuss new ways of getting fourth-graders to study American history. A few months pass and you are happily sharing videos of Mittens hammering Beethoven or explaining to new friends why 8-year olds should learn about Crispus Attucks. Little did you know that the community you joined — the one that’s hosted in San Francisco and run by an innocent-sounding little Internet start-up — is actually owned by a couple of Russian teenagers who built the thing overnight for $32.

Now these kids have a database of all 8,319 other feline-loving and / or elementary school teachers that are using their site. And they have your username. And your email address. And your password.

It’s the same password you use at Amazon and PayPal, isn’t it?

And it’s the same password you use at Amazon and PayPal, isn’t it? It’s the same password you used when you created your GMail account and your Twitter account, too, isn’t it? And I’m guessing you used the same email address and password for iTunes, right? Now, my friend, you are screwed.

There’s really only one way to avoid this, of course:
Don’t use the same password for everything!

continue reading …

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Daily David

February 2, 2010

Only XKCD could produce such an emotionally-charged comic strip about the Mars rover Spirit. (How can you not feel badly about that poor little robot?)
Where do all my taxes go? The New York Times has a great infographic that displays the recently-proposed 2011 US budget.
You’ll find bunches of (mostly technical) fascinating links if [...]

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Living Under a Rock

January 30, 2010

With the possible exceptions of my father and (maybe-not-so-strangely-coincidentally) my father-in-law, I don’t know anyone who is as voracious a reader as I am. I also seem to consume an outlandish amount of television and there is rarely a moment in my life in which there isn’t music playing. Oh, and I love [...]

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Friday Five: Favorite Places in Maui

January 29, 2010

 

Black Rock, Ka’anapali
Front Street, Lahaina
Whaler’s Village, Ka’anapali
Valley Isle Resort, Kahana
Paia

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Adventures with Microsoft Support

January 27, 2010

My XBox 360 broke near the end of December. I was playing EA Sports NCAA Football 10 at around 3 o’clock in the morning — with the Gators leading 45 – 10 against an unbeaten #2 TCU late in the 3rd quarter of the 2014 BCS Championship Game — when the screen suddenly went [...]

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You Could NOT Care Less

January 26, 2010

I can’t stand when people say, “I could care less.”
“I could care less,” is one of those little things that drives me absolutely batshit crazy. If you could care less, it means you care. That’s not what you mean when you say that, is it? What you mean is that you don’t [...]

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Spenser: For Hire

January 25, 2010

“Sometimes I get distracted by food; but mostly all I think about is women and baseball.” – Robert B. Parker’s Spenser
My favorite author died on Monday, January 18, and he took with him my favorite fictional character.
I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. My dad, though — who lives in Rhode Island now and [...]

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