Assorted Ramblings, Tech

Safer Online Banking

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I’ve been following the Washington Post Security Fix blog for the past year or so. Recently, Brian Krebs has been writing a series of post about businesses are having with thieves stealing their banking credentials, and then the subsequent financial problems since businesses don’t have the same protections as consumers.
One place where I do disagree with the author is the idea of the Macintosh as a safe-haven. In some of his other columns, he’s mentioned that Apple is actually less secure than Windows, but because Windows has more marketshare, that’s what thieves will mostly target. I agree with that much, but the logical leap of “therefore Macintosh is safe”…. I’m just not a big fan of “security through obscurity.”
Three recent articles dealt with the idea (including a How-To) of using a Linux Live CD for online banking.

Just to be clear: I don’t think Linux is any more of a panacea than Mac, it’s just a bit more obscure. What I like about this particular solution is that you’re booting from a read-only copy of the operating system. In effect, every time you boot the computer, it’s brand new. Once you’re done with the banking stuff, turn off the computer (you don’t even need to go through the normal shutdown!) and next time you fire it up from the CD, it’s back to the exact same state as when you started it the last time. Even if something does get on to the computer, it can’t save itself to that read-only OS.
I currently do my banking from a virtual machine which I use for absolutely nothing but banking. But I’m definitely digging this as an alternative.

Stories, Tech

Watch This!

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I bought a new watch a year or two back and it’s mostly run well. A few months ago, I started having problems where it would periodically lose several hours, but it wasn’t a constant thing. Last Wednesday though, the digital date display stopped working and by Friday morning, the entire thing was dead.

Taking the back off took about 20 minutes work a couple small screwdrivers, finding a replacement battery wasn’t overly complex either and swapping the new battery for the old was 10-15 minutes work.

I’ve spent the last two or three days trying unsuccessfully to put the cover back in place. Finally today I took two pairs of pliers, put tape on the ends to prevent scratching, and tried squeezing the pieces back together that way. The only thing I achieved was to chip the crystal.

Going online, I discovered that I’m not the first to encounter this difficulty. The current crop of Timex watches are apparently notorious for this problem. It turns out that the preferred method of replacing the cover is to clamp the entire thing in a vise!!!

I don’t own a vise, but I do have a C-clamp. After a bit of digging, I managed to locate it (Now if I could only find my electric blanket!). I put the watch between two paint stirrers and tightened it up in the clamp.
That did the trick! Now there’s a much bigger crack in the crystal*.


But at least the back is staying on.

*I’ve had worse. The previous watch was scratched across the entire left side by the time it was replaced. But next time I won’t tighten the clamp so much.

Update: November 9, 2022 Looking back over the intervening years, I’ve moved away from battery-powered watches altogether. My preferred watch these days is self-winding or “automatic” (a strange adjective to be sure). By removing the need to replace a battery, I have also greatly increased the lifespan of my watches.

Photos, Silliness

Mmmmm…. Crickets!

Got an email from Angela today to let me know that October 14 is National Chocolate Covered Insects Day.
This, of course, brings back memories of the “Exotic Cuisine Night” I celebrated with the Jaycees during the cicada invasion of 2004.
In one favorite photo, Angela is holding a piece of banana-nutcicada bread. The expression on her face, pretty much says it all:
Angela reacts to eating a bug.
“What’s that crunch? That’s not a walnut.”

Assorted Ramblings, Silliness

The Butler Did It!

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Every so often I hear a song on the radio with lyrics along the lines of:

Now I’m falling asleep,
And she’s calling a cab,
While he’s having a smoke,
And she’s taking a drag…

And so on. The song is called “Mr. Brightside” and it’s sung by a group calling themselves “The Killers.” The problem with this song is that one of the lyrics is, “He takes off her dress now.”
Every time I hear that line, I’m reminded of this joke:

Lady Brooks summoned her butler to her bedroom.
James arrived, she said “You know why you are here I assume. Take off my dress and do it with care. It cost a lot of money so do not tear it.”
“Take off my bra and stockings too.”
James diligently did what he was told to do.
“Take off my knickers, I know you have done that before.”
“If I catch you wearing my clothes again I will personally kick you out the front door.”

Now you can get that joke stuck in your head too.

Assorted Ramblings, Fandom, Silliness

Bombing the Moon

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Many thanks to Squish for passing along a link to the news story about NASA’s plan to bomb The Moon. No, they’re not really going to “bomb” it per se, that’s just the spin MSNBC is using. What’s really going to happen is that they’re going to deliberately crash a couple spacecraft into a crater on the moon’s South Pole in order to verify whether the crater contains any water ice.
Boy, are they gonna be surprised when The Moon pops!
Of course, those of us with a sense of history remember what happened the last time there was an explosion on The Moon, ten years ago, on September 13, 1999…

Photos, Silliness

The Ig Nobel Prizes

The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony was held at Harvard this past weekend.
Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan (all three from Chicago) received the Ig Nobel Public Health Prize for their work on the “Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks” (U.S. patent # 7255627).
Pictured below is Dr. Bodnar. Standing with her, and modeling the award-winning garment are Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle (left), Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman (right). PHOTO credit: Alexey Eliseev.
Wolfgang Ketterle (left), Dr. Elena Bodnar, Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman (right)
Yes. It’s a brassiere which can be converted into a pair of gas masks.
Likewise, the Ig Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to “The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.”
I can’t help but think various US banking executives and central regulators may have been runners up for that one.
Finally, Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México received the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for creating diamonds from Tequila.
A full list of winners (past and present) appears on the web site of the Annals of Improbable Research.

Assorted Ramblings

How to Recycle an Airplane

A few years ago I recall seeing where someone out in (I think) California had bought a 747 which they were going to convert into a house. An interesting idea, though I’m not sure how long it would take before the novelty wore off.
Somewhere along the line today I ran across an article mentioning some other creative recycling ideas for used aircraft. I’m not sure which I like more, the “747 as a hotel” or the house using wings for the roof.

Work

Easy Sales Pitch

I stopped off to chat with The Chief this afternoon to ask if I could take a half day off next Friday. That’s when the set up takes place for the Biergarten at Oktoberfest and I wanted to help the Jaycees with their part. No problem with that. (I like working for this guy.)
The rest of the conversation was even more entertaining:

Me: Of course the next day’s the good part. I’m going to say just one word, and I know you’ll be there.
Boss: Beer?
Me: Exactly!

Now I just need to remind him. 🙂