Lee.org

I wrote this little guide for my aunt. Her email password got hacked a while back. If you don’t currently do something similar, you should!

First, here is how to make a bad password that will get hacked:

• Use a word that is in the dictionary, even if you r3place s0me l3tt3rs w1th number5 (that’s an old trick) or…
• add a 1number1 to a 3word3 (that’s an old one too)
• Make your password a too common phrase like your favorite band, “Flock of Seagulls”, or your birthday “2/2/1980”. There aren’t enough 80’s New Wave bands or birthdays to fool a brute force attack on your password.

Now here is how to make a good password that is easy to remember and won’t get hacked:

Change all your passwords to follow a pattern. Make the pattern something you can easily figure out but a password thief could never do.

1. Start with a basic password that is something you like, but misspell it. For example, “caps” to “kaps”.
2. Change it so that it has a capital letter, a number and punctuation. For example, “Kaps^2”.
3. For every website you go to, prepend part of the website name to the new password. For example, maybe use the first 2 letters and the last letter of the site. You’d get “amn” out of  amazon.com. So your password for Amazon.com would be “amnKaps^2” and your password for Bank of America would be “baaKaps^2”.

That’s it!

Your final password should be between 9 and 12 characters. (some websites stupidly limit the length of your password, and you don’t want to have to use a different strategy on those sites, lest it be harder to remember.

You now have a REALLY GOOD PASSWORD that is REALLY EASY TO REMEMBER and REALLY HARD TO GUESS. And it’s DIFFERENT ON EVERY SITE so when one website gets hacked, the bad people don’t know your password on other sites!

————————————————–

If you have gmail, I strongly recommend you turn on 2-step verification.
How to enable it.
A friendly video that walks you through it.

Yes, it takes a little effort, but so does locking your front door when you go out.

Short story: last year I sat down at a public computer at City College. As I typed in my password, I got this chill, wondering if there might be a virus on the computer, sending my password off to some nefarious Russian hacker den or somesuch. So the first thing I did was enable 2-step verification.
Flash forward 3 months to this ABC News article that starts out “A computer virus found at the City College of San Francisco may have been part of an elaborate international scheme stealing students’ personal information for more than a decade.”

Yes, the bad people got my password. But my password strategy and 2-step verification protected me. Nuff said.

I’d like to teach a class with the Institute of Urban Homesteading. To do to the class, I need a space in or around Oakland that can handle a bunch of people playing with bread dough. Can I use your kitchen? If you have a large oven and some space in or near the kitchen, I’d gladly pay you and/or have you attend the class. Call me!

Here is the tentative class description:
Bread in the Oven
3 hour weekday evening class
Cost $30-50 plus $5 supply fee to be paid on day of class

The focus in this class is making an excellent French bread with just a few minutes of effort. Making bread is easy. It doesn’t have to take a long time or be a lot of work. You can make fantastic bread every day or every week for well under a dollar a loaf with less than 10 minutes of effort including cleanup! We will talk about instant yeast and sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb shaping, ammendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit! We will eat and bring home what we make in class.

I regularly take control of the computers of friends and relatives to help them resolve computer problems. It’s just so much easier SEEING the problem than having it described to you.

Easiest method: Team Viewer noncommercial version

Your friend must be at their computer to help log you in. Team Viewer relies on VNC and VNC Single-click code. The Team Viewer people are running a Repeater and a pretty interface.

Tell your friend:

1. go to http://www.teamviewer.com
2. click on “Start Customer Module”
3. download and run it
4. When it says “please tell your partner the following ID to connect to you desktop” tell them the numbers shown

What you have to do:

1. go to http://www.teamviewer.com
2. click on “Start full version”
3. download and run it (you don’t have to install it… follow the prompts)
4. Where it says “Create Session”, type in the ID that your friend tells you
5. then type in the password your friend tells you
6. Now, you HAVE THE POWER! You can control their PC :-)

There’s a million things I can’t do. But what bugs me is that there’s a million things I could do given the chance. I feel pigeonholed by my work history.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Video game rivalries can be thrilling!

And wow, Billy Mitchell is really made out to be a jerk. Though I read some discussion notes on Wikipedia about how some parts of that stress was manufactured by the director with editing. 2 points being that we never see Billy playing even though he says how important it is to play in public, and that we never see Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe speaking to one another except for a single jab that Billy makes. It gives Billy this total jerk feel. Though I read that they do speak to one another at events.  Heh, you can even buy a “Billy Mitchell is a jerk” T-Shirt.

Tropic Thunder

Weeee!

The Hangover

Fun :-)

Superbad

When I first watched Superbad, I thought it was fun and cute. But I recognize now that it is an iconic film. I put it in the rarefied company of films like  Napoleon Dynamite, Revenge of the Nerds, Real Genius, and Breakfast Club.

I’ve been fiddling with my blog format for as long as I’ve had a blog. I keep thinking that I’ll develop some sense for how to make a nice layout. I haven’t. I won’t. That is sad. I should move on.

So what should it look like? Or is it fine how it is?

Charlotte and I were wandering around the October 17th San Francisco Open Studios. We stopped at several artists’ studios and Charlotte found many orange and bumpy paintings to admire (she has a thing for orange and bumpy, but that’s a story for another time). At Fort Mason we found ourselves in one room, she was totally keen on some paintings by Jeff Grove, including one with a plastic garbage bag on it. That one turned out to be a terrific painting of a woman in rope bondage, covered up to keep the neighboring Kinkade devotee artists from freaking their shit out. While they chatted, I wandered over to some photos on the wall. There were some nicely shot “common”  architectural images… doors, front stoops, cars. Some nice work with light play. And then  I fell in love with the most unusual image.

I got in a conversation with David Booth, the artist. After a while he asked me what I liked about it and I said something like, “It’s just such a curious image. I’m looking at this railing and I see how perfect it is in this boringly common scene and I want to ask ‘why is this railing here?’ Why would it be put there? I mean, nobody needs a railing in just that spot, so what’s it doing there?  ‘Why are you there, railing? Who put you there? What are you doing, being so perfect there? It’s like your  hanging with turkeys when you could be soaring with eagles! You’re just sittin’ there like all in your quiet perfectness. And what are you doing there anyway? I can’t see why you’d be put there, nobody needs a railing there. Nobody would spend all that effort to put a railing there. Come on, tell me what you’re doing there! What are you really doing?’ And then I realize that I’m yelling at a railing in an alley in a photo and I laugh and I laugh and I laugh!”

David was excited. He said he had a similar response to the railing and was glad he could project that in this art. He had walked past it many times, hardly giving it any notice and then it struck him!

You can find the magical railing here, at about  1941 Stockton / 100 Fielding. Here is David Booth describing to me where to find it.

I have a much higher resolution version of this image but I thought it appropriate to only post this low res version. David Booth is an excellent artist and deserves the recognition.

I had a very excellent Christmas eve dinner with the Kosas last night :-)

Erin got me a Christmas present :-)

I baked 2 apple pies :-) The gluten free pie was very well received by the gluten intolerant family members, thanks to Charlotte for suggesting I bake it.

This is an excellent guide for people wanting to make fire effects and fireworks.

FIRE SAFETY
MANUAL FOR FLAME EFFECTS
&
FIRE PERFORMERS THIRD EDITION

TAUGHT BY LES IZZMORE
FIRE SAFETY EXPERT
Portions of this manual have been copied from the World Wide Web and compiled specifically for artists and performers that use fire. This manual is for educational purposes only and is
NOT FOR SALE

Ken Murphy, a supremely cool guy that I bump into a lot is presenting his recent and ongoing art project, A History of the Sky at the Exploratorium January 5-31. There will be a premiere event at Exploratorium After Dark on January 7th, 2010. I will be there. Maybe you will join me?

I don’t understand quite why but this piece fills me with emotion and sometimes tears every time I experience it. I am very much looking forward to seeing this piece in person again.

local version: