Monthly Archives: July 2011

How much should you trust the cloud?

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Recently there was quite a bit of hubulub about Dropbox allowing everyone’s account to be accessed by anyone for 4 hours. This is bad, obviously. The guys over at Securosis got it right in their response. However, y’all should have known already to encrypt anything in the cloud if you were reading this here fine blog back in aught nine.

I clearly do not trust cloud, or really, any services online (I also take issue with “the cloud” being synonymous with “online”). The few online services I do use, I follow extremely good password practices. For example, my gmail password being over 20 characters of which I don’t know even know. Really, we should all be using two factor authentication to really lock things down.

I’m still quite concerned with a scenario where gmail is hacked site wide (not per use phished or even “whaled”). There’s nothing you can do in this scenario to protect yourself. How expensive in time, and potentially, literal money, is it worth to have a free service like gmail at the point it gets hacked? I’ve asked the same question myself and have even priced out other hosted, dedicated email services, free or no.

So, the point of this post is A) Nya nya, I told ya so and B) be safe!

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Level Up to Bees Knees

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So, y’all remember how much I loved American Born Chinese? Mr. Yang’s latest is Level Up and I just finished it. It’s great! Not quite as good as ABC, but it stands on its own.

There were a couple things about this book that resonated with me. The first is the addictive behavior of a young kid playing a video game. And not just any video game, but the video games my generation grew up on: NES, Super Mario Brothers, Zelda and the like. I actually wasn’t that good at these games back in the day, but I wasted hours down at Freeway Variety, the local five and dime store, watching my friends play (oddly the only mention of Freeway online is the glossary for a movie from some guys who grew up in my “hood”). To this day there’s still a few friends who I can say, “Elf needs food” and they’ll finish the saying with, “badly!”.

The second thing that resonated with me was that at that age, I read a lot of comic books. I would go to Comic Relief (clearly I haven’t been in a while, I just found out they’re closed, R.I.P.), go around the corner and by two slices from Arinell Pizza (it was 1/2 the size back in my day. Really!) and sit and read comics. That same night I’d go home and read every comic I’d gotten that day. Then I’d re-read them. How does this tie into Level Up? Well, I just couldn’t wait to start, let alone finish, the graphic novel, so I sat and read it as fast as I could, just like back in my salad days. Just like the protagonist in the book and his video games.

One big difference between eating Arinell’s pizza or 10 rolls of Smarties ’til I’m sick while I read comics and graphic novels, is now I’m all grown up! I can have adult drinks while I read. Ya know, like Bees Knees! My wife recommended a recipe from Not without Salt. Bees knees are tasty! Oddly, I think I might try the next ones with a bit of rosemary:

  • 2 oz gin
  • 3/4 oz Honey Syrup
  • 1/2 oz Lemon Juice

NWOS suggests doing the honey syrup like simple syrup: 1 to 1 of honey to water, bring to simmer, let cool and use. However, I cheated and just did the 1 to 1 measurement using piping hot water, and then stirring the bejeesus out of it. Worked fine and no dirty pan.

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