Learning to Dance in the Rain

Archive for October, 2008

Recently I discovered lala.com, which is a really cheap way of listening to any of six million songs. Luke has his own account where we keep his music. Here’s his favorite.

Due to popular demand, we have created a slide show of Luke’s latest and greatest shots.  The little girl in the pictures is his best friend, Makenzie who is a month younger.  She is all girl and he is all boy, so it’s fun to watch them interact.  Mak makes sure he is fed, and that he’s got toys to play with (she’s the woman taking care of the needs of her man) and he gives her hugs and occasionally roars like a dinosaur in her face – okay, so he’s a boy – the energy’s gotta go somewhere!  They are very sweet together.

Aside from playing with Mak he also has some other hobbies.  Mostly they involve either a slide, a plunger, or something with buttons, lights, or wheels.  He loves books very much and has finally kicked the habit of eating them – hooray!

Our luck with Luke in nursery ended very quickly.  Within a couple weeks he was crying when we left him and I’ve spent most of nursery time with him lately.  We hope that improves soon.

On the positive side, we recently exchanged his crib rail with a shorter rail that has an opening where he can crawl in and out without our help.  Although he seemed to love the change and crawled into his crib the first night, it was scary the first night as we weren’t sure whether he’d wake up in the middle of the night, forget about the change and end up flipping head first over the shorter railing.  He did great though, in part due to my running in as fast as I could that first night when I heard him crying to help him notice the shorter rail.  Since then he has been an angel.  He almost always goes to bed willingly at his bed-time anyway, but now he occasionally comes to us in our bedroom in the middle of the night if he needs attention — very often without crying at all. It’s so exciting to have a son in our home that is feeling so grown up!

Do you realize that your email password is probably your most sensitive piece of information?  With your email address and password, I could manage to log into almost every web site you have an account on.  Even if you use different passwords on all those other sites.  I just have to click "I forgot my password" on those other sites, read your email for the ‘reset password’ link, and I’ve stolen your identity.  Even credit card and bank web sites often have this "easy" password recovery feature.  In fact since I have access to your email I could very likely discover most of the web sites you have membership on by searching through your email archives and get them all in just a few minutes.  Have I got you thinking twice about giving away your email password to some site that wants to download your address book yet?

Never, never, never give someone or another web site your email password!  It’s just about the worst thing you can do.  Facebook, LinkedIn, and other otherwise "reputable" sites love to ask you for your email address and password so they can offer you the convenience of spamming all your friends by looking up their email addresses from your email address book.  All they ask for is your email address and password.  Don’t give it to them.  Whether they are reputable sites or not, any person working at that company, in a moment of compromised integrity, could steal your password even long after the fact and rip off everything you own. 

Do you still want to use Facebook, LinkedIn, or these other social networking sites and have them spam your friends?  Fine (I hope I’m not in your address book!).  Most of these sites also offer an option for you to manually export your address book to a .csv file which you can then upload to these social networking sites yourself without giving away your password.  That’s definitely a safer option.

It’s less convenient than just typing in your password, true.  There are upcoming technologies that will help solve that and make it safe and convenient for you to share your address book.  But for now, do it the ‘hard’ way and save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run.

So protect your own identity by not sharing your password.  Give away all your friends’ privacy without asking them by giving away their email addresses to a social networking site that they may not want to join anyway.  But that’s an etiquette issue at least, rather than a hard-core security issue.