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2008

  • 1 min read

Does your computer ever make a weird sound for no apparent reason?

I am on a Mac and I have lots of odd little things running, doing backups, syncs, who knows what. Every so often my computer goes "boink!" with no error message or display and I wonder, hmm, I wonder what just happened?

I have a suspicion it's my hourly backup which is boinking because one file couldn't be backed up. But it might be finder saying that it was done copying all those files (oh wait, maybe that's a "bing" not a "boing") Or might it be something else totally?

  • 1 min read

FireFox 3.0?

I got the big new release of FireFox 3.0. Looks fine. Actually looks mostly the same. I am not sure what the big changes are but I am trying it out to see how it goes.

I know one regular headache with FireFox for me has been that it would pin the CPU for no apparent reason. The closest I came to seeing a pattern is that it seemed to have to do with pages being opened that had Flash scripts on them. But I can't say I ever verified that. All I know is that fairly regularly when my system got slow, I would see FireFox at the top.

If that's all that FF3.0 fixes, that would be enough for me.

Update: I just saw this link about FireFox 3.0

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LifeLock and Identity Theft – again

I am a LifeLock customer and so I follow developments in this arena pretty closely. Check this post LifeLock and Identity Theft from Schneier on Security:

LifeLock does a bunch of other clever things. They monitor the national address database, and alert you if your address changes. They look for your credit and debit card numbers on hacker and criminal websites and such, and assist you in getting a new number if they see it. They have a million- dollar service guarantee -- for complicated legal reasons, they can't call it insurance -- to help you recover if your identity is ever stolen.

All in all, I probably will remain a customer. Schneier does a good job basically saying that LifeLock is clever and useful but too expensive. That's more positive than the press they've been getting.

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Virtual credit card number

My Citibank MasterCard allows me to generate a virtual credit card number, pretty simply, using a fairly ugly web interface. But a few clicks and you get a picture of a credit card, including numbers, dates and CVC. The magic is that this credit card can be used only once so if it's stolen you don't run a risk. Pretty cool. I just used it to pay for some software online and it worked like a charm. Simple and useful!

  • 1 min read

June in Paradise

I just returned from RailsConf, a conference all about Ruby on Rails. Many bloggers have written about it so I won't summarize it further. In the coming days I will be posting on various of my discoveries and contacts made.

For today though I want to just direct your attention to the picture on the left. After the conference (which was in Portland Oregon) we drove to Seattle and spent one full day in Mount Rainier National Park.

This was around June 3d. We stayed at the Paradise Inn.

The Paradise Inn is at 5,000′ elevation.

I knew it wasn't going to be warm, and we brought our winter coats. But we were surprised by the 30 foot snow banks!

Yes, that's me in the picture 🙂

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“This is the Discover card Fraud department. Call 1-800-555-1212 – IMMEDIATELY

Sounds ominous, right? So I call them up, and I hear a serious voice telling me to please hold on, then I hear the official sounding "you are being recorded" beep beep beep.

Then the voice comes on the phone and says, "Thanks for calling Discover Card. Please give me your Discover Card number."

What would you do? I am worried about fraud on my card, right? But do I know who I am actually talking to?

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Portland OR smokes

I'm in Portland Oregon for a few days for a conference, and this may be an unfair sample, but I was amazed to see how many more people seem to be smoking cigarettes - on the street, in restaurants, etc - than what I am used to in Boston. Only one data point, but notable. I wonder why.