What’s in my Bag #7
Current and Previous "What's In My Bag" posts here
I just finished playing in my 6th tournament ever, and I just about DFL'd (again), in Int. That's okay, I'm improving and though I kicked the ground a couple of times yesterday, I had a lot of fun. Just getting some rounds in with friends is enough.
I also have a few things to work on. My backhand, which I've been using since April (about 6 months now) is getting better and better, and while my scores have dropped about 5-7 strokes a round typically (I blow up now and then, too), I feel like with just a bit more time and practice, I'll be able to shave another 5 strokes per round. I'm missing my line just a little many times, and when I start playing from the middle of the fairway instead of the fringes, my shots will all be easier.
On the Friday before the tournament, I followed a doubles pairing of some open studs (Jay Reading, Mike Olse, Brad Miller & Ryan Sawyer). They played the new gold course at Ingleside, a narrow, tangled never-a-good-lie par 65. I knew going in I'd be impressed, and I wasn't really surprised by their play (which was excellent). I was mainly surprised by how easy even their long throws looked. And their 300 footers -- many shots on this course were short drives for placement -- they looked like me throwing a 100 foot upshot. So, I'm clearly throwing WAY TOO HARD.
Dell Latitude 2100 w/Ubuntu: Thumbs Down
My wife and I wanted to try out the new tiny netbooks and I'm a Linux guy so we bought a Dell Latitude 2100 w/Ubuntu installed. We upgraded a few things, including a touch screen which I was pretty psyched about using. I think Touch Screens will rock the world. I am probably wrong.
I have used Linux off-and-on for about 10 years, first at work in about 1996, then for myself with a variety of desktop computers and a Sony Vaio in 1998. That Vaio was an early attempt at using Linux full time and it mostly went well, but I had to resort to Windows for a lot of my work. Browsers weren't very good on Linux then, and there was little to no multimedia support.
The ensuing years everything got better and I have 4 Linux laptops in the house right now (not including the Dell we are shipping back today). Linux works. It's awesome. Unfortunately, Dell isn't doing the Linux movement any favors by sending out this netbook.
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Create your own tr.im
URL Shorteners can be really useful. Before twitter came along, the main reason for using a site like http://tinyurl.com was to be able to take a long url that wrapped in an email or newsgroup post and shorten it to allow for a better, cleaner view. Sometimes the wrapped URL broke, making it unclickable, too.
With twitter, short urls became even more important. Even those with one or two extra characters (bit.ly vs tr.im or tr.im vs tinyurl.com) lost out in the fray: 140 characters means 2 extra characters is about 1.5% of your message.
The problem is: tr.im went out of business, at least temporarily. With it, went all the shortened URLs. If your web site relied on those URLs, you were out o' luck. Turns out, though, a URL shortener is very, very easy to implement. This tutorial is based on http://wjmp.net/ where my sandbox URL shortener is.
How to Create Secure Passwords you’ll never forget
A really long but not complicated password is better than a short complex one.
This is a pretty good password: 3*w#loWQ@
But this one is too: A8-9*iA8-9*iA8-9*iA8-9*iA8-9*i
Not as complex, but a LOT longer, which is a key. Remember that. Repetition can help make a password more secure. The cracker program doesn't know how long it is. It doesn't know it's repetitive. It just has to try scores, thousands, millions or billions of permutations to get it. In other words, someone really has to care.
How they figure out your password
As a companion to my posts about having rememberable, secure passwords, I wanted to cover, in general, how people ("hackers") figure out your password.
