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You Shouldn’t Do That

March 5th, 2010 ydant

Finally I managed to make the bank representative understand that I knew how to type the security answers into the website and that I was typing them in correctly.  So she went off to talk with Tech Support.

When she returned she explained to me that I had used special characters in the security answers, and the system allows me to do that. However, “I shouldn’t do that”, because it breaks things.

Just use subversive security questions like these:

Gfvk!Sm!z@RVOZP!O-=`

5hi,=xPQnmel}<'0Lgt6

m5:!oiwoeF9{S.G>twnO

RKD`W#,'2C;6V{C6VJ8p

@%4%{7\N?Y.QoJv`E[ 0

Your account will be so secure that nobody can log on.

Of Books and Bytes

December 9th, 2009 ydant

Clan of the Cave Bear

This is a hand-me-down copy of Clan of the Cave Bear - an embodiment of both the argument for and the argument against e-books.

What once was a smell that brought me back to browsing libraries and used book store shelves for hours at a time with great delight in the information and stories filling the walls from floor to ceiling, has become a visceral stench of age and decay. Old books now smell musty and make my nose tickle. They are bulky and don’t hold up very well to the ages, a fact the copious amounts of packing tape holding the binding together are a testament to. And still, for an e-book to last as long as this book would likely be just short of a miracle. The companies over burden their books with copy protection and rights limiting software designed to lock you into a single device, although they claim it’s to protect the artists’ profits. What are the chances that Amazon and Barnes and Noble will be around in 25 years to support your digital purchases? This book has stood the test of time (and the ones surrounding it are still respectably aged when considering the life times of digital files).