I am not a social person. It's just not my nature to seek out interaction with other folks and share all the gory details of my life with them. So when social networks like Facebook and Linkedin became popular I pretty much ignored them. As a former software developer I expect new applications to be a bit buggy and, given that the whole purpose of social networks is to get you to share information about yourself, I thought they were likely to be rife with privacy and security gaps. I was convinced that they were something to be avoided, at least by me. Unfortunately, a majority of the few folks with whom I would like to have some social contacts tend to communicate through social networking sites. That includes our kids. So when my wife came to me and told me that her sister, who was on Facebook, had some news about our kids that we hadn't yet heard, I had to agree with her that we should take the plunge.
Once we got on Facebook I became ever more amazed at how much personal data people put in their profiles and posts. People who, I am sure wouldn't leave their front door unlocked when they go away, will use their cell phone or laptop to post that they are out on a day trip or grabbing a cappuccino at the local beanery. That is sort of an open invitation to any tech-savvy burglar to stop by and run off with the new flat screen they posted about on Facebook earlier in the week. The reason for that is sort of twofold. On the one hand a lot of data that people put on Facebook is available to people whom they might not intend to have it. In addition, there are a lot of companies who make a living by aggregating data from various sources and selling it to anyone who wants it. That can make for an interesting and really insecure situation.
Just to make sure that I'm not laboring under more than my normal degree of paranoia here I ran a little cyber-stalking experiment today. It went like this:
I got on the Facebook wall of someone who is one of my Facebook friends (we'll call this person, F) and scrolled down through the posts until I found a comment from someone who is not one of my Facebook friends. This person (whom we will call X and refer to as the neuter he, which doesn't necessarily imply that it is a man rather than a woman) is one who frequently posts location info that is often commented on by F. Ordinarily I wouldn't have access to X's posts unless I specifically searched for X using Facebook's friend search function, but when X comments on a post that one of my Facebook Friends has made, or vice versa, Facebook let's me see X's profile information as well as the posts on his wall. Another way to get that kind of information is to run a Facebook application. To the best of my understanding, the Facebook application APIs will allow an application to get at most anything in a person's profile. Here's an article with some more information about social media APIs.
In any case, X's birth date and city of residence are listed in the profile, so I picked up that info from there. I also picked up some information about X's immediate family. Next I Googled X's first and last name and city and state of residence. This turned up a wealth of data. For one thing, X belongs to an organization that has a Facebook page. On that page I found out that X is a chairperson for a certain group. I also found out when and where the group will meet over the next several weeks. So now I know some times when X will be away from home and, in one case, I know that he will be holding a meeting at his home.
Another item that came back on the search was a page from a data aggregator. This page contained even more information about X, including a picture of his house and the front part of the name of the street where he lives. There was also information about X's spouse and children, his past residence locations and other spellings of his name. The site offered to sell me a full report with all the information the company had about X for a small fee. I looked at pages from several other aggregators and got similar information and offers of a full report, in one case for an introductory price of ninety-nine cents! One of the aggregator's listed the last part of the name of the street where X lives. So by putting together the two parts I had received from the two aggregators I was able to get the full name of the street.
Had I chosen to buy the full report I would not only get information on X's full address and current phone number, but also current income and place of business, complete list of relatives and any public record information concerning life events such as marriages, divorces, etc. There's more information about this subject in this article from the Vancouver Sun.
The way it appears to me is that a tech-savvy burglar, using the information gleaned from X's Facebook profile and the information from the location posts that X puts on Facebook, could clean out the house while Mr. and Mrs. X were out having a double latte some evening. If any curious neighbors challenged the thief, he would know more about the Xes than the neighbor knew and would be able to allay their suspicions long enough to get away with the goods. All of this, at least in my mind, is tantamount to putting the front door key under the mat.
So what can you do to make it a little tougher for burglars to rifle the family jewels? For one thing you can start by putting as little information in your social networking profiles as possible. Of course you'll need to put enough info there so that someone whom you want to find you can do that, but you should keep it to a minimum. Remember, all I needed to get the data I've mentioned here was first and last names and city and state of current residence. Other information, like family relationships, city and state of birth, schools attended, etc., just makes it easier to steal your identity or to verify it when dealing with a data aggregation site. Another thing to avoid is posting your location when you're not at home or the fact that your spouse is away for an extended period of time. The former might allow someone to burglarize the place and the latter might cause you to get an unwelcome visitor. A third thing to avoid is social networking site applications, especially games that require you to volunteer information about yourself or one of your friends. They are just there to feed the databases of data aggregators. In fact, it is a good idea to disallow the application APIs altogether so that nothing can run against your id.
Doing these things won't guarantee that you won't have a problem, but they'll make it more difficult for someone to steal your identity, or that new flat screen.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Clueless Drivers, Rude People, the Dorky Hat and Other Drivel
I know how grumpy old men get that way, cuz I”m one of them. Here's an example of how that happens.
A couple of weeks ago I was on my way to do a volunteer project at the Master Gardener Demonstration Garden. I was going to enable one of the raised beds for folks who are too handicapped to bend over to weed the garden and things like that. This was on a day when the high temperature was expected to be 106 and it was probably the 40th day of 100 plus degree highs we had had this summer and maybe the 25th in a row. At a quarter till nine it was already in the low nineties and, despite the fact that it hasn't rained here since Sam Houston died, it was humid as hell.
As I pulled up in the left turn lane to tun onto the main street of the little town that is our county seat, I saw that an eighteen-wheeler was about to turn right in order to go the opposite direction from which I was headed at that time. So instead of pulling right up to the light, where the big rig would have to drive over the left front fender of my pickup in order to make the turn, I stayed back a few car lengths from the light until the truck got around the corner. As soon as the truck was past me I pulled forward to make the turn, because the light was now green for me. As I moved forward a thirty-something woman in an SUV with the gas door hanging open and a kid about to fall out of a child seat in the back cut in front of me so close that I couldn't see the back of her car. I'm not sure what she was driving with because she was talking on a cell phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder, putting on makeup with one hand and working on her pompoms or something with the other. Just at that moment the light turned red for our lane and a big pickup cut across her bow on the cross street so she had to stop. At this point Ms. I'mWayMoreImportantThanAnyoneElseInTheWorld looked in her rear view mirror and gave me a dirty look like I had done something to keep her from zooming through the intersection as she had planned. At least to the extent that she was capable of planning anything. I, of course, responded by manually reminding her that her IQ was 1. Yeah, I know I was on a humanitarian mission here, but benevolence only goes so far with me.
So the light finally changed and the clueless wench got around the corner, but then she drove at about fifteen miles an hour while she searched the roads on her right looking for the spot where she wanted to turn in. Of course when she made the turn she didn't signal. I know, I know, I should have passed her, but I was going to turn right not too far up the road and, because she was driving so slowly at that point, all of the cars behind me where zipping into the inside lane and I couldn't get around her.
I have always felt that in situations like this you should be able to get something akin to a hunting license that would have a tag on it like you get with a deer license and you could use that any one time you choose during the year to accost a lousy driver, take their keys away and staple a tag to their ear that says “Driving while dumbassed" and their license would be suspended for the rest of the year. Of course, there are times when someone might want to use one of those on me so maybe that's not such a good idea. Never mind.
OK, so here's a place where one of those licenses would still be a good idea and it doesn't even involve driving.
My wife and I took a BOGO coupon to Baskin-Robbins last week to get something cold because it was another 100 plus degrees day. The joint was packed so there was no place to sit and eat the ice cream inside. They did have two or three tables outside though, so we decided to brave the heat and eat our sundaes there.
Now this B-R is in a strip mall outside the entrance to a subdivision. The rest of the mall is populated by real estate offices, Vietnamese man-pedi places and your friendly independent insurance agent. There is a restaurant at the other end of the strip but the Baskin-Robbins is clearly the only place in the strip that has outside eating.
After we sat down we smelled cigarette smoke and noticed that this old we-live-in-an-expensive-retirement-community-looking dude was smoking outside a liquor store about twenty feet upwind from us. Fortunately the wind was kind of gusting, so we didn't get enveloped in a cloud of fumes, but we were still getting second-hand smoke. I was going to say something to him but after a couple of (not very) discrete coughs from my wife, the guy moved further up the strip where his smoking wasn't as much of a problem.
Just as Ellie and I were able to breathe an untainted sigh of relief a thirty-something woman (starting to see a pattern here?) who was so skinny she looked as though she must subsist totally on “reds, cocaine and vitamin C” (apologies to the Grateful Dead) and who had some sort of tattoo that started at one ankle, twined around her bony leg, and emerged from her tube top somewhere near the opposite shoulder before wrapping around her scrawny neck, pulled up in some kind of Japanese faux Jeep with out of state plates. She had a cell phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder (more patterns), a freshly lit cigarette in one hand and with the other hand she dragged a small child of indeterminate race and sex that never stopped whining up and down in front of the B-R while she blabbed away on her phone and smoked that whole damn cigarette. I'm not sure Ellie and I even got second hand smoke from that one because she was so close that it was almost first hand.
Meantime a blue-haired woman came out of B-R with a couple of cones to go and got in one side of an H-2 while the smoky old dude from up the strip got in the other. So it turns out that he had to have a quick cigarette before his ice cream cone, just like the illustrated woman with the whiny kid had to have one more cigarette before she took him in to get his ice cream fix.
I'm not so sure that the hunting license/tag thing is the best cure for inconsiderate SOBs like those two. I'm thinking maybe a Winchester Defender loaded with three-inch magnum buckshot. After all, they were killing Ellie and me with all that cigarette smoke and, this being Texas, I should have been within my rights to shoot them in defense of self and family.
Speaking of family: at times that's another source of irritation for us grumpy old galoots.
I think I mentioned once or twice that it has been gawdawful hot this summer. OK, I realize that Central Texas, where I live, is farther south than northern Mexico. It's farther south than the south coasts of Mississippi and Alabama and about at the same latitude as the south coast of the Florida panhandle and not much north of South Texas, which is farther south than any part of the continental US except for the very southern tip of Florida from Miami on south, and that's probably going to be under water in thirty years anyway and then Texas will be the southernmost state in the continental United States. So it's always hot here in the summertime. These days, however, we are on some kind of warming trend and the prediction I've heard is that Central Texas will be as hot and dry as West Texas in thirty years or so.
The bottom line here is that you really need to protect yourself from the sun when you go outside, and Ellie and I are outside a lot. Normally I wear a gimme cap when we go out. This summer, though, I've had a problem where the tops of my ears have gotten sunburned because they aren't covered by gimme caps. So I picked up this sort of Palm Beachy thing that has a brim that goes all the way around. Ellie is loath to have me wear it when she is with me because she says it looks dorky on me. She's right; but then I look dorky in any hat. Come to think of it, most of the time I look pretty dorky whether I'm wearing a hat or not; but for some reason she thinks this particular hat is way dorkier than most. On me. It would probably look good on that guy in the commercials on TV who pushes XX cerveza and says “stay thirsty my friends”.
I tend to favor function over form, so I don't much care whether I look dorky in that hat. It keeps the sun off me and keeps my ears from getting sunburned and that's all I care about. So I wear it. Still my wife and I have a big debate over it every time I bring it along. At least we did until a couple of weeks ago when I was wearing it while we toured Presidio La Bahia. As we walked along the fort walls a thirty-something woman with a phone pressed between her cheek and shoulder passed us in the opposite direction. As she came abreast of us she smiled and said “Nice hat”. I'm pretty sure she wasn't being sarcastic; but I was kind of grumpy the rest of the day anyway. I'm not sure why. I think it was the heat.
A couple of weeks ago I was on my way to do a volunteer project at the Master Gardener Demonstration Garden. I was going to enable one of the raised beds for folks who are too handicapped to bend over to weed the garden and things like that. This was on a day when the high temperature was expected to be 106 and it was probably the 40th day of 100 plus degree highs we had had this summer and maybe the 25th in a row. At a quarter till nine it was already in the low nineties and, despite the fact that it hasn't rained here since Sam Houston died, it was humid as hell.
As I pulled up in the left turn lane to tun onto the main street of the little town that is our county seat, I saw that an eighteen-wheeler was about to turn right in order to go the opposite direction from which I was headed at that time. So instead of pulling right up to the light, where the big rig would have to drive over the left front fender of my pickup in order to make the turn, I stayed back a few car lengths from the light until the truck got around the corner. As soon as the truck was past me I pulled forward to make the turn, because the light was now green for me. As I moved forward a thirty-something woman in an SUV with the gas door hanging open and a kid about to fall out of a child seat in the back cut in front of me so close that I couldn't see the back of her car. I'm not sure what she was driving with because she was talking on a cell phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder, putting on makeup with one hand and working on her pompoms or something with the other. Just at that moment the light turned red for our lane and a big pickup cut across her bow on the cross street so she had to stop. At this point Ms. I'mWayMoreImportantThanAnyoneElseInTheWorld looked in her rear view mirror and gave me a dirty look like I had done something to keep her from zooming through the intersection as she had planned. At least to the extent that she was capable of planning anything. I, of course, responded by manually reminding her that her IQ was 1. Yeah, I know I was on a humanitarian mission here, but benevolence only goes so far with me.
So the light finally changed and the clueless wench got around the corner, but then she drove at about fifteen miles an hour while she searched the roads on her right looking for the spot where she wanted to turn in. Of course when she made the turn she didn't signal. I know, I know, I should have passed her, but I was going to turn right not too far up the road and, because she was driving so slowly at that point, all of the cars behind me where zipping into the inside lane and I couldn't get around her.
I have always felt that in situations like this you should be able to get something akin to a hunting license that would have a tag on it like you get with a deer license and you could use that any one time you choose during the year to accost a lousy driver, take their keys away and staple a tag to their ear that says “Driving while dumbassed" and their license would be suspended for the rest of the year. Of course, there are times when someone might want to use one of those on me so maybe that's not such a good idea. Never mind.
OK, so here's a place where one of those licenses would still be a good idea and it doesn't even involve driving.
My wife and I took a BOGO coupon to Baskin-Robbins last week to get something cold because it was another 100 plus degrees day. The joint was packed so there was no place to sit and eat the ice cream inside. They did have two or three tables outside though, so we decided to brave the heat and eat our sundaes there.
Now this B-R is in a strip mall outside the entrance to a subdivision. The rest of the mall is populated by real estate offices, Vietnamese man-pedi places and your friendly independent insurance agent. There is a restaurant at the other end of the strip but the Baskin-Robbins is clearly the only place in the strip that has outside eating.
After we sat down we smelled cigarette smoke and noticed that this old we-live-in-an-expensive-retirement-community-looking dude was smoking outside a liquor store about twenty feet upwind from us. Fortunately the wind was kind of gusting, so we didn't get enveloped in a cloud of fumes, but we were still getting second-hand smoke. I was going to say something to him but after a couple of (not very) discrete coughs from my wife, the guy moved further up the strip where his smoking wasn't as much of a problem.
Just as Ellie and I were able to breathe an untainted sigh of relief a thirty-something woman (starting to see a pattern here?) who was so skinny she looked as though she must subsist totally on “reds, cocaine and vitamin C” (apologies to the Grateful Dead) and who had some sort of tattoo that started at one ankle, twined around her bony leg, and emerged from her tube top somewhere near the opposite shoulder before wrapping around her scrawny neck, pulled up in some kind of Japanese faux Jeep with out of state plates. She had a cell phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder (more patterns), a freshly lit cigarette in one hand and with the other hand she dragged a small child of indeterminate race and sex that never stopped whining up and down in front of the B-R while she blabbed away on her phone and smoked that whole damn cigarette. I'm not sure Ellie and I even got second hand smoke from that one because she was so close that it was almost first hand.
Meantime a blue-haired woman came out of B-R with a couple of cones to go and got in one side of an H-2 while the smoky old dude from up the strip got in the other. So it turns out that he had to have a quick cigarette before his ice cream cone, just like the illustrated woman with the whiny kid had to have one more cigarette before she took him in to get his ice cream fix.
I'm not so sure that the hunting license/tag thing is the best cure for inconsiderate SOBs like those two. I'm thinking maybe a Winchester Defender loaded with three-inch magnum buckshot. After all, they were killing Ellie and me with all that cigarette smoke and, this being Texas, I should have been within my rights to shoot them in defense of self and family.
Speaking of family: at times that's another source of irritation for us grumpy old galoots.
I think I mentioned once or twice that it has been gawdawful hot this summer. OK, I realize that Central Texas, where I live, is farther south than northern Mexico. It's farther south than the south coasts of Mississippi and Alabama and about at the same latitude as the south coast of the Florida panhandle and not much north of South Texas, which is farther south than any part of the continental US except for the very southern tip of Florida from Miami on south, and that's probably going to be under water in thirty years anyway and then Texas will be the southernmost state in the continental United States. So it's always hot here in the summertime. These days, however, we are on some kind of warming trend and the prediction I've heard is that Central Texas will be as hot and dry as West Texas in thirty years or so.
I tend to favor function over form, so I don't much care whether I look dorky in that hat. It keeps the sun off me and keeps my ears from getting sunburned and that's all I care about. So I wear it. Still my wife and I have a big debate over it every time I bring it along. At least we did until a couple of weeks ago when I was wearing it while we toured Presidio La Bahia. As we walked along the fort walls a thirty-something woman with a phone pressed between her cheek and shoulder passed us in the opposite direction. As she came abreast of us she smiled and said “Nice hat”. I'm pretty sure she wasn't being sarcastic; but I was kind of grumpy the rest of the day anyway. I'm not sure why. I think it was the heat.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Time Warp
There are pluses and minuses to just about everything and retirement is no exception. On the downside, most people retire when they are up in years and not able to physically do a lot of the things they could when they were younger and most retirees have less money to spend than they did when they worked full time. On the plus side, however, some kind of Einsteinean time warp happens when you retire. You don't have a lot of commitments anymore and the days of the week cease to have a lot of meaning. In some ways the weekdays and weekends become reversed. You find yourself staying home when all of the working folks are out shopping or hitting the recreation areas and then you run your errands during the weekdays when all the workaday folk are in their cubicles.
Some people have a hard time with an analog life that isn't governed by the clock and calendar. I guess for some people it is sort of like being lost at sea with no reference points in sight. Once you get used to it, though, it makes life a lot easier. Take last week for instance.
Ellie and I had decided to hit the Texas Independence trail again. We planned to take a Friday run to Goliad to see Presidio La Bahia, one of those consecrated in blood sites sort of like the Alamo. We had been planning the trip all week but as the week progressed it began to look more and more as though tropical storm Don had its sights trained on Goliad and the prediction was that it was going to get pelted by five or six inches of rain Friday afternoon. We decided that that didn't sound like fun to us. In fact it would be adding insult to injury since Grizzledgalootland has been in the grips of a record-setting drought all year. Since we're living in a time warp the storm didn't really cause us a problem though. We just switched the trip from Friday to Thursday and spent the day climbing the parapets of Presidio La Bahia and paying homage at the shrine dedicated to the 400+ members of the Texas revolutionary army that were massacred there.
That's the neat thing about living beyond the clock and calendar. One day is the same as another, so you can slide your schedule all over time and back and do what you want to do whenever it's convenient.
Today was another example of the advantage of living without a schedule. The powers that be have been working on the road behind Casa Galoot for over a year. Apparently they have ramped up the schedule in an attempt to finish it by the time school starts and buses begin to rumble down the road because, at four freaking o'clock this morning, we were awakened by the sound of road-building equipment clanking and growling so close to the house that it sounded as though they were in the backyard.
We both woke up at the sound and lay there like zombies for half an hour or so until we realized that they weren't going to quit anytime soon. So we got up, poured ourselves into a pot of coffee and sat around trying to work up some degree of consciousness for an hour or so until we were able to see something besides floaters.
We were both kind of hungry by then and Ellie mentioned that a local one-off all night restaurant had an early bird special breakfast from four o'clock until seven. So we followed the old proverb “when life gives you broken eggs, make migas” (I think that's some kind of Tex-Mex proverb) and hied ourselves to the Kerbey Lane Cafe (which, as it turns out, isn't on Kerbey Lane; at least, not the one we went to) and chowed down on a couple of eggs and a couple of raspberry pancakes each, with bacon for her and fresh fruit for me (all for $3.45 apiece), washed down with about a gallon of coffee until we were more or less coffee-logged.
After that we drove to a 24-hour Wal~Mart and killed some time until the local mall threw open the doors for the crowd of septuagenarian strollers that usually gathers there at that time of day and joined the group for a mile and a half walk in the A/C. (It was about 90 degrees by then and humid as, well Bon Temps, Louisiana, I guess.) We had planned to make it a two-mile walk but the coffee had worn off by that time and we were kind of sleepwalking so we decided to head home to get some yard work done before the temperature got up into the triple digits again.
On the way home we realized once a gain how lucky we are to be able to live in relative rather than absolute time. Yeah, sometimes you hit a boring patch, but it's great to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it instead of trying to fit everything in on the weekend or after work. Now, being able to afford to do the things you want to do when you are retired .... Well, for most of us that's a different story.
Some people have a hard time with an analog life that isn't governed by the clock and calendar. I guess for some people it is sort of like being lost at sea with no reference points in sight. Once you get used to it, though, it makes life a lot easier. Take last week for instance.
That's the neat thing about living beyond the clock and calendar. One day is the same as another, so you can slide your schedule all over time and back and do what you want to do whenever it's convenient.
Today was another example of the advantage of living without a schedule. The powers that be have been working on the road behind Casa Galoot for over a year. Apparently they have ramped up the schedule in an attempt to finish it by the time school starts and buses begin to rumble down the road because, at four freaking o'clock this morning, we were awakened by the sound of road-building equipment clanking and growling so close to the house that it sounded as though they were in the backyard.
We both woke up at the sound and lay there like zombies for half an hour or so until we realized that they weren't going to quit anytime soon. So we got up, poured ourselves into a pot of coffee and sat around trying to work up some degree of consciousness for an hour or so until we were able to see something besides floaters.
After that we drove to a 24-hour Wal~Mart and killed some time until the local mall threw open the doors for the crowd of septuagenarian strollers that usually gathers there at that time of day and joined the group for a mile and a half walk in the A/C. (It was about 90 degrees by then and humid as, well Bon Temps, Louisiana, I guess.) We had planned to make it a two-mile walk but the coffee had worn off by that time and we were kind of sleepwalking so we decided to head home to get some yard work done before the temperature got up into the triple digits again.
On the way home we realized once a gain how lucky we are to be able to live in relative rather than absolute time. Yeah, sometimes you hit a boring patch, but it's great to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it instead of trying to fit everything in on the weekend or after work. Now, being able to afford to do the things you want to do when you are retired .... Well, for most of us that's a different story.
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