WiFi access point security password etiquette.

Now that more and more people are carrying devices capable of browsing the Internet via wifi, your chances of being called upon to share your wifi access point have gone way up. Alright, maybe the only thing that’s gone up is the number of people in your home who wish they had access to the Internet via your wifi router, but are afraid to ask for your password.  They’re afraid to ask because they don’t want to put you on the spot, fearing that our Wifi password may not be the simple low tech unique password it ought to be.

How passwords are hacked or stolen varies based on what the password is for. Website passwords can be hacked  from a computer most anywhere. Those passwords  should not be a word found in the dictionary, they should include a mixture of upper and lower case letters and numbers. Best practice is to vary these passwords by sites. That way if you’re password is compromised at one site other sites are not left vulnerable. To gain access to your account on a password protected site, hackers use computer programs that can automate the process for them. Often referred to as the brute force method its basically the same as someone trying your pets name or your kids names or your birthdate in different combinations until they get in.

Wifi access is different from web site security in that to gain access to your network your attacker needs to be close enough to your router to attempt to gain access to it.  In a neighborhood it may be obvious that there’s a car parked nearby with someone who doesn’t belong. But if you live in an apartment or condo there may be people trying to access your network at their leisure. If you fear this maybe the case you may choose to change your router password once a month or so. Not using a simple common word your pets name, street name or other obvious piece of information is a good idea. Wifi access is very low fruit for those wishing access to something they shouldn’t have access to. Email, banking and shopping sites are far, far more valuable. So much more valuable that the idea of someone working hard to gain access to your network is a relatively low risk.

So I propose wifi passwords should be secure enough to keep your neighbors off your network, but friendly and simple enough to share with visiting friends or family. They should be different than all your other passwords. They can be a phrase “theflowersarepretty” “onein1million” or a number and name “2354schwartz” The idea is it should be different than your important passwords easy to share, easy to remember and  easy to change.

The best ringtone imaginable should make you not want to answer your phone. It should bring a smile to your face and fill you with joy or a fond memory.  Of course it should also be loud enough so that you know your phone is ringing in the first place. I believe I have found the perfect general purpose ringtone. It’s not anything like the song I hear when my wife calls, or the tune I’ve associated with my son, or the alarm that warns me my ex is on the phone.  (She’s not that bad, the alarm sound makes me laugh when she does call. sorry Cami.) This ring reminds me a great trip to Montreal and of the awesome power of an F1 car.

My new ringtone if a recording of several F1 cars speeding past, about 20′ away. The cars have just exited a sharp left turn in 3rd gear at about 85 MPH and continuing on through the gears to 180+ MPH. They’re shifting into 5th at about 135 mph on their way to 7th gear right in front of me. What a sound!

I’m not a huge fan of alternative ringtones but I do believe they have there place. I’d never pay for a ringtone. Instead I prefer to edit an audio file, save it and transfer it to my iPhone with a program called iToner. I know next to nothing about transferring ring tones to other phones.

Now the best part, like sharing this story I’m sharing the file I created. Here is the file for you to use on your phone. It’ll open in a new window. Right click it and save it to your machine.

because somewhere, someone, sucks more than you.

This one took me a while to learn. If I knew this in my 20s or 30s I might have made it where I wanted to be, much faster. Or perhaps I’d have gotten there, got bored and been looking for something else.

Here’s the idea. Do you know what they call the guy who graduates last from medical school? They call him “Doctor.”

What ever you think you’d like to do in life, get yourself as close to it as you can. Do what ever it takes to be a person making money doing that thing. Never worry that you may not be good enough, talented enough or lack in any way, what it takes to do that thing (unless its specific education, no way around that one). Because once you arrive in that job you will find people there that are worse at it then you than you ever feared you could be.

Many people just fall into a field of employment based on family, friends or circumstance. By pursuing your dreams, by being involved with what interests you, your chances of success are already higher than someone who doesn’t take the time get what they want.

I wanted to work in entertainment, (television/movies) since high school. I’m here now, but my journey here was long. I see young people around me working in entertainment, many of whom I’m sure have very bright futures ahead of them. There are also people in entertainment who just “fell into it” based on circumstance or situation. Some of those people are hard workers and do great, but others who lack the drive and initiative to make something of it risk losing their jobs to someone willing to work harder. The entertainment field is special in that a college degree isn’t mandatory. Depending on the job, creative talent or most importantly initiative matters most. Success is nearly guaranteed to those that can see what needs doing and gets it done.

New in Lightroom 3 is the ability to make lens corrections similar to those possible with an articulated view camera. I’m absolutely loving this feature. Below is an example of a snapshot processed through Lightroom without any compensation for the distortion of the buildings caused by misalignment of the film plane to the buildings. Mouse over the image to see the corrected image. The lens corrections feature allows you to straighten vertical lines and correct for pincushioning or barrel distortion.

Roll over to compare before and after.

The lens on the Lumix LX3 un-corrected, adds a wicked amount of distortion all by itself. Lightroom corrects for this when it converts the RAW file. Jpegs from the camera have this distortion corrected in the camera as the Jpeg is prepared. The only time you would even notice it is when using a RAW convertor that doesn’t automatically correct it. The distortion I’ve corrected for in this photo was caused by how I held the camera as I took this picture. I like seeing the buildings straightened out instead of leaning into the street. Using this feature does chew up some of the image. Shooting wider or looser is one defense or I could have held the camera parallel with the vertical lines in the scene.

It was a great trip despite our difficulties getting there. We flew from Los Angeles at about 10:30 pm expecting a 2 hour wait between planes in Washington DC. While deplaning I received an email informing us that our next flight had been cancelled. We found a surly gate agent that offered the choice of flying about 5 hours later to Toronto and then on to Montreal, or we could wait 8 or 9 hours and fly direct to Montreal. We chose the former and set about entertaining ourselves at the airport. We would have left the airport and checked out some sites but according to my phone we couldn’t get anywhere of interest and back before our next flight.

In Toronto we had 2 hours between flights. At least on paper we did. We made our way through customs and took our time checking out anything interesting along the way to our second gate. Back through security and John’s second hands on body search, due to his pacemaker keeping him out of the metal detector. We arrived at restaurant for a meal and a beer. Were not really sure what meal it was, since we didn’t really sleep on the flight from LAX and we’re now three hours ahead, tired and confused we enjoyed the meal.

After the meal it occurs to me to check our boarding pass for our next flight. According to what I was reading that plane had already left.  There was no, “maybe we can run and catch it” about it. It was gone and we weren’t on it. I offered this observation to Robert who had great difficulty accepting the reality of our situation. We paid for our meal and gathered up John who had left us for bathroom break and headed off to get help. Damit! How did this happen? Where did the time go? didn’t we have 2  hours?

We did have 2 hours. But just barley 2 hours. Airplanes start boarding 30 minutes before they leave, plus we waited in the security line and wondered about the airport. In our lack of sleep confused state we simply missed our flight due to fatigue. It was decided this was our only defense as we pleaded for help form the airline to get us to Montreal. Afraid we may need to buy another ticket to Montreal, due to our careless respect for our first tickets, we found help. It turns out that flights from Toronto to Montreal leave every hour, we were booked on a flight leaving in another hour and a half to give us time to retrive our luggage and re-check in. Here we are waiting for our bags to re-emerge after their hands on security check after being removed the the plane we weren’t on.

Thursday was going to be a fine day of sightseeing and getting situated in the city prior to the race. Now it’s been spent on airplanes and in airports. We finally arrived in Montreal at about 8:00 pm and our Limo driver was nowhere to be seen. Repeated calls from Toronto and from the airport in Montreal were met with an answering machine. We were forced to take a taxi (a beat to crap Toyota Camery) to our hotel. The Orbitz travel voucher has all kinds of language on it about how they don’t even entertain the notion of refunds so now I’ve lost $55 due to the cancelled flight and our inability to get on a plane. Crap!

The next few days all went well as we enjoyed the city and the race. The F1 cars are amazing. Here’s an audio file recorded as we made our way to our seats for qualifying.

In our last few hours in Montreal it occurred to me that I was still holding the travel voucher for the failed limo ride from the airport. So I called the limo company again and got the answering machine. Then I turned off my caller ID from my phone and called again. SUCCESS! They answered. I explained that I wanted to use my voucher from our arrival to take a limo from the hotel to the airport, “sure” he said “what time would you like the driver to meet you?” Perfect. Yeah they seemed to be avoiding my calls, but so what, at least we’re getting what we’ve already paid for.

Dinner on Saturday night at Boris Bistro in Old Montreal was great. We made reservations at a place recommend in both Robert’s and my guide books. Boris Bistro on Mcgill in old Montreal.

It was my first time tasting Foie Gras.  All things considered, it was pretty damn tasty. Also on the appetizer selection this might were french fries cooked in duck fat, and Escargot. That’s the Foie Gras in the pastry at the bottom.

I enjoyed duck magret, in an espresso cardamom sauce, John had the braised beef, in red wine and bacon sauce. Robert had the lamb shank confit, tomato sauce and creamy polenta. With wine and the most delicious chocolate mouse, caramel thing it was a fantastic meal.

After that we strolled old Montreal before taking the subway to the Mont Royal area where an entire street was closed to traffic for the enjoyment of strolling from restaurant to bar to bar enjoying sidewalk venders along the way.

Seeing and hearing the F1 cars was fantastic, but this may have been the peak of my visit to Montreal. Very nice.

It’s late Sunday afternoon in Montreal after the Grand Prix Du Montreal. We’ve just returned to our room before heading out to try what reported as some of the best smoked meat sandwiches anywhere. A place called Schwartz’s Delicatessen. looking forward to that.

The race was great success and certainly worth doing, at least once in your life. Montreal is a beautiful city full of friendly people.

Nearly all the 50,000 plus attendees of the race take the subway under the St. Lawrence river to get there. Each train has six cars and half a car holds approximately 60 people. So that’s roughly 1080 people per train. It all flowed amazing well. Montreal handles crowd control amazingly well. As we left the race site on Saturday we saw someone being detained by the police. He was surrounded loosely by 5 or 6 officers as one officer was using his radio. It was clear the individual detained was going nowhere, but at the same time he wasn’t being touched. We joked that to Canadians that may be the equivalent of the Rodney King stop.

John and I, on the track after the race.

Don’t forget to listen to my AudioBoos. Then check out the audio I posted to Posterous. Those both proved to be easier to to a quick post of an audio file or photo from where ever I was. Later I might re-post some of the audio files, (especially the one of the F1 cars speeding past) to this site. Also look for the video of the three of us waiting in Toronto for our bags to reappear after being taken off the flight to Montreal that we missed.

Both Rob and John have passed out as I’m writing this. Seems like this happened yesterday too. Fighting the urge to record them snoring.

We were awoken at 5:00 am (2:00 am Los Angeles) sharp by the sun rising, and shining directly into our hotel room window. We got cleaned up and made our way to the track to pick up our tickets before the the will call trailer even opened. Walking like Zombies we were in our seats by 8:30 am. (5:30 back home).

When I purchased the tickets I didn’t know exactly where our seats would be in the grandstand, only which grandstand. Turns out they’re not the most perfect seats, but they could certainly be much worse.




We watched some Ferrari 430s practicing for a “gentleman’s race” to come. Then it was an F1 practice session, followed by a group of F1 cars that spanned several years of F1 racing. We ate lunch at the track and walked around until the next practice session. We caught glimpses of the track from time to time. Mostly we could enjoyed the sounds of 18,000 rpm motors pumping out 700+ H.P.
Were back in the room now tacking a break before possibly heading back out. Rob just rolled over into what looks like a nap, so who knows for sure.

So far Montreal is really nice place. The people are great. it’s clean and green and seems like it would be fine place to call home. Expect perhaps for the winters.
Not much was accomplished in the picture department today. Okay Rob’s asleep, looks like John’s going to follow him.

We’ve chased the sun at 350 mph and caught her. Crap! There it is coming in through a few open windows. We’re descending into Washington DC after a dreadful 5 hours trying to sleep.

Here we go. John, Rob and I take off in about an hour for our all night flight to Montreal Canada. We’ll enjoy 4 nights and 5 days checking the race events and the local sights.
Stay tuned to my Twitter feed for Audio Boo updates, Posterous posts and maybe a few pictures. I’ll try and record and photograph my way through the day. The posts may all come at once when I reach a wifi access point. So you’ll have to bear with the untimley nature of the updates.
Alright, so long for now. Stay tuned for updates.