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My free Gmail account allows me to have a 64 bit password.  If you can crack it, you deserve to be able to read my email.

Well what about the important stuff, like my online bank accounts?  My banking account you say, funny you should ask.  My bank limits my password to 20 characters.

One of the smartest things I have done was to decide to try and listen to books on CD during my commute back and forth from work. I absolutely love it. I love it for several reasons and I am about to tell you why.

The first reason is taking the pressure and stress off traffic. I live south of Atlanta, the asshole of the world, and I have to commute into the city every day. Atlanta traffic is horrid and you would do better to ask a homeless man to cure cancer than ask everyone using the interstates heading into or out of Atlanta to pay attention and JUST DRIVE STRAIGHT! There is however, no better feeling than being stuck in traffic and not giving caring because you are so wrapped up in a book you can’t wait to hear what happens.

Another reason is it allows you to listen to books that improve you. You can listen to books that help your career, make you a better parent, or any number of topics you would like to improve. Anything is better than listening to absolute crap ( IE The regular FM stations that pollute the radio dial. If you are in Atlanta fire up star 94 for a taste of the biggest idiots to ever pollute the airwaves. Those people make Howard Stern seem like a good counselor). Cut the FM cord. It is worthless and will never help you.

Just sit back and look closely at the amount of time you spend in a car. An hour a day is a lot of time that could be better spent either entertaining yourself or improving yourself.

UPDATED: Canceling My XBox Live Gold Membership

It came time to cancel my Xbox 360 Live Gold Membership tonight.  I have no problems with the service or the cost of it, but I just don’t use it.  I haven’t played my Xbox 360 in months much less logged on to play someone else.

So, I log into my game console and look around for the cancel button.  I went through every screen on the account management tab but nothing.  I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Me being a naive Internet user ( 16 years and counting) I assumed Microsoft would make canceling the service as easy as it was to start.  I mean it took me 2 minutes and a credit card to start my account right on my Xbox 360.  Why should canceling be so hard?  We know why they make it so hard, but damnit I am ranting here.

So anyway, I hit Google with “how do i cancel my xbox live subscription” and about the second one down was the number I had to call to cancel my membership.  So I dialed it up and after 4 Indians, 3 Holds, and 2 reference numbers I finally got it canceled.  If I gave out a weekly you suck ass award, Microsoft would get this weeks.

Need to repair your Xbox?

In the middle of my redesign, I decided to go in a new direction. I came across WP Remix and decided to buy it. It is really more of a content management theme than specifically for a blog. The versatility of it is why I purchased it. It is a great base to build upon and includes several different homepage options. The design you see here is completely stock for the blog. I haven’t gotten around to customizing it yet. The profitable projects get priority.

The funny part is, after finding and buying WP Remix, I found WP Premium which is a free theme offered by the same author. I downloaded it and have it running on my music blog. After some customization, I am really pleased with the way it looks. It is exactly what I wanted, 1 main column and 2 sidebars together on the right. Excellent theme and you can get WP Premium here.

I am very pleased to announce jasonpoteet.com and a few other websites are running on a fresh dedicated Linux web server. It was completely built from from the terminal window by yours truly. Of course if it winds up getting hacked because I did something silly like chmod 777 my config files, you’ll know why.

My main hosting experience has come from Windows Servers NT 4 through Windows 2003. I like Windows but I also wanted to expand my Linux abilities. Linux is easy to figure out from the GUI so I decided that wouldn’t really teach me the proper way. I also wanted to make a server that was blazing fast and as secure as possible. Common sense tells you the less you have installed the faster and more secure your server will be. With that thought in mind, I decided to go with a minimal install that only has what I need installed.

Working from the terminal window was certainly an exercise in patience for me. It was pretty frustrating at times to know what I wanted to do, but have no idea where the file I needed to change was located. That is where the wonder of the Internet came in. The wealth of information on the Internet is just incredible these days. It was very satifisfying though when I finally got the hang of everything and got the website up and running. I am also very please at the improved load times versus the old server. The hardware this is running on isn’t that impressive so it is certainly an improvement.

When I finish up a few loose ends, the next phase will be redoing the design. The old design went south when I updated Wordpress, so I decided to simple start over. The current look is a blank wordpress template from refueled.com. It looks good for a blank template, but it does need some livening up. That will be the next around here.

According to a article on Yahoo News, Time Warner Cable will roll out a beta test of a new pricing structure later this year that will charge broadband users based on their monthly bandwidth usage.

This was only a matter of time. Downloading music is one thing, but as home users start downloading more and more videos the ISP’s see their chance to up monthly subscription rates. I suspect you can also count on not getting a lower rate if you don’t use a lot of bandwidth.

The cable companies are already suffering from oversold bandwidth and they are losing the new High Def customers to the satellite TV providers because they can’t compete. Bandwidth is the reason your cable company offers you 10 HD channels and as of this post, DirectTV offers 84 HD channels. If you have an HD TV, it is a no brainer who your HD channel provider will be.

One interesting aspect to this will be the millions of unsecured networks out there. I can’t drive one mile from my house without stumbling across at least 3 unsecured wireless networks named Linksys. Charging by the amount of bandwidth used will simply encourage people do their downloading on their neighbors wireless network.

It definitely isn’t a good time to be running a cable company. You are losing customers based on your old infrastructure and your only real prospect of growth is increasing billings on your current customer base.

Maybe they can lease some of that dark fiber from Google.

I have really been focusing a considerable amount of energy on security lately. I have been looking at some of our conventional wisdom and trying to decide how it fits in with our current world. Is it still relevant or does it needs some to be updated.

That brings me to the topic of tonight’s post, the secret question. The secret question is the one that many of your more important services will ask you to supply an answer to so they can verify who you are. The most common question is what your mother’s maiden name is. They will also ask things like, where were you born, what is your dad’s middle name, what was your high school mascot, and many more just like that. The problem with these types of questions is they are easy for someone to socially engineer out of you.

My philosophy is this. Questions that have real answers are easier to answer than questions that don’t have real answers. When you are asked for your mother’s maiden name, pick a word or name or even a series of alphanumeric characters to supply as your answer. Don’t use your mother’s real maiden name. It is easy for someone to find out your mother’s maiden name. Hell, she might even tell them if they ask nice enough. They won’t be able to find out her maiden name is $fop()5tHg.

For many years, the conventional wisdom has been to never write down your passwords. You are suppose to make a strong password and remember it. This practice is very secure, however it is not practical in todays electronic society. Remembering 1 strong password is easy. Remembering 100 is a completely different thing.

In my opinion, forcing yourself to remember the strong password means you will use the same password in multiple places. This will leave you very vulnerable if your password is ever compromised. This also brings the “weakest link in the chain” effect into play. Your banks computers may be strong and your account information may be very secure on them. That internet message board or website you register with may not be as secure with the password to your electronic vault.

I carry a journal with me that has my passwords. I also guard the journal the same as I do my wallet. A journal may be overkill for most people so you could also write down your passwords and a single sheet of paper and store them in your wallet. Make sure you make a copy and stick it with your other valuable papers in a safe or safety deposit box. I create unique passwords for all of my sites and I write them down on a dedicated section of the journal as soon as I create a new account. I also don’t use words or dates in my passwords. Those are a lot easier to brute force than tougher passwords. For example, your name and birth date isn’t a good password. #eL9~ukl5f$ is a good password. EDqz~!)Oy$R:>jp;sd80_xCY}P=1^NVi41{.%GwPB”Dfqo4P,gentAG is an even better password. That last password is a 63 random printable ASCII character password generated by GRC’s Ultra High Security Password Generator. If someone can break that password, they were going to get your info anyway. I know some people have a tough time generating their own passwords so use that site. Steve Gibson of GRC is a legend in computer security.

It is ok to write down your passwords as long as you protect them and make sure you use different passwords for every logon you need. That way if one password is compromised somewhere you only have one password to change.

Well, like most other people I upgraded my Foxmarks to version 2.0 recently. What a pain in the ass that was. I should actually read the release notes to see why we needed a new version. The biggest change is probably the bookmarks file itself. I see it went from .xml to .json. Hopefully there is a good reason in there to account for all the headaches caused by the upgrade.

I had been using the custom FTP settings and had plenty of trouble getting it to work after the upgrade. This is what I did to make it work. First, set up your custom FTP server address. I could never get Foxmarks to work when I put in the URL to my FTP server. I had to put in the IP address on several different computers and it would finally work. That looked like this:

ftp://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/foxmarks.json

Not sure why Foxmarks is having DNS problems but that seems to be the case. The FTP server answers to the url just like it should. The only thing I can think of that could be causing it is the server is is using 1 ip for different websites and using the host header to forward the traffic properly. If that is the problem, it explains why so many people are having trouble with the custom FTP settings after the upgrade but some say theirs works fine.

The second part is getting the .json file up there. You have to go to a computer with the old bookmarks up to date. Then manually upload that set of bookmarks after you have upgraded Foxmarks. Now you have a .json file on your ftp site. Go to your other computers and configure their Foxmarks settings. Now you can force download the new Foxmarks file.

We currently have a iRobot Roomba and love the thing. It does a wonderful job of helping keep the house dog hair free. You just press a button and it vacuums for a couple of hours then goes back to it cradle to recharge. Now that is my kind of house work.

The back of my house has gutters that are at least 30′ off the ground. So you can imagine my glee when I saw an ad for the iRobot Loojâ„¢ 120 Gutter Cleaning Robot. I’ll report back when I actually get one.