Cogitations by Brad

A lot of churches have either moved or are moving to using overhead slides, but a lot of them don’t know a lot about the hardware and software available to them. I think by advising these churches on a good solution, I could know the right solution to save them money, and get a portion of the money that was saved by the congregation for my service.

This idea stems from a website I did for a guy that advised people on a another issue, but it’s consulting work, which is this idea.

Maybe I won’t have to charge a lot if I have another full time job, and just charge enough to cover costs, but if I decided to try and use this as an income, I don’t see any immediate problems with it. I might could even build some of the hardware, and become a wholesaler to make the product even cheaper while retaining more of the profit. Both sides would benefit.

I wish some people would come with disclaimers on their forehead. (And I’m not talking about you, the person reading this, because you yourself, are perfect as you are ). It could say, “I’m not rational,” or “I think too highly of myself.” Maybe even, “I have too much money and it’s going to cost you a lot to be my friend because I don’t know what efficiency is.”

Maybe I just need to learn to say no.

Since my accident, I haven’t updated this thing much. Maybe that’s because of the condition of my fingers. I had major lacerations on the outside 3 fingers of my left hand, and had to have stitches, and wear bandages for the past 3 weeks on them. I’ve seen a hand doctor twice, and this last time, he told me that I was ready to start using them a little more.

I’m still going to be wearing a wrap on my middle finger, but the outside two are actually healing nicely. The pinky has definite scars, and the ring finger still has a spot that is healing, but they’re good enough that I don’t have to protect them as much.

I’ve been doing sporatic work on Exposong, including getting image slides, but nothing to show for it yet. I’ll actually be starting back to work on Tuesday, so I’ll be looking forward to getting back to work.

We were driving in Lubbock yesterday. My roommate, Garrett, was driving his Toyota, I was sitting shotgun, and Tina was in the back seat. Someone was tailgating us, so Garrett decides to break to get them off. “Hold on,” he says, not actually knowing that we’re going to have a real reason to hold on soon. The vehicle swerves left to avoid him and over corrected, coming back to hit the left side of the bed of the truck. We fly left, and it feels unreal; the top of the truck hit on the ground, I see the windshield shatter. Most of the impact was on the drivers side. I had blacked out.

Now we’re on all four wheels with people all around the car. A lot of medical people had witnessed it, and they were making sure we were all not too badly injured.

The roof had caved a little on my side, but more so on the drivers side. The windshield in front of me was shattered, and disconnected at the top. I looked down, and my hands were bloody. Turns out most of my injury was in my left hand. I started to see spots.

Emergency vehicles arrived a little later. They put a neckbrace on all of me and pulled me out, making sure that they did all the effort. They had to pry the backdoor off to get Tina out.

Tina and I went in one ambulance to University Medical Center. Garrett went to Covenant Hospital.

Once we arrived, they put me in the hallway. Random nurses were asking some questions. The hospital was overrun with people coming in on carts and police officers. I heard someone say that we flipped 2, maybe 3 times. It took 45 minutes to get a doctor (estimated). Another 15 minutes, and a guy came to get a catscan on my neck, and an x-ray on my hand. They took me back to the hallway.

I had been thirsty since I got there, but they wouldn’t give me a drink. My brother came in finally, because they had locked down the ER (I think for an investigation of some sort). Other people came in and out to visit me, and it would take at least 1.5 hours to get me to a room. Another hour and the doctor came to stitch me up finally. Another 45 minutes and a nurse came and cleaned my wounds up. They must have liked me so much that they wanted to keep me around.

They finally released me, and Daniel and I went and got my medicine.

Thanks to Daniel, Jeff, Hollis, and all others who showed up at the hospital. (I typed this with one hand and another finger)

I know a lot of Americans who absolutely hate the idea of our products coming from other countries. They whine and complain, saying, “they’re stealing our jobs,” or they state that in fact, the workers are underpaid and oppressed in their jobs because it is a 3rd world country.

In fact, when our factory jobs go overseas, it’s a good thing. Not only do we stimulate the economy of the countries, and add wealth to the country, we get a good product as well, at a lower price. They are happy to have a steady income, that probably pays more than they would get without the factory, and our pocketbooks are better off because the wages of paying their employees are lower.

Does it take away American jobs? In a way. Do we as Americans want to work for $5.15/hour (actually more now that minimum wage is going up)? Do we want mundane factory jobs? No, most of us do not. Our nation is moving away from the low, hourly rate jobs, and into the educated, high salary jobs. There are plenty of jobs for the uneducated, and even though it hurts when 1,000 people lose their job to a factory relocation, without change, our economy will never grow.

It’s important to remain informed on the major issues. A lot of times, politicians will tell us what we want to hear, but it’s  not always what’s best for us in the long run. So, before you complain about the economy, make sure you know the facts.

Looks like I’m going to be working this summer. My boss wants to set me up with office hours, which is promising, because that will mean I’ll get a steady paycheck. It also means I’ll be in Lubbock for most of the summer, which isn’t so bad; I already commited to the softball team with our college group.

I’m finally finding a group that I’m comfortable with at Cross Campus. Kind of ironic that it’s happening now out of the whole year. Better late than never.

I’ve been using firefox in combination with adblock plus for a long time now, and haven’t really second guessed myself. A lot of websites aren’t there for the users, but in fact just there to make money. I don’t appreciate when there is less content than there is advertisement, so it is sites that abuse their power to advertise that make me use adblock.

One of the things I’ve learned in microeconomics this year, is that in a free market society, you can often help yourself the most the most by helping others. This is how Christians can be profitable business people, because in fact by being fair to customers, they are in in fact helping others while making a profit.

Back to the adblock issue, I’d like to reward more people for being responsible, and using a fair amount of advertisement, but I’m not quite sure how this can be done with adblock right now. Maybe the feature that I’m looking for is an opt-in for each website. What I mean is, I disable ad-blocking for all websites. If I visit a site, and they are using more than three ad-banners, I put them in a list that blocks all advertisement for that site.

I see over-advertisement as being as offensive as spamming. I think the web community as a whole needs to start discouraging bad behavior. This would be another toolkit in the users toolkit that I think would help the web as a whole.

I’m really liking my new background picture. See it in action on my desktop:

Find the original picture at art.gnome.org. It works great with icons around the leaf, and I even had my icons set up that way to begin with.

Doing this project for my work, which requires me to crack passwords from a long list of users, has taught me a lot of general things about passwords. I’ve actually figured out 600 745 of the 2000 passwords from users just because they were pretty weak passwords.

Passwords that are words in the dictionary (or multiple words combined) are easy to figure out. Never use your username, information about you that can be easily found out, “password”, or information about the site your account is on as your password. Fully alphabetic or numeric passwords aren’t too hard to figure out either. Combining them helps, but using “animal1″ won’t get you too far. Passwords that are short (less than 6 characters or so) aren’t too hard to figure out either.

The best password is something that’s really random, and not even your closest friends could figure out. A word that is rarely used, such as an exotic animal, food, action, or tool, is a good starting place. I would then add multiple numbers to one side of the word that you can remember, but is not something public to the rest of the world (license plate is no good). Capitalize a random letter or two in the word, and maybe even change some of the letters to special symbols (a -> @, T -> 7, A -> ^, S -> $). If you don’t replace letters with special characters, put some in between, after, or before your password. Finally, it’s a good idea to use the different password for different accounts if possible.

So I’ve got a 3rd project now. I’m supposed to see if I can break passwords from a computer. This will be used to email them and let them know that they need to change their passwords. It involves cracking, but for a good cause. It’s going to be a fun project if I can figure out the best way to do so.