Someone finally put an embeddable version of this on youtube so now I can share it with you.

"As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything”, lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents?

Fortunately, Mint.com is in a unique position to answer this question – quantitatively."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/30/the-economy-according-to-mint/>

If this counts as creativity. Ciara sent this my way after doing a google image search:


I hadn't seen the above picture before, but it's from a magazine featured on somethingawful. Check out all their back issues: http://www.groomertogroomer.com/gtg_back_issues_new.html

[via ciara]

http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=7230

Joel pointed out to me the way that may products are advertised in the way seen above. You know, like:

Wrangler Jeans. Real. Comfortable. Jeans.

It's an overused tactic, but I get what they're trying to do. They're trying to make me consider each word. They're real, American jeans. They're comfortable. They're [Ok let's put it all together now] really comfortable jeans.

But now I just saw a commercial online for Walsh College. Their slogan?
Walsh College. Live. Breathe. Business.

While I get that they're saying that you can live and breathe business there, what are they trying to say by emphasizing the individual words? Survival? Air quality?

Yesterday I sold my first thing on ebay. Work had some old printer cartridges that they were going to just throw out so I thought I'd see what I could do with them.

So by "sold" my first item, I really mean I spent time setting up my account, made a positing that won't expire for another week, and checked to see if anyone had bid by refreshing every couples minutes. No bids yet.

Still no bids.

Karen found this little thing that let's you make Obama-style photos out of any picture. http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/

Friends, it’s time to change your password. Reasons to change your passwords:

1) A site you have used has been hacked or compromised
2) It’s been a while since you’ve last changed your password
3) Your passwords are all the same word
4) Your password isn’t secure
5) Anyone could guess your password
6) Because it’s the great password change of ’09!

Let’s go over this. These days, there are plenty of Trojans out there that look to steal your passwords. I really hope you’re running anti-virus software, but consider running a full system scan for malware too. All clean? Good. You’re not completely safe yet though.

You’re especially vulnerable if you’ve used sites like Facebook from a public wireless network. Facebook has awful password security, and if you’ve recently used an unsecured wireless network to check Facebook, people with packet sniffers like Cain and Abel can pluck your password right out of the air.

This brings me to another point. If your facebook password is the same as your email password, change them both now. Your email password should be your most secure password. After all, if I have access to your email account, all I have to do is go to all the websites you have accounts on, make use of the “forgot my password” button, and all of those sites will happily send me new passwords to the email address I have control of.

What makes a secure password? Well, let’s look at two common hacking techniques and how to safeguard against them. Dictionary and brute force attacks consist of the hacker going to a web form, putting in a username, and repeatedly guessing passwords until he’s in. The process is all automated.

As Twitter recently found out, if your password is a word that is in the dictionary, you are incredibly vulnerable to this type of attack, especially if your site allows multiple log in attempts without consequence. A dictionary attack just tries a list of common passwords and words from the dictionary.

More secure than a simple word password is a non dictionary password. Do not, however, use anything as a password that anyone could figure out from a conversation with you. No pet names. No birthdays. No address numbers. If your friends could guess your password, don’t use it. This includes things like “goblue” and “wolverine” if you went to Michigan.

Let’s say you’ve decided that your new password is the first letter of each word from the first line of a poem. So “tiger tiger burning bright” becomes “ttgb”

This still doesn’t protect you from a brute force attack. In a brute force attack, the hacker has the computer generate attempt after attempt. First it tries single little passwords a-z, then every combination of two letter passwords (i.e: aa, ab, ac, ad, ae), and so on until it figures out your password.

If you have a four letter password, there are 456,796 possible passwords that you could have. This seems like a lot, yes, but the hacker would be able to test all these possibilities in a matter of minutes. If you had a 6 character password (the minimum on many websites), the number of possible passwords is now 308,915,776 (so it will take 676 times as long to crack).

If your password is all lowercase letters, you can make it even more secure by adding a capital letter and a number. a-z has 26 possible values (each character in the password could be one of 26 different options). Add capital letters, and each character has 52 possible values. Add 0-9 and then each character has 62 possible values. Suddenly your 308 million possibilities have become 56.8 billion. You can even take it the extra mile and add punctuation. 1TTBBitfotn!

Lastly, don’t use the same password for every website. There’s always a possibility that something will happen, and wouldn’t you rather have one password be stolen than all of them? Pick a theme and you won’t have problems remembering. Have your passwords be something you’ll remember and can try different variations of (but again: nothing your friends would guess). That way if “1nv1s1bl3” doesn’t work on a website and you can’t remember which password you picked, you know that it probably is another thing in that theme like “r3l3v4ant” You can use things that you like, but remember specific is better than general i.e. “leviosa” is a better password than “harrypotter” because of course “harry” and “potter” are dictionary words but also because someone you meet might think to guess harrypotter since you love it so much, but who’s going to think to try all the different incantation words?

Alright, it’s time to go change your passwords. Make sure you don’t forget what you’ve changed them to. And remember not to use them on any unsecured wireless networks.

If you're logged in to your Google account while using google maps, it will automatically remember addresses for you. Not only that, but if you format your address with the address name in parentheses like this:

"111 Example Lane Ann Arbor MI (Location Name)"

The next time you need directions to or from Location Name, you can just type in "from Location Name [then select the full address that pops up] to 999 W. Street Dr ann arbor mi" and Google will do the rest for you. No more having to look up someone's address every time you need it.

Nice overalls.

[via digg]

[via digg]

Today I took some photos at work so that we would be able to use them for online advertising and brochures. In sending my six edited photos to the marketing person, I got a returned-to-sender email because:

"Message size of 31478373 exceeds destination mail server limitation of 31457280 bytes"

In other words I was .02mb over the limit.

I think this is an interesting blog entry and that's all that matters.

http://www.masalatime.com/?p=768

via Joel

If you're impatient, skip ahead to 1:40. Please click the arrows to view full screen.

Click for full

Art by Jason Chan, a guy who it turns out also did art for some Magic cards I have.

One of the great things about having already graduated is that from time to time I will have a dream in which I look at a syllabus at 4am and realize that I have a paper due the next night.

There's nothing better than waking up with that "paper!" feeling and then being able to say "No, wait, I don't ever have another paper due again"

The official Google Blog has a great article about searches performed during the inauguration. Complete with graphs!

http://www.sheepfilms.co.uk/b3ta/mexicantile.htm

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/e/0/3/e035a08e616468d1b0500bc12dcc11e9.gif

Of all cold drinks, orange juice is the worst cold drink once it turns warm.

Making six figures one settlement at a time:
http://news.aol.com/article/disabled-man-sues-businesses-for-a/303037?icid=sphere_newsaol_inpage

[via fark]

[via stumbleupon]

[Well, his team did at least] There's a new blog too. The whole look is very web 2.0.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/

/eagerly awaiting a flickr photostream to take it full web 2.0

[source]

...bore a striking similarity to another salute you may have seen:

More info at:http://history.verdeserve.com/the-official-american-flag-salute-used-to-be-a-hitler-salute/

You'll just to click to really appreciate it: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Hong_Kong_Night_Skyline_non-HDR.jpg

[link fixed]

More recently, I subscribed to a magazine using a form where you have to write your name in boxes. The automated reader misread what I wrote.

As a result, Nilke Hulsebus gets a Nintendo Power every month.

[also, yes, I subscribe to Nintendo Power]

Back when I was a sophomore in high school, I took a test called the PLAN test that is supposed to measure your aptitude for college. Somehow, however, rather than writing my full name on the scantron sheet, I instead wrote

Hulsebl J. Hulsebus

Meaning that I started writing my last name in the first name spot but somehow still managed to write the L on the end. And so for the next couple months, Hulsebl got offers to go to colleges across the country.

Today at work someone called and let us know that icicles were over a walkway. Then she said "I don't know if you've ever seen Grey's Anatomy..."

She was referring to this (ffwd to 1:30):



"I don't think it's that farfetched that that could happen" she added.

So I was going through this slideshow of photos of Obama's administration. And who do I see but Eugene Kang, a guy I took a photo of for the daily four and a half years ago when he ran for city council in Ann Arbor.


He's number 5 or so in the slideshow.

[via phlops on twitter]

but he made a whole bunch of money like he saw the housing crash coming
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2009/01/07/John-Paulson-Profits-in-Downturn

Ridiculous. Ridiculous. And it's from Esquire. And these two pages are right next to one another.

[via photoshop disasters via from a different angle]

If you search for two numbers with periods between them, Google knows you're searching for a range. Try this search for 1800 to 1900 (1854 wins in my particular results).

[via wired]

This is what I think of whenever I see snuggies. Snuggies are the in things these days. They're everywhere. Here's the infomercial gold if you've never seen it. Everyone has one of these all of a sudden. See video below.

Karen was trying to watch 90210 yesterday when halfway through the episode this started to happen. It lasted until the end. Audio problems and skipping around due to TV, not my phone video quality.