1. Advent Calendars

2. The Coke Advert

3. Raymond Briggs Father Christmas – Sadly hardly ever seen on UK TV now.

Looking at these three things again, some interesting conclusions could be levied against how commerical christmas has become.  But to me, when I see these three things, it does always bring that little christmas sparkle.

About 6 years ago I split up with what basically was my first love girlfriend. We’d been together for over 3 years and I was devastated when she broke up with me. Now I’ve moved on with my life since then and I’m well and truly over her. But one of the ways that I made through the long nights before I was over her was to watch films / TV series to distract myself from the emotional  turmoil that I was going through and its something that I realised that I still do today. When I get home from work I watch probably 3 hours of stuff off the TV, make my way through boxsets of Series of Scrubs / Babylon5/X-Files that sort of crap, plus playing computer games when I could have been doing something much more interesting, self improving and social.. . . . so why don’t I?

I’m by no means on my own on this, I know of many others who have similar issues, using computer games to avoid getting out and experiencing life, plus I have heard that for my generation it is quite common for people to prefer to stay at home and socialise on the internet using Facebook and whatever, which is actually worse for us according to research and were more likely to get depressed because of it.

So why do we do this? Are we too dependent on consumerism that we can’t help but buy whatever the latest product we desire, such as computer games and we dedicate our time to playing these to satisfy our expense? Are we too afraid to venture beyond our comfort zone  and experience the world around us? Or has the area around us changed so much that we are now scared to venture out there for risk of being mugged or worse?

For me I have to give this some thought, both for why and what to do about it.

And out of these two billion odd users if you asked them (and any readers of this blog) if their password has 8 or less characters in it, I wonder how may people would have to put their hands up? would you?  Well chances are if you have then your password is now apparently too short.

Out at of interest I looked up what the most common passwords are and the results were pretty much what I expected bar one or two surprises.  The list can be found here http://modernl.com/article/top-10-most-common-passwords.  It’s a little outdated but probably still valid.  Out of that list only one common password goes over 8 characters.

But why does it matter? I hear you thinking.  Well it all comes down to how a malicious hacker would try to break into your computer.  There are many ways of doing this, but to keep this simple I will keep it to the two common ones, one being cycling through the most common passwords known. Some hackers actually include this list into viruses that automatically try to hack the administrative account of the computer to gain access.  The other, and main topic of this post is one called ‘Brute Force’.  Brute force in its simplest understanding entails a hacker obtaining a copy of your encrypted password and using a computer program tries to break the encryption by running through every possible combination that the password could be until it gets the right one.

Years ago this would be very difficult because normal PC processors have protection to stop them being used for this kind of attack, but recently the processing power of graphics cards (used to display everything on your screen) has increased dramatically and because of the way these operate they cannot be currently protected against this use.  This has allowed malicious hackers the ability to be able to crack short passwords potentially very quickly.

So what do you do?

Well most experts will say to increase your password size to at least 12 characters.  But I worked in IT support and know first hand how difficult it is to get users to use passwords with numbers, upper characters and yes the dreaded symbols! and getting them to remember them afterwards without writing it down is sometimes almost painful, especially if they know they are going to have to do it again in 90 days.

So what tips can I give?

Well the easiest way I have found of creating a password that is long enough, complicated enough and still memorable is to think of a sentence I will remember such as ‘I Like Walking’, which is 12 characters, then swapping some of the characters for numbers or symbols which look similar such as e=3, l=7, a = @, o= 0 (zero) until you get something like  ’IL1k3W@lk1ng’.  And don’t forget the all important upper and lower case letters as you can see in the example.

By doing this you make it a lot harder for a program to be able to break your password.

If anyone else has any other suggestions for password remembering strategies then please let me know and I will post these here.

The original inspiration for this post came from this BBC news article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10963967.

Anyway I found out who the person was and as it turns out it was someone who I hadn’t spent a lot of time with in a few years and generally we only hung out when with certain people.  The situation was a little more complex than this but this is all I will say.

However despite the fact that I havent seen or spoken to them this year I still feel bad about loosing contact with them.  It means that yet again another social connection to another person has been lost.  I can speculate as to why they have removed me from FB but however because they have removed me it means that they have actively made the decision to do this and that makes it feel a little bit worse.

“BP shares suffered another difficult day as attention turns to the possible impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on the UK’s image in the US.

The oil giant’s shares closed down 6% in London after earlier plunging 12%.

The UK government has played down fears expressed by some senior figures of “anti-British rhetoric” in the US.”

Source: BBC News – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10281079.stm

 All week I’ve been hearing about “anti-British rhetoric” coming from America,  from the BBC website, to quotes from US Senators;

Anthony Weiner, a usually sensible Democratic congressman, declared:
 ”Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum, they are not telling you the truth.”

Source: The Guardian -  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jun/10/us-bloodlust-bp-oil-spill

 I sympathise with America, I really do, this disaster is massive and is going to cost billions of Pounds / Dollars to sort out and will have an impact for probably many years.  However what has disappointed me and frankly annoyed me slightly is how it could be implied by certain individuals that the UK is to blame in some respect.  May I point out that whilst BP started out as a UK company and was called ‘British Petroluem’ in 1954, it is now an international company, which changed it’s name following in 2001 to simply BP.  Maybe congressman Anthony Weiner should look up that subtle bit of history.

Additionally the facts about the explosion and the failed blowout preventer have yet to come to the surface (no pun intended).  It may interest others that BP didnt operate the rig - but a US firm did (Transocean), that out of 126 employees on the rig - only 6 were BP employees and that the failed blowout preventer itself was built by another US firm (Cameron),   I think before the US goes on a merry old witch hunt against BP, they should actually find out the facts of what actually happened first.  But they do have the right to blame BP on other matters, such as being ill-prepared and equipped to deal with the situation in the gulf of mexico.

The truth is going to take a long time to come out and whilst it is quick and easy to blame BP, considering their less than stellar record we should remember that just because it was a British company that not everyone is to blame.  After all did British politicians place blame on America for the sub prime loans that started the global recession only 2 years ago?

OR

Are they some of the most important questions that will ever ask in your life?

Lately I’ve been thinking, about my life and where it’s leading (more on that another time) and I became pre-occupied with thinking about those two questions.  The first of them, ‘Who are you?’ especially, or rather ‘Who am I?’  I started trying to define in my mind and on paper who I am; a writer, a poet, a romantic e.t.c and as I wrote my mind started focusing, rather pessimistically, on the negative side of my personality such as; I’m overweight, i’m single e.t.c.  But as I wrote this all down and finally looked at the result of half an hours scribblings, it felt, empty, sure I’d written a lot down, but it certainly felt empty and quite negative.

Who Are You?

So I went on a quest for greater understanding, a quick google search turned up a couple of interesting entries from Life 2.0 and Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi’s teachings regarding self enquiry (links below). Gradually after reading through the articles I began to think and partially realise that who I am cannot be defined in terms of writing down various factors of who we are.  In fact all I had written down was various parts of what my ego said I was, and writing down exactly who I am is quite impossible.

The part of me that defines who I am, isn’t the voice in my mind that said earlier as I was writing ‘you’re a great man’ or ‘your single and fat’ that’s simply thought, transitory in nature and comes from our ever-changing mind with its volatile and ever-changing patterns.  However the fact that these thoughts exist and then go again show the path to who we really are, the observer, which watches the thoughts taking place and decides what should stay, get acted on and what shouldn’t.  It makes its decisions, and is defined by, every experience that has occurred in my life until now, and will continually evolve based upon the experiences, decisions and consequences of my next day, and the next and so forth, until the day I die.

Additionally the part of my mind that generates the thoughts such as ‘I am great’ is driven by my ego, created by the compliments and success of the events of my life, which can ultimately lead to thoughts of failure and unworthiness.  From what I have read ego can be one of the singly biggest ways of being unable to achieve what we all really want.

What do you want?

When you think of the question, what comes into your mind? Success in your job? A beautiful wife / husband? A fast car? World domination? are these things really what you want, or are they simply your ego exerting its influence onto your mind?

There’s mention of this in the teachings of self enquiry as well.  And when I read this I knew it to be true.  As true as it is that the Earth revolves around the sun.  What everyone wants in their lives, every single moment, is happiness, pure and simple happiness.  Not the happiness we get from being successful at our job over others, not happy because of the new car we’ve just bought or in fact any external reason.  But happiness that comes from within.

Closing thoughts

I don’t know if anyone will ever read this or how useful it might be for others who ask the same of themselves.   But to me it seems that thought and ego, whilst they may not define who we are does play a significant part of who we are still plays an important part of our lives.

Thoughts occur in order to help us make decisions or think through a problem and allow our observant part to make a decision.  Or in contemplation to help us realise the need for change in our lives.  Ultimately before going on this search I thought ‘Who Am I? What do I want?’

Our Ego, the part of us that makes us wants things in order to be successful and externally happy, whilst it should be watched like a hawk and reduced significantly in many people on this Earth it still plays it’s part in creating thoughts that give us an uplift in confidence.  But thoughts that prompt us to act, which are generated by our ego need to be carefully observed, not directly acted upon and our mind prompted to transcend such thoughts into acts that are not particularly aimed at impressing others.

Links and Resources

 http://www.life2point0.com/2006/10/who_are_you.html

http://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/teachings.html

http://www.srichinmoybio.co.uk/blog/life/who-am-i/

Google Search Results - Thanks Everyone

I was browsing through the word press stats today and found a couple of interesting bits of news:

1. By far my most popular post to date is my guide for removing links from a Casio Edifice watch, which now features as the first search engine result in google!

2. The busiest day on my blog was for the same post was guess on guess what date………………….. 25th December! Yep all those people who bought brand new Edifice watches and couldn’t wait to get those surplus links out.

It seems like this post is still the firm favorite, with most of the finite traffic that comes to my blog checking out this post.  But what I don’t know is quite how effective the post is, does it really help people?  Do I need to look at something more such as a video demo or anything like that?  So please tell me what you think!

Much the same has happened with my blog.  One minute were in November and the next it’s nearly June and the gap in-between is as barren as the space between galaxies.

But now with the small heat wave in the UK over and the gentle pattering of rain against my window, I believe its time to brush off some of the dust and try to breathe (although i find trying to do both at the same time a little difficult and generally a lot of coughing occurs) some new life into this old girl and see if I can’t really make a go of it.  Globally blogging is somewhat an ailing pastime already as younger bloggers prefer to micro-blog using social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, but I just seem to prefer blogging.

So once more into the breach dear friends?….I hope so.

No the title of this post should have been more along the lines of… ‘ Why I like listening to rain’ or ‘Boy does rain make me feel alive’ but anyway.

I was sat down in my study, just listening to some music and reading something online when i reached the end of my playlist and silence fills the room, I listen for a moment and I can hear the fans on my laptop whirring quietly, the sound my lamp makes when it’s on dim and finally the rain outside.

I pause from my reading and walk to the slightly open window I left to let some air in and sit next to it. My nostrils taking in some of the chilly november air, making my senses tingle and taste the falling rain, the freshness of it, clearing out the air thats been getting stale close to the ground and somehow rejuvenating it. 

 The air flowes and tenses the pores on my face and opens my sleepy eyes.  I see  the wood outside my window, the mix of pine, ash and hazelnut trees now laid bare from a recent autumn storm, a few straggeling leaves gliding through the air to join their kin on the floor of the wood.  The few evergreens that keep hold of their precious color all year-round, their tips swaying in the wind in an almost hypnotic swing.

And I listen, my ears no longer burdened by music or the sounds of electricity; to the gentle pattering of rain on the slate roof becoming the background notes of the symphony that my senses have only just tuned into.  Gradually I start picking out new notes, droplets of rain falling on the metal garden chair below, the plants in the garden, branches in the trees, the bucket thats gradually filling  and the gentle flowing of the collecting notes of the background flowing down the metal guttering making a gentle trickling sound.  If you listen carefully enough the sounds become more clear and the various verses of the song take form.  Then totally unbeknown to you at the time, everything that is going on in your life just melts away for a while, your muscles relax and you just sit there simply listening to the rain without a care in the world…

A few months back I purchased a watch from an online store, a Casio Waveceptor EQW-500BE.  The watch arrived and I eagerly tried it on only to find that that the watch strap was nearly twice the size of my wrist. So my only course of action was to remove some chains.

I first looked online to see if I could find any help on the process for doing this, but I couldn’t find anything that was really relevant for this kind of watch, so I’m going to post the process I used in-case anyone else wants to know how to do this.

Firstly I’m going to show you what holds each link together, after that the rest should be pretty straight forward.

a. Watch Links, b. Metal Pin for holding both links together, c. metal c clip (very important)

Firstly measure roughly how many links you need to take out of the watch, if you need to remove more than two I’d recommend removing the first two pins on either side of the watch clip, this will ensure that you can lay the watch flat to work on it, and that you can remove equal numbers of links on each side of the strap.  This will stop your watch looking lopsided.

 Unclip the watch and look at the back of the metal links, you will see on the back of most of the links a small arrow:

This indicates the links that you can remove and the direction in which you have to push the pin out from.  You will see if you look on top of the link above the arrow there will be a pin hole.

Removing the pins will be quite a time consuming process and will require a fair amount of patience so take your time when doing this and I’d recommend that you do this over a solid flat surface with a piece of paper on it so that you can catch the metal C clip if it falls out.  Use a thin pin such as a sewing pin or badge pin to push down the pin hole and gradually push the pin out on other side of the link, this will take some force but not a excessive amount.  When it gets to about half way you can use something like a pair of pliers to pull out the pin.  This will then release the link.  Once this is removed turn the watch over so that the metal arrows on the back of the link is facing upwards, then shake the watch once or twice to remove the metal c clip if it hasn’t fallen out already, once you have the clip, keep it safe as you will need at least one again later.

Repeat the procedure on the next link and links on the other side of the watch depending on how many you need to remove until you have removed the required amount. 

Once this is done you will need to reattach the links to reform the chain.  To do this you will need to insert one of the metal C clips back into the link before you pass the pin through it, this will hold the pin in place in the link and prevent it from falling out.  The C clip goes into the top of the middle section of a link as shown in the picture below with a yellow circle.

Then push the links together and push the pin back down through the link.  Voila!!