The Weekly Wrap-up

In no particular order, here’s my weekly wrap-up.

Good Eats
To my dismay, I discovered today that my favorite cooking show, Good Eats, ended in 2011 with 14 seasons. No fair! The show taught me so much about cooking. I’ll think about Alton Brown when I wear my Star Wars apron and take the kosher salt from the cupboard.
Excel and Passwords
After my disappointment about Good Eats ending, I opened Excel and created a random password generator. Prepare for some nerdiness.
I have the bad habit of using a rather short and therefore easy to crack password for nearly every website that forces me to create a username and password. I’m not exactly sure which website decided that it was a good idea to ask you to register with a username and password. Sure, fine. But when every other website followed suit and started asking for usernames and passwords in order to post a comment or two, or do something simple, suddenly the average Internet user has to produce several hundred usernames and passwords.
I personally have a list of about 140 usernames and passwords I’ve used over the years. It doesn’t help that I have ten or fifteen aliases I use in various places. Hell, I even legally changed my given name to be one of my pseudonyms.
I recently read the book We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, which accomplished a few things. One was make me change my VPN to a more reliable company. The other was to start making more complex passwords. Enter my Excel random password generator.
Basing my design from Diceware (http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html), I have a dictionary list of 18577 English words. Then, I used Excel’s random number generator to simulate rolling the dice 5 times, each time giving me a number between 11111 to 18577: =RANDBETWEEN(11111,18577).
This in turn I have match to one of my dictionary words listed on the column next to the number: =OFFSET(A1,MATCH(E2,A1:A7467,0)-1,1).
Then I have it add a random number and a random character to the end, for good measure.
The result of all these formulae is a nice long random password, with amusing results. The theory goes that I should come up with a truly random password, memorize it, and then use it for a high level of security. Here are some examples:
Perch plod roy louse usurp puke 4 )
Ripley fiery fine addis vii m 8 >
Queasy hail spell doria corp guilt 8 )
Satyr docket edit aides stunk snag 3!
I’m not entirely sure why these random sentence-length passwords amuse me as much as they do. I think I read it and try to make sense out of the words—and sometimes they seem to make sense. Usurping puke? Stunking snag? Here’s to more amusing passwords in my future—and also getting locked out more often.
Olympics
“The only thing that I want to see in the Olympics,” I told Meg this morning, “is women’s beach volleyball.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“The clothing—or lack thereof,” I said. “Not that I don’t get to see better every day around you.”
Meg snorted and we ate breakfast.
Later on, after she left for work, I flipped on the TV and washed the dishes. What was on? Women’s beach volleyball. USA vs. Australia. I watched two matches, but it didn’t seem to beat my memories of Brazilian Olympians of eight years ago.
Well, that’s it for me and the Olympics, methinks. They’re pretty much like any other sport for me—I see it on TV and my mind drifts to other matters. Watching sports is like going to most parties for me. I feel bored and wish I were somewhere else, doing anything else, preferably with a computer.
Also, I feel uncomfortable watching 16 year-old girls in gymnastics spandex. Visions of failing polygraphs start to come back to me. Dammit, I’m not a pedophile.
Books, Gandalf, and Writing
I’ve been on a recent buying spree with books. I rarely sit down and read books. I listen to audio books all the time, but it’s much more impressive to own paper books, so I can lay them on a shelf and not read them. They stare at me with big brown puppydog eyes asking, “Why don’t you read me?”
I think I have what Buddhists call monkey mind, which I originally learned about from Natalie Goldberg’s books. I can’t sit still for long without doing something with my hands—which is why writing suits me. I play some music loud enough to tune out the world and tap, tap, tap—my fingers can explore the avenues of my mind and I can project my ideas while sitting quite still. If it weren’t for computers, I’d probably be a very active person—walking or moving constantly. It’s also probably why I don’t do so well when I have to go to places and sit still for long periods of time without contributing (parties, trips to Pinetop, vacations, etc.).
Despite all this—I love books and I like buying them. I stick to five main categories: 1) books about writing, 2) books about science, 3) books about atheism, 4) books about linguistics, and 5) science fiction. I’m contemplating adding essays to the list too; I’m discovering my enjoyment for compilations of chapter-length essays, with authors like Sarah Vowell or David Sedaris.
So on my first visit to Barnes and Noble this month, I bought Sarah Vowell’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot, even though I just listened to the whole thing. I like the format a lot, and wanted to see it in print. I need to learn from authors I like; emulate them and become them. Probably everything I like about my writing I’ve stolen from others over the years. Don’t all writers steal to some extent?
My second trip to Barnes and Noble resulted in a Lego set. Meg saw it and squealed: “It’s adorable!” It was Gandalf riding in a horse cart with Frodo standing nearby, like the beginning scene from Fellowship of the Ring</em>. She bought it for me and I somehow escaped without buying a book—or so I thought.
When I put the set together the next day, Frodo stood two thirds as tall as Gandalf—awww. And what was Frodo holding in his hand? A book nearly the size of his torso.
And then two days ago, Meg wanted a back massage. She’s got big boobs and she’s a nurse, which is a bad combination for back pain, but a good combination for a husband. She promised to catch up with me and I headed for—you guessed it—Barnes and Noble.
The third trip yielded two more books, How to Blog a Book by Nina Amir and Writers [on Writing]: Collected Essays from the New York Times.
I wonder how many books have been written about writing? Or why I enjoy reading them? Maybe I like to commiserate with people I identify with. There’s something special about writers, after all. Or maybe it’s just an easy topic for a writer to write a book about.
I’m still uncertain if I want to get published, though. Published as in, getting published by a publishing house like Scholastic or Random House. Not self-published, which feels like cheating and deeply sad for some reason. A deep part of me has always wanted to get published. But the other parts of me don’t want to expose my words to such public scrutiny. It’s not the outright rejection I’m afraid of; it’s the part where I produce something I consider to be the best I can do, and then get told that it needs to be edited.
I should probably should just suck it up and write something worth publishing already.