A Fun Night

I saw Wicked last night at the Overture Center with Kristen.

It was nice to celebrate our anniversary at the location of our wedding ceremony and one of our earliest dates.

Mobile Blogging Fun, Revisited

Tonight I write this from the BloggerPlus application on my iPhone.

The great thing is that the latest version of the app works well for those of us who use Google Apps with their Google Account.

It turns out that prior versions were not properly authenticating to Google via their Blogger API. After a cordial email exchange with the developers, who took me up on an offer to debug and/or beta test, I was able to help the team resolve their authentication issues.

Not bad, not bad at all. Now I can be blogging on the go!

UPDATE: It seems like the app omits the ability to add a hyperlink to one's text. This seems like a pretty big omission if true!

Tonight, I'm A Typical Grad Student

Another round of insomnia tonight. Fun!

I decided to make the most of it, as I have the last few times. Instead of reading a book, or having a snack or a nightcap, what do I do?

Write an enhancement to my nonlinear χ² PDE function minimizer.

Yes, tonight, I'm a typical grad student... right?

Recovering from Nigerian Hackers...

In the last few days, my father-in-law and wife's web-based email accounts were compromised.

In each case, the attacker utilized an IP address originating from Nigeria, obtained access to the account, and proceeded to send an email to all contacts purporting to be in the UK, in a stressful situation, and needing money to avoid further stress. They then proceeded to delete all of the contacts in their contact lists.

Kristen was able to regain control of her Google account in a little over two hours -- which let us find that the attackers were forwarding her incoming mail to a phantom @ymail.com account and had changed her security questions. She was also briefly locked out of Facebook, which had shared authentication credentials with her Gmail account.

My father-in-law was only able to regain access to his Hotmail account after a little over two days of frustrating email and forum exchanges with Microsoft. He found that things were similarly infested once he regained control: changed security questions, mobile accounts registered for password resets, etc. -- fortunately, no email relaying on his part.

He's now migrating to Gmail, mainly out of disgust for his experience with Microsoft during the stressful time of account compromise.

After apologizing to everyone, and fielding many, many phone calls from people who were wondering how Kristen got into the UK in the first place, much less into trouble (!) the damage appears done, and we are recovering.

It really was a wake-up call, though -- there's a lot of personal information that can live in one's email account, much less damage to one's reputation if unauthorized people access it and spam people. Things get worse if one's authentication credentials (i.e. passwords) are shared across multiple sites.

If you're like me, you probably do share passwords, because a) passwords are hard to remember, especially cryptographically strong ones and b) people tend to be lazy. Of course, this multiplies the damage that can be done if a password is compromised.

In light of this event, I decided to migrate to a managed password solution: LastPass. More on that later, as I continue to evaluate it. Suffice to say for now that I'm very impressed, and appreciate the Gibson-esque TNO ("trust no one") security model it employs. I first heard about it on Security Now! episode 256, which introduced the concept and this particular solution to me.

All That Housework is Done

Work on the condo has finished. All the ~50 wall patches are sanded and re-painted, the carpets have been cleaned and repaired, toilets fixed, windows washed, light fixtures cleaned and dusted, walls scrubbed, bathroom and entryways re-caulked, and countertops cleaned.

Thank goodness!

I even got a chance to leave a little housewarming gift for our new tenants. (Ever since we received one from our landlord in Janesville, we've followed in his footsteps.)

Carpets and Paint and Caulk, Oh My!

Lots of work at the condo today.

I was amazed by the job that Service PLUS Carpet Repair Services did today at the condo. They fixed a long-standing oopsie of mine (stereo wiring under the carpet, vis-a-vis a razor blade cut -- bad idea!), re-stretched the carpet to fix a bad seam and cleaned up the entryway, which looked very ratty due to natural wear and tear.

The result: professionally-done carpet, in less than two hours and less than two hundred bucks. It was such a great improvement, I wish that I had called them earlier! They've got my future carpet cleaning business for life as well.

Painting is going well, with 25+ wall patches complete, the office completely patched and painted (can't tell where the work was done!), the living room painted, and the first coat on our newly-tan walls. The bathroom caulking has been stripped, due to Kristen's diligence.

More work tomorrow: ceiling repair in the second bath, finishing up the painting, and re-caulking the master bath!

Ah, the joys of being a landlord...

Checkout at the Condo

Today Kristen and I said goodbye to our first tenants at our condo. I feel very lucky to have been able to meet such nice people, and we wish them well as they move on to their brand-new home!

It was a nice afternoon, considering we were working on prepping the unit for its next occupants, who by all means are very nice as well. Kristen and I were masking off the living area in preparation for painting, while our tenant was finishing up the last of the cleaning and checkout. What made things fun was their infant daughter who "helped" us with the masking (she made an artistic rendering of a shark in blue masking tape), as well as listening to her and Kristen engage in spirited conversation.

Tomorrow will be a long day: painting and general repairs at the condo. Hooray...

Mobile Blogging Fun

In the spirit of trying to keep writing something new, more often, I've tried to find an app for my iPhone which can easily post, view, and edit things over here on my Blogger-hosted blog. You'd think that this would be something that is supported by umpteen bazillion apps, but it surprisingly is not.

So far, I've tried two: BlogWriter and Blogger+, with mixed results.

BlogWriter flat-out didn't work as advertised. It didn't work at all. Their support essentially turned me away after hearing that I had a custom domain, and instructed me to ask Apple for a refund. (Yikes, and good luck!)

Blogger+ did not work at first, but so far I've been getting pretty good responses from them. They helped me get things going on a test blog, which now does actually work successfully. Turns out one has to create a Picasa web album linked to the blog before things can be properly registered. (Odd, but OK...)

On the plus side, they're even looking into why things wouldn't work with the redirect offered by the custom domain names. So, good on them! It makes me feel a bit bad that my forum posting is prominently displayed on their app's front page...

So, I think I'll wait this one out a few days before posting a review for the app. I really think that having easy access to the posting is what will increase my posting volume!

This is a test... this is only a test...

Blogging from my iPhone here, via text messaging.

Who would have thought you could actually ever do this, much less want to? :)