August, 2007 · TangleBones
Check your password strength
My work-buddy Jeff has just put up a new site: PasswordMeter. Using a number of different strategies, the site grades your password to let you know how strong or weak it is. The site details what you’re doing write and wrong, and provides some good guidelines for creating a good strong password. Check it out.
He’s looking for ideas and improvements for the site, so if you have any suggestions, check out the PasswordMeter Blog.
My Giant Son
I took Jared to see his neurologist today, and got him officially weighed and measured. At 7 years, 7 months, he’s just under 91lbs and just over 4′5″. That puts him in the 90th percentile for height and the 98th percentile for weight. He was playing with another 7-year-old in the waiting room that looked like a light snack to Jared.
To reinforce his tremendous size, I took Jared to get some new shoes for school. We bought the last pair 4 months ago, but they were obviously too small for him. So we went to a shoe store and tried to find one of those foot measuring things. A woman with 3 girls was hogging the kids’ model, so we grabbed the adult one. Jared’s foot landed at 5 and a half, and I said, “That can’t be right.” An employee on a ladder came over and said, “Oh, we need the kids’ one. Hold on.” He pries it away from the other customer, and Jared’s foot covers all of the numbers.
So we go back to the adult one and Jared is right between 5 and 6. The clerk says, “Men’s shoes are in the back corner of the store.”
“There aren’t any Diego shoes in the men’s section, are there?”
“Um, no.”
So Jared left the store in some men’s Airwalk Matrix Twin Gore slip-ons. Back at home we discovered that Sierra, if she didn’t mind a little extra room in the toe, could totally steal his shoes if she wants to. He’s only 3 sizes behind his mother. Looking at him with the shoes on, his profile resembles a capital L.
One more undesirable trait that Jared will later curse me for. Good luck finding size 13s that you like, son.
UFC 74 Wrap-up
Well, I wish I was a betting man, because I was right about the winners, if not the methods of victory, for every single fight on the card last night. Randy Couture won an impressive fight, stopping Gabriel Gonzaga in the third round with a TKO. What was amazing was that the 44-year-old dominated a man 16 years younger with better striking, better conditioning and what can only be described as complete domination. And like I said, Napao is a stupid nickname.
We were having a party at our place last night, so I taped the fights and watched them today. It took all the willpower I had not to check the many MMA-related feeds that I follow this morning so that I could see the fights without knowing the winners. The show was much better than 73, though I found GSP’s fight a little dull. It looks like after changing teams and managers, he decided to change his fighting style as well. I guess it was effective, but I would have thought such a well-rounded fighter could have finished a limited wrestler/striker like KOS, either with his kicks or by submission.
Once again, it sucked to pay to see the fights, and miss almost all of the preliminary bouts. Luckily, Randy finished his fight early enough that we got to watch Thales Leites put a beautiful armbar on Ryan Jensen. But whichever fight left mat stained with blood for the rest of the night would have been nice to see.
The best news is that UFC 75: Watch a Deaf Guy Get his Ass Kicked will be free on Spike TV. Seeing Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Dan Henderson go at it for free (as well as watching Michael Bisping destroy the aforementioned Matt Hamill) will be great. I hope to make fight picks a regular part of this site, so I’ll have to get something together next week.
My Latest Obsession
For the last year or so, I’ve been getting back into watching Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) events. Whether it’s the UFC, WEC, PrideFC, BodogFight, King of the Cage, or just whatever I can find on the internet, I’ve really been enjoying MMA, in spite of some nasty goings-on last winter (don’t ask). I like the physicality, I like the competition, and I really like the fighters.
Latest Annoyance
The most annoying word I’ve been hearing lately is:
- offline - adj.
- 1. online
As in, “I saved a lot of money, because I bought it offline.” And not to mean, “somewhere other than the Internet.” It means, “on the Internet.” Seriously, people, what the hell?
So instead of actually writing anything
…I’ve been restoring pages that I lost in last years Typo-upgrade incident from the Internet Archive. I found a bunch of what used to be my most heavily visited pages over there that evidently got lost in the shuffle, which, while not new content, means more search results for me, and maybe more ad revenue. Which just might motivate me to post some more.
I think part of my problem has been I have all of these posts that I want to write: a review of What You Can Do Right Now to Help Your Child with Autism
Oh, and I’m entering my mid-30s today. Blech.
Just a Small Gmail Notifier Firefox Extension Tip for users of Google Apps for your Domain
For the three of you that:
- Use Firefox, and
- Use Gmail, and
- Use the Gmail Notifier extension, and
- Host your email through Google Apps for your Domain, and
- Can’t get the extension to connect to Gmail anymore
What you need to do is uninstall the app, then find your profile directory and open up the prefs.js and delete all the lines containing “gm-notifier”. When you re-install the notifier extension, just use “username@yourhost.tld” for the login, and everything works.
And all three of you are welcome.