Not sure what to get for that special person? Thinking of gift vouchers? Wait! Why not just give them the money, and simply tell them which shop to spend it in.
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… and many others, when Shôn and I met up again yesterday to reminisce about our working holiday in USA. It has been thirty five years, no less, since we last saw each other. Mary Kay from Cleveland had stumbled across my 1976 diary posts and got in touch last week. This prompted me to find Shôn who is now living less than half an hour from me! It was an almost surreal experience. We were the same people; we shared the same vivid memories of Cleveland and our road trip. Yet we have more than half a lifetime of not knowing each other. Neither of us has entirely escaped the ravages of time, and we are now both clean shaven. So we don’t look the same as those two students way back then. It was nice – a bit like rediscovering an old pair of shoes at the back of the wardrobe. Shoes which are familiar, easy to slip on, yet which feel strange. Comfortable but different. Carol from Cleveland is visiting the UK soon. It would be great if there was a way for the three of us to meet up once more. This morning I threw out pieces of stale bread for the birds. A short time later, one of the pair of magpies which have built a new nest high up in the tall trees flew down. It swaggered over to the bread like a corpulent ringmaster. Picking up a piece the bird carried it over to our birdbath, dunking the bread in the water before devouring it. Three facts I learned today: Q: Which town is not only the birthplace of Baroness Bakewell, but is also the home of Lottery Street and Hollywood Towers? A: Stockport! Its inclusion in Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places To Live In The UK is therefore clearly a travesty. After recent heavy rain my local nine-hole golf course is suffering from partial flooding. Two holes are unplayable. Immaculately manicured grass is now under a sheet of water which shows no signs of subsiding. And there in the middle of this new pond, looking content and perfectly at home, glides a solitary snow-white swan. The recent discovery of two bombs hidden in computer printers sent from Yemen, and my earlier ramblings about passwords, got me thinking. How likely was it that a Chicago synagogue would be expecting to receive a printer from Yemen where half the population are illiterate and most people are Muslims employed in agriculture? I’m not suggesting that parcel companies make that kind of value judgement before accepting consignments. However, what if the sender were required to show in advance that the recipient was expecting the item? Some kind of authorisation barcode could be generated and fixed to the parcel. Not foolproof of course, but better than the current situation where effectively anyone can send an unsolicited parcel to anyone else. I recently watched the film Enigma about the British code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. I don’t pretend to understand the detail, but I gather that it was possible to break German secret codes using ‘cribs’ – fragments of information which provided a starting point in the search for a solution to the puzzle. It occurred to me that this WWII struggle between the code makers and code breakers is relevant to the problem of password security in the 21st century – the age of the internet and identity theft. Banks and other organisations have been quick to improve security by for example rejecting simple or obvious passwords such as ‘hello’ ’1234′ ‘letmein’ or ‘password’. Many go further than this by insisting on a password containing both uppercase and lowercase letters, and at least one numeral. This of course extends the number of possibilities beyond 26 per position and greatly increases the security of the chosen password. However – and this is where I might be revealing a glaring misunderstanding of probability and of code-breaking methods – this insistence is in itself a ‘crib’ which reduces security somewhat. Let’s assume you have a machine which generates random passwords by drawing from the alphabet (uppercase and lowercase) and numerals 0-9. This might very well come up with passwords which do not comply with the bank’s rules, even though they are truly randomly generated. So the rules mean that the number of acceptable permutations is much less than the number of possible permutations, which must make the code-breaker’s task easier. I would have thought it much better to insist on machine-generated passwords and allow them all, rather than human generated ones which conform to published rules? I have recently discovered the cashback and discount coupon site called Quidco which makes it easy to get a discount when shopping online. A bit like the Nectar scheme, except you get money back instead of Nectar points. All you have to do is visit sites via Quidco! It’s early days, and I have not yet received any money from them, but neither has it cost me anything to join. Watch this space! If you use Gmail, you will know all about organising conversations using labels. To find all conversations with a specific label, select ‘Show search options’ and choose the label you want from the dropdown list called ‘Search’. Easy. But what if you want to find conversations with multiple labels? For example you are interested only in messages labelled ‘Sales region 2′ and ‘Quarter 3 2010′. Instead of going into ‘Show search options’ simply type your search into the search box at the top of the Gmail screen thus:
and click Search Mail. This will return a list of conversations containing both labels. Note that the label names are case insensitive, but you must replace spaces with a hyphen. What if you are interested in messages with either label? Then you would use:
The OR operator must be uppercase. Alternatively you can use the pipe operator ‘|’ (shift+backslash on your keyboard) like this:
You are probably three steps ahead of me here, and wondering about other compound searches. In fact you can choose from a long list of “query words” to build up a very specific search. In Gmail see Help articles › Using advanced search for the (almost) endless possibilities! I am taking Jamie to a drumming exam tomorrow. “Make sure you aren’t late – they start bang on time” his mum said to me in all innocence. |
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