New Year’s Resolutions Are For Kids

I don’t like making New Year’s Resolutions because like everyone else they usually don’t happen. I jokingly did make a resolution last year on NYE. After spending the whole night playing 7th wheel, I decided that sucked so I wasn’t going to do that again this year. I did have someone to kiss on NYE. I was happy! I had my brother and his girlfriend in town from California (no, they weren’t the ones I kissed).

Better Adulting…

I work a lot and try to stay off the computer when I am home but that has only forced me to spend too much time in front of the TV. I am seriously debating cancelling my TV service. I didn’t have TV for years. I would just pay for internet and that was it. I added AT&T U-verse when I moved to this new apartment because it was actually cheaper to get TV, Internet, and my mobile phone bundled than the previous Time Warner Internet and AT&T Phone. Believe me, I did the math several times to get the best deal. Because of this, I stopped streaming TV to my computer and started recording on my DVR.

Side note, I am not really sure sometimes when to include a comma so I think I put too many in my sentences. If that is grammatically incorrect then please feel free to tell me. I know I have some Grammar Nazi friends who will gladly point out my flaws.

I have always been a fan of Security Now podcast by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte on Twit.TV but wanted to try some additional car listening stuff. I love music but I love learning more. I started listening to Joe Rogan Experience and while he throws plenty of F bombs around he has some really interesting guests. The one thing I recently heard him say was that to change things you need to change your focus. My focus has been on working, coming home, feeding and letting out the dog, and then sitting down in front of the TV. I keep my weekdays busy with a small group, trivia, volleyball, and of course my son. But, I have been spending way too much time on the couch. I pay for a gym membership that I haven’t stepped foot in for about 7 months. It kills me that I don’t go back. I hope that by writing more on here that I can redirect my focus effectively and get back into a healthier routine and not so many hours in front of the tube. For those who are too young to remember ‘the tube’ does not reference YouTube. (shameless plug for my own YouTube channel) I just got distracted by several videos on this channel.

Before I forget, I would like to give a shout out to my fellow IT comrade and friend Messy. I am not sure if he wants hit full name shared because I don’t see it on his blog. His blog is 1amm3.com which stands for I AM ME. He writes about his thoughts as I do on here. I helped him get his blog started and he has encouraged me to put more time into mine. I have been doing my own website since December 2004 but this last year I have been encouraged to write more on here and I attribute that to Mr. Messy. Go read his stuff, very interesting.

I just realized it is 12:30 and I need to go to bed. I have been writing this blog and migrating files all night since I got home. I did stop to eat so that’s good.

The last thing I wanted to say is that while I hate New Year’s Resolutions, I did tell myself I wanted to write on this blog daily. So far there have been two blog entries in 17 days so maybe my daily will turn into weekly, but I do want to get my thoughts down on here to keep myself accountable to doing better things. I want to have a better life style over all and that means starting with keeping track of my thoughts on my blog. I don’t even care if any one reads.

And since it is 12:30am, I am not going to take the extra time to add pictures to this one, sorry.

 

Turning over a new leaf is an odd saying. I feel like being single sucks. Anyone who says they like it is just lying to theirself. God put us here to be with somebody and we were never meant to be alone. While I don’t believe that means that we have to be with someone every second of the day it does mean that we are meant to enjoy this life with someone else. It means we are meant to care for another more than we care for ourselves. The Greeks had several words for Love and one of those is the love you have for your partner. We all ‘love’ our family, we ‘love’ our friends, we are supposed to ‘love’ our neighbors; but these don’t compare to the love that we have for that special someone. I am fairly certain I have felt this love for a couple people in my life. I can’t reminisce on those because for one reason or another they are not in my life. I was married once and would like to think it was happy and loving at some point or else why did I say, “I do”? For now and probably until Kingdom comes I will not have happy thoughts because of how it ended; not that it ended but, but how it ended. I have also loved others who eventually felt I was not right for them. Rarely have I loved someone who I decided not to be with. Isn’t that odd.

I would LOVE to find a beautiful woman who I enjoy being around and can get to know just as I know myself. I am confident she is out there but for now I haven’t found her yet. I am only 33 and know I have plenty of life left on this earth, but would like to spend the majority of it not alone. This is not a plea for someone to pick me up off my feet. It is a desire, not a need. I don’t ‘need’ to be in a relationship. I feel if you ever think you ‘need to’ be in a relationship, then you ‘need to’ be single for a while until you figure out why you think that is a need.

Morning 5-minute Random Babble

Side note: In prison, the worst punishment they can give someone is solitary confinement. That should tell you that we as humans are social creatures meant to be around other people. That means in a group as a whole, and in our private lives as well.

I created this image above as a pure social experiment. I am not going to post anything with it. I am just going to post it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. I will also probably post it to Youtube. Here, my website is the only place that I will report the findings. I am curious how many people will like, friend, follow me based on this image. This should be fun!

Update 1: I don’t know why I haven’t changed my twitter handle to the same as the rest. When I created it I wanted to create a common name with my first website, “icwnow.” Now since all of my other screen names and handles are “jasrasr” I think after this fun I will switch it too. I wonder if twitter gives you a time delay where you can still be reached by the old handle as well as the new one or does the old one become obsolete once you change it?

Update 2: I have changed my Twitter handle to @jasrasr (twitter.com/jasrasr)

I use a plugin on this site that tracks hack attempts and I just checked it and there were some odd attempts.

Attempted Usernames: admin, jasonlamb, jasonlamb.me, test, username

Attempted Passwords: 12345, 112233, 123456, 147852, 445566, 778899, 123456789, 123456jasonlamb, 123jasonlamb, 1q2w3e, 1q2w3e4r, 1q2w3e4r5t, a1234456, adi, admadm, admin123, Admin321, admin333, adminadmin, administrator, asdasd, batman, easytocrack1, freedom, genius, jasonlamb, jasonlamb.me, jasonlamb1, jasonlamb123, jasonlamb1234, jasonlamb123456, jasonlamb-2014, jasonlamb321, parola, pass, password, password123456, Q12345, qazxsw2, qwertyuiop, test, yankees, zasxdc, zasxdcfv, zxcvbnm

I laugh at these people and their lame attempts at hacking my site. Here is an example of a password that I use: G8!5TB2Kdbnru3n#Avx@pHA
That is 24 characters using CAPS, lowercase, numbers, and symbols.

From howsecureismypassword.net you can see it would take 14 OCTILLION YEARS to crack at 4 million per second!

The Password Meter has it at “very strong.”

rumkin.com says, “This password is typically good enough to safely guard sensitive information like financial records. Well, yeah…duh!

I started using LastPass a while ago and it has changed how I now use passwords. I am constantly auditing myself on what passwords I use and often change from an older password to one as seen above. I just think it’s funny what people try as possibly passwords for my site. I also work in IT so I know how silly and too often simple passwords are, for most people. It’s no wonder the amount of data that stolen just by simple passwords.

I know it is sometimes a pain to have a difficult password but it could be the difference between thinking you have information store safe and secure and identity theft. Think about it, and take note. The best thing you can do is NOT use the same password for two different sites. Yes, I know it’s easier. But so is it for the bad guys. If they get an email and password for one account you better believe they will try it on another account.

Stay safe friends.

Technically the file type is pronounced “jiffs” like “jello” but I prefer a hard G like “gifts”. Here are a couple I made from my lovely iPhone 6 multi-shoot camera. I then converted them to gif format with the help of photoshop and a website.

I just had an in depth and detailed conversation with an AT&T rep, Diana and this is what I learned.

First some history: I had an iPhone 4 as of July 2012. It got a little wet in a hot tub in NY. I bought the iPhone 4s on a two year contract price of $199. A couple months ago I got a $30 discount on my AT&T monthly bill for no reason and no strings attached
. Two years later (today), I called AT&T and asked what my options were because I got a notification about AT&T Next program.

They told me told I had two options:

1. Go on the Next program in which I pay nothing for the phone up front, no contract; and the full price of the phone is distributed along a 24 months period. At 12 months you can trade up your phone at no additional cost.

2. Sign a new 24 month contract and pay $199 up front for new phone, plus upgrade fee of $40, plus I LOSE my $30 discount.

So either way my bill goes up $30, it just matters whether I pay for the phone upfront or over the course of time. They really want people off contracts and the Next program will end up saving you about $75 over the course of a two year perdiod.

I just thought I would share what I learned because I know many of my family and friends have AT&T. I really like AT&T and have have been with them since Feb 2006 and they have really bent over backwards to keep my business with very little complaint and problems overall. I can’t speak about U-Verse, DSL, or land-line (POTS) phone or any other AT&T department, just the wireless guys.

If you have any questions I will be happy to answer what I know. I plan on checking this out further before it’s time to get my iPhone 6!

More info about AT&T Next Program:
http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/next.html

 

from the old site: This used to be a page of a challenge I set up in June. It was to build one page per day. Now it’s going to be all my random pages. Obviously I have been out of the loop for quite some time. I hope to pick up the pace.

I might add those pages to this…maybe