I am constantly blown away at how easy some people’s passwords are that they use for their email, their website, their banking. I have a pretty good feeling they figure… who would want to break into my stuff? The thing they don’t realize is that there are password bots or scripts written to search for easy access passwords out there. All they do is go through hundreds of thousands of possible names in hotmail, gmail etc and try and crack them.

Once in, the hacker… well, actually not a hacker because using a program to do your work is about as complex as taking a dump and reading the newspaper at the same time. These guys are called script kiddies… but anywhoo… the script kiddies then go into your email and look for anything valuable. Maybe a pass to your banking, maybe a porn site password, perhaps something as dorky as your myspace profile so they can edit things and set up viruses/hacks for others to stumble into. (although to be fair myspace/facebook is good about blocking such things).

So what is your password? Do you change it often? Ever? Does it have numbers/letters? Special characters? Is it a word with an extra number or letter attached?

Here are some examples of a database that was recently cracked.  Showing some examples of weak, fair, good, strong and unbreakable passwords. Myself, my current pass is 11 characters using lower case, upper case, numbers and special characters. Hard to remember? it was at first, sure… but then it becomes easy and well, thus far my shit is secure.

How about yours?

The most frequent passwords people use….

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

The database revealed a large amount of users had chosen "easy-to-crack" passwords, the most common being "123456", which was chosen by 290,731 users, or almost one percent. ‘Nicole’ was the 11th most commonly chosen code, followed by ‘Daniel’ in 12th. Other names appearing in the top 20 passwords include ‘Jessica’ and ‘Michael’.

So there ya go… if you’re one of the people with a simple pass, you might want to rethink your password a little.

I’ve always been a desktop guy. I have owned laptops but for some reason, I was always rather grounded to my desk. That is until recently… I went away on a trip and I had our back up laptop with me for work and well… it was sloooow. Bryci has her kick ass Macbook pro and I was using the laptop we use for B’s cam show broadcasts… so it’s your every day $500 dollar range laptop, nothing crazy.

On my desk right now as I type this, I have a collection of geek happiness that is here to make my job easier, my life easier I suppose. I am always interested in what other people use for their systems, what their desktops look like etc. I remember coming across blogs and sites where guys would post their set ups and sometimes it gave me new ideas foe the direction I wanted to move in, or at the very least, stuff to look at. With that said… I’ll try and better illustrate the whole desktop v laptop dilemma.

(Mac on left, Win7 on right, both with apple extended keyboards and Logitech G9 mice)

On my left, I have my Apple Mac Pro (8 core (2.8 GHz), 10 gig ram, 4 tb of storage + 2 tb of scratch storage for HD video encoding).  On my right, I have my windows 7 machine. It’s comprised of Intel i7 920 quad core (2.67Mhz). 6 gigs of ram, and 3 tb of storage and 1 tb of scratch space for Photoshop etc.

(drives sit in waiting for me to fill them with goodness)

Both machines have their own Apple 30+ screens for large desktop space, easier to work with etc. Both rock 2560 x 1600 screen resolution @ .25 dpi which is awesome for graphic work/hd video editing. I use the Win7 machine prob 90% of the day, the Mac is used for video editing almost entirely.

(i7 box on left and Mac Pro on right with Jack in the background sleeping)

It’s not that I think Win7 is better than OS-X, truth is I think OS-X is *much* stronger, I just am more used to Win over OS-X and most of my software is Win based. I used to have bootcamp on the Apple and I stayed in Win7 more than OS-X, then I realized if I grabbed a second system I could streamline, become quicker. System A is video encoding while system B is doing other tasks… it did speed me up, so that’s good.

So with that all said and done… now I am sitting here typing this pondering the future of my video editing tasks. I have more or less decided when Apple released their new Mac Book Pro in the next month or two… I’ll look at getting one of those, and sell my current Mac Pro. Reason is simple… the laptop can replace the desktop unit, still power the 30” screen and do everything I currently do and as an added bonus… I have mobility which I’d like.

A good deal of people I know live on their laptops, swear by them. I figure… buy the laptop, sell the desktop, pay the debt down from that and after all is said and done, I walked away with a new laptop for a fraction of the price. The new Apple MBP is said to have the i5 and i7 chips in them once released, so we’ll see I guess.

(not my laptop.. but it is the skin I just snagged)

I saw this skin for the 17” MBP laptop that made me drool so I bought one. I am such a geek. heh I don’t even have the laptop yet, so why did I grab a skin? Well, honestly… the last time I saw a cool skin they sold out quick and the movie company clamped down on the company making them so there was no second run. I didn’t want to lose this sucker, so I figured… $15 investment. If it turns out I don’t go that direction and get the new MBP… i can always sell the skin on eBay or something. meh

So that’s the dilemma in a nutshell. To lap or not to lap. I wanted my own Macbook for the longest time so I can continue writing with it, so this moves me one step closer to realizing a life time goal as well. Yes, I’m writing something… more on that down the road

I had posted the trailer for Iron man 2 before, a link to the HD version… but in case you didn’t see it or you’re just hoping for a second look… well whata know, I linked it.

Fuck yeah this will be good.

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG

This movie is going to be off the fucking hook! War Machine in the house! (War Machine is the second Iron Man costume, powered by Don Cheadle’s character, James Rhodes. Now add in Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke… OMGOMGOMG  yeah, geekfest

so cannot wait for May 2010

Where will you be on May 7th, 2010?

I can tell you where I will be, and if I can earn enough brownie points… I might just have a gorgeous girl by my side. (yes, B, I am talking about you)

Seeing Mickey Rourke as Whiplash is going to be kind of cool.